Here is a Paul Theroux Interview you won’t want to miss. According to The Atlantic magazine, for better or for worse, the age of the e-book is upon us. Analysts estimate Americans will buy on the order of 6 million e-readers this year, and by 2014, an estimated 32 million people will own one. What does the proliferation of Kindles, Nooks, iPads, and other e-readers portend for the publishing industry? What does the e-reader mean for writers, for storytelling, for the place of fiction in the cultural landscape? They put this question to travel and fiction writer, Paul Theroux.
Paul Theroux Interview:
The Atlantic: How would you characterize the state of fiction today? Are we producing more or fewer good writers than in the past, and more or fewer good readers? How have the writing life and the reading life changed since you were starting out, 40 years ago?
Paul Theroux: Fiction writing, and the reading of it, and book buying, have always been the activities of a tiny minority of people, even in the most-literate societies. Herman Melville died in utter obscurity. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s books were either out of print or not selling when he died. Paul Bowles was able to live and write (and smoke dope) only because he wrote for Holiday, the great old travel magazine. Nor are writers particularly highly regarded. A few years ago, Boston, a city of writers and thinkers, needed to name a beautiful bridge and a graceful tunnel. The first was named for a recently deceased social worker and civil-rights activist, the second for a baseball player. This happens in most U.S. cities, partly from ingrained philistinism and also from the non-reader’s fear of books, of writers in general. Many aspects of the writing life have changed since I published my first book, in the 1960s. It is more corporate, more driven by profits and marketing, and generally less congenial, but my day is the same: get out of bed, procrastinate, sit down at my desk, try to write something.
To read the rest of the article go here. I agree with Paul Theroux. Writers stay the same, no matter what happens in the technological world. We get up and face another day of trying to create stories, articles, poems and plays that we hope will resonate with our readers. What do you think? Are you writing or creating something today?
P.S. Seeking Sara Summers is also available in e-book format on the Kindle, as well as iBooks and Barnes and Noble (on the Nook).
P.P. S. I’m an ex-shrink who writes award-winning novels. Check out my books here.
From one of my wonderful email subscribers:
“I think my greatest challenge is indeed living in a culture of philistines. I don’t know of any culture that isn’t composed mostly of such. A curse to be an intellectual (with heart, to boot).
Definition of a phil·is·tine from dictionacy.com: a person who is lacking in or hostile or smugly indifferent to cultural values, intellectual pursuits, aesthetic refinement, etc., or is contentedly commonplace in ideas and tastes.”
It’s true the U.S. has never been full of readers, and I live in the Bohemian Berkeley area, where there’s more reading than in most places. I know people who “brag” they haven’t read a book since college, and didn’t even really read them then. I have friends in whose houses are only coffee table books for show (for a while in the 90s it was “God: A Biography” from people who never went to church except to make business connections; then after 9/11 it was Americana picture books). Me, I just ordered Deborah Eisenberg’s complete short stories, Mann’s Doctor Faustus and Bloom’s The Man Without Qualities (an Amazon merchant somehow got two boxes of the critical edition in hardback and he’s giving them away for SEVEN DOLLARS apiece). Where I’m going to put these I don’t yet know.
As I mentioned recently in a post of my own, I do find the new e-gadgets making it tougher to write suspenseful fiction——and I don’t mean suspenseful in just the “cliffhanger” fashion. With this new “Color” phone app that lets you share pixs and video with anyone standing 150 feet away from you whether you “permit” it or not (see https://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/223226/color_introduces_locationbased_photosharing_app.html if you don’t believe me, and what the heck’s the point???) we’re living our lives as an open book, which I find ridiculous. Privacy is part of what makes our lives——and our fictions——interesting. This new trend of technology laying everything out in the open is, to me, bad for all creativity. Just one person’s opinion…
I guess I really started *writing* 16-17 years ago. Back then, it wasn’t unusual for someone not to have a home computer or an email address. I’d say that publishing was a different beast. That being said, how I write hasn’t changed. But I think how one gets published has changed a great deal. For one thing, it’s much easier for a writer to find out which publishers (and agents) are interested in their kind of writing.
It’s really hard to say if the changes in publishing are good or bad. Perhaps it is best to stay away from labels like that. In the end, they don’t matter. Publishing is what it is. (My zen talking again!)
To answer your final question, nope, no writing for me today. After finishing a manuscript a couple of weeks ago, I’m in break mode for a while. That’s how it goes for me. Kind of like I deplete the well and then must wait for it to fill again.
Fascinating comments as always. Sonja, enjoy your “break mode.” I’m sure you deserve it. John, enjoy your privacy. (I totally agree with you about the absurdity of living our lives as an open book, btw. Sometimes, I feel overexposed just having this tiny blog.) That said, you guys are a rare breed and, as we say here in the South, I appreciate you, probably more than you will ever know.
I read about 50 books a year, mostly fiction. I’ve done this since I was in my twenties, except back then I read more nonfiction.
One of my favorite questions to ask people when I’m mingling at a party with strangers or talking to close friends is “What are you reading right now?” Books and stories are one of my passions. I can’t imagine life without them. I can’t imagine not writing. I feel very fortunate to have the opportunity.