Quote of the Week - Apr 30 - May 6

Sorry about missing a couple weeks of quotes.  Here's a fresh one to entertain you momentarily.

Writers should be read, but neither seen nor heard. -Daphne du Maurier (1907-1989)

Ah, the old maxim.  They used to say the same of slaves and servants. Once upon a time, that's what authors where.  Servants to dukes and duchesses, or freethinkers behind the scenes of plays and the like.  But to think that should continue today is pretty funny.

Today, the voice of writers needs to be seen and heard.  As Percy Bysshe Shelley once claimed, it is the words of poets that move the people of the world.  It is our responsibility to change the minds of dictators, to open the doors to a new age, and to find ways to convince people to attempt a different, better way.  As writers, we are watchers of society.  We watch that which goes on around us, and in many cases, we know more of human nature than those who do not write.  Yes, psychologists have a major upper hand in the working of the psyche, but their textbook knowledge doesn't expand beyond the individual, where we supposedly can see the whole.  For Shelley, it was not just in writing poems, but in action that he strove to spread his message, and to ultimately change the world.  The same is  true of today's writing activists.  Margaret Atwood, among Canada's most famed writers, is very outspoken on a number of topics, as are any number of other authors.

Some books, poems and stories were written to be heard, not read.  To my mind comes the speakerly takes of Ivan E. Coyote and Thomas King, and the lyrical poems and plays that have been recorded for centuries.  These are tales and thoughts and plays meant to be heard, and in the case of plays, to be seen.  For the authors to be hidden away out of sight does us no good.  We cannot feel our success, and in many cases, neither can the audience.

But today, in our world of technology, we have an even bigger reason to be seen and heard.  The book is quickly becoming a relic of ancient times.  Today, schools across the country are destroying their libraries of books, tossing or selling the books and replacing them with already out of date computers.  Even worse, students are spending less and less of their free time choosing to read.  Instead they find themselves playing video games or watching television to a far larger degree than before.  I'm not saying there's anything wrong with TV and Computers, quite the contrary, but I am saying that it is greatly affecting how often people choose to read.  Students now tote around their mp3 players, listening to music. 

As authors in our current world, it comes to us to change the way we "write". Yes, continue to put down words that are to be read.  But also read those words aloud!  Not just in coffee shops or literary meetings, but read them aloud into microphones and record your writings.  As mp3s, students can listen to the writer recite their novel.  On TV, they can watch the author reading it, even as images of other acting out the contents are worked in.  With the computer, they can actively reconstruct the writing in a new breed of interactive video games.  Today, if people cannot see it and hear it, they increasingly deny its existence or discount its importance.  The author, the writer, must be seen and heard, as well as read.

Maybe it's the fact that I just watched this, but I felt like applauding.

Really, it saddens me that so many bodies of so-called "timeless" pieces of literature are looking to one day go the way of the dinosaur. I can already envision a world where unless The Canterbury Tales obtain a multi-million dollar film budget, or Dante's Inferno finds a realm as a FPS using DirectX technology, literary works such as these will become almost forgotten.

Even finding works being read by more modern, "entertaining" authors can be a difficult feat nowadays. Maybe it's just the people that I happen to come across. Working in a restaurant, I have the pleasure of working with any number of nerds. There's Eric, the movie nerd. There's Caryn, the anime nerd. There's Gerry, the horror buff. There's Packer, the PC and gaming nerd. Then there's me, a mixture of all of the above to some degree.

But it's nigh impossible to talk about a book with someone at work. Sure, there are people there who read on occasion, but it's few and far between, and typically it's more for a reading assignment at one of the local colleges than for personal benefit.

Case in point: The book 1984 came up the other week at work.  Out of the sixteen employees working that day, only four had read it, including myself.  Six had never even heard of it.  Never even heard of it.  But if I were to ask if anybody had seen The Matrix, well, I don't think I'd get a single "What's a Matrix?" response. :

Ultimately, however, what scares me about the entire concept is what will become of books and authors in the near future?

"Hi, is Edward available? Hi, Edward, my name is Timothy, I work with Penguin Publishing. Yeah, your book is great and all, but I have to ask, have you ever written a screenplay? No? Well, we're ready to offer you a reasonable sum for the rights to your book, which won't actually publish, but will instead turn over to a subsidiary to turn your novel into a full-length motion picture."

Frightening.

But that's the way of the world, I suppose. I'm hopeful that the success of certain authors (J.K. Rowling really comes to mind) will certainly pique the interests of these youngsters today, so that they'll continue reading as they grow up, and hopefully keep the literary world alive.

It's not that I'm too terribly adverse to a really solid screenplay or whathaveyou, but there are many things that one can do with a novel that cannot really be done with other mediums. Granted, the opposite is also true...but what about the imagination? The bard's flourish with the author's soul? Knowing just what exactly is going on through a character's head, without the need for hackneyed voice-overs?

Personally, I don't like watching people read books outloud, or listen to much of the same. I like to have the book in my hands and get lost in its pages. I don't know where the world of the written word is heading, given the current trend and popularity and budgets of films, music, and videogames.

All of the aforementioned go hand in hand with writing, and perhaps writers will just need to adopt new mediums in order to pay the bills and feed their families. I certainly hope not...but I hope.