A Million New Novelists

What Will Blogging Bring Our Culture?

We are on the verge of seeing a creative explosion in our culture. There is one reason for this: the advent and adoption of self-publishing. In particular, I am speaking of the future outlook for the novel. Although self-publishing effects all artistic forms, photography, video, audio, visual art; the art form that is most immediately affected by self-publishing is creative writing. By a wide margin, most blogs are dedicated to the written word in one form or another.

How many people who had the talent and desire to write decided long ago to give up (or delay) their artistic pursuits because of the difficulties in getting something, anything, published? I know as a young creative writing major at college, I considered the prospects of supporting myself as a writer when I graduated nearly unsurmountable. It just wasn’t going to happen. Now my particular story has more to do with a lack of any discernible talent, but how many of my generational peers made a similar calculation. How many of us decided to turn away from our creative pursuits because of the daunting road that would undoubtedly lay before us. So much easier to just go into banking or marketing or porn.

Similarly, how many of us have watched in awe as the last decade has seen an explosion in the opportunities for us to activate those nascent creative ambitions? The answer lies in the number of people who have started blogs and began pecking away, finally doing the very thing they never thought they would have the opportunity to do.

To be sure, many self-publishers do so as a hobby, and not because they believe it will ultimately provide them the financial support or opportunities to quit their day jobs. They do it because they can. The effect this has on our self-confidence, our self-esteem, is incalculable.

Where Is All This Self-Publishing Going?

Eventually, there will be a winnowing down of all these self-publishers. The good and great writers will be separated from the rest of the pack. They will find their followings, and their natural followings will find them. New trends in web curation (aggregators, semantic web) will enable the new class of great writers to emerge and flourish.

We will soon see a million new novelists and essayists, memoirists and biographers. And they’ll be coming from the emerging group of people who never thought they would have the opportunity to do so. That is something we should all be thankful for. Just you wait.

Image Courtesy of SpecialKRB on Flickr

Tagged as: Blog Evolution, Bloggers as Novelists, The Art of Blogging