Zero tolerance for silence, or the literalization of “Writers write.”

Sorry -- I thought you were going to say something

I more or less stopped writing fiction and poetry after grad school. It was probably a combination of factors that put me off it in the end — among them my lack of output in the absence of deadlines and my complete ignorance of the basic mechanics of narrative — but especially effective was the indifference of literary magazines to the work I sent them.

Sometime between now and when I gave up on becoming a writer, the definition of the word got blurry.

Writing used to be a job that writers got paid to do by institutions such as book publishers and newspapers. Being a writer wasn’t about writing per se; it was about being published. And it was my failure to be published that convinced me that I wasn’t really a writer.

Today it’s often sufficient for a writer to be able to say that he writes and is read. “Writers write” was once the refrain of creative writing professors instilling in their students the value of constant practice in the pursuit of craft. Now it’s literally true.

As newspapers die away, it’s going to be increasingly important for writers to establish credibility based not on the publications they’ve written for but on the quality of their thought. Writers will find themselves associated with certain topics because they have something to say, not because they’ve been paid to say something.

By way of blogging, we’ve all been granted universal access to  the upside of self-publishing without the garage full of butt-ugly books.

What got me thinking about this was a book coming out soon. It’s about a technology company whose devices have attained near-ubiquity in the last half-decade or so. It’s the first book-length study of this company from a major publisher and I’m eager to read it, so last week I looked up the author to see what else he’d written and what he was about as a writer. I wanted to know if the book was going to read like Fast Company or The Financial Post.

I was so disappointed with the results I decided that I needed to write this post, and that it would be unkind to disclose either his name or the title or subject of his book.

Here’s what I found:

• The author’s blog goes back less than 2 years and hasn’t been updated for 2 months. Did I mention he’s supposed to have written about a technology company? And that his book is out soon?
• The blog contains little more than abridged press releases from the company he’s written about. No idea what he thinks about the company’s direction or their latest offerings.
• Even though he appears to have written his own Wikipedia page, there’s nothing in his bibliography suggesting he’s the right guy to be writing this book.

Where’s the passion? The obsession? Where’s the writing? Where is a reason for anyone to pay $30 for a hardcover book written by him on a subject to which he appears to be less familiar than his potential readers?

On the area of an author’s purported expertise (what is authorship of a book but a declaration of authority?) what are we, the market of his potential readers, to make of his silence?