I live with a "real" writer, and I read a lot, so I know that a lot of "real" writers are upset that these days just about anybody can pound on a keyboard and "publish" whatever comes out and then call themselves a "writer," or even a "novelist." There's been stuff on TV about child "novelists," too, and that really seems to set the "real" writers off. It seems to me that, in both instances, the "real" writers and "real" novelists are onto something. There is a lot of crap out there. Or out here, I guess, since this is on the Internet. And a "novel" written by a child is a lot like a "painting" by a chicken. A novelty, perhaps, but not a "novel."
"Real" writers, I am told, are people who have learned the "craft" of writing, and who also have some talent. "Real" fiction writers, for example, have learned the time-honored techniques of story-telling. "Real" novelists are writers who have learned the "craft" of writing a novel. Oh, and did I mention that a "real" writer should also have some talent? Well, they should. Especially if they aspire to write "literary fiction," which I guess is defined as anything that doesn't fit into a "genre" like "romance," or "western," or "crime," but may also include "well-written" books in those "genres."
Of course, it was always the case that anybody could simply call him or herself a "writer," just like anybody (in LA, at least) can call him or herself an "actor" or a "filmmaker." (The writers in LA, "real" and otherwise, are usually called "screenwriters," by the way.) But in the old days, a manuscript written by a non-writer would, even if eventually completed, wind up moldering away sitting on the top shelf of a coat closet or something after rejection by a publisher or two and never see the light of day. A not-novel "novel" couldn't harm anybody's sensibilities just sitting there in the closet, and how many people who'd created such a thing would have the cojones to call themselves "novelists" without throwing in a self-deprecating laugh?
However, times have changed. For one thing, everybody's attention span has gotten shorter, so "novels" don't have to be as long. It doesn't take quite as much determination anymore to come up with enough pages to call a manuscript a "novel." No more James Micheners. No more "Don Quixotes" or "Moby Dicks," either. Not only that, you don't really even have to write enough to fill up your pages; you could simply cut and paste from other novels, like "re-mixing" other music instead of coming up with your own song. As a matter of fact, I believe they gave a Pulitzer prize a couple of years ago to some brilliant young "novelist" who did exactly that.
Most importantly, however, it's easy to get stuff "out there" now, which I've always assumed is one of the goals of putting ideas and stories into written form in the first place. The traditional publishers used to fulfill the function of gatekeepers, refusing to publish most of the true crap because they wanted to make money and believed, rationally enough, that nobody would want to buy something that wasn't reasonably interesting and well-written. Recent developments, viz., the enormous popularity of the "Twilight" series and the "Fifty Shades of Grey" trilogy, seem to have proved that the traditional publishers, now rapidly becoming defunct, were wrong. Apparently, people have either acquired a taste for crap, or are no longer capable of recognizing it. In any event, they are willing to spend money on it, and that's all that really counts when it comes to the bottom line, right?
The traditional gatekeepers have abandoned their posts, and they were being overrun in any event. The net effect of the collapse of our educational system and the explosion of new technology is that writing of all kinds, and fiction in particular, no longer needs to be well-written or interesting in order to be published.
Anybody can blog about anything, just like I'm doing right now, and presto! You're "out there." Of course, for the most part, what's "published" on the Internet is raw and unedited and often incoherent, but that happens when you publish a "novel" through the starvling remnants of the "traditional" publishing houses, too. "Real" New York publishers these days push things into print with little or no editing. Pick up a copy of "Fifty Shades of Grey" if you don't believe me. An oft-published "real" writer, a friend of the "real" writer that I live with, recently complained that she had a manuscript rejected on the ground that "it needs editing." In an atmosphere like this, the child novelist is an inevitability. Come to think of it, even actors and celebrities don't really need to bother with ghost writers anymore when its time for their obligatory "book." They can just have a staff member compile their "tweets" or something and somebody will publish them. Or, alternatively, they can write a "novel" on their phone between takes on the film set, which the literary lioness Molly Ringwald really truly did.
Come on! If a publisher won't edit manuscripts, what exactly is the value they add to the creative process? Oh, you say, they will promote the book and get it into bookstores, of course. Really? There aren't that many bookstores around anymore, have you noticed? And just ask any "mid-list" author about what kind of Herculean efforts his publisher put into promoting his or her last book. So what's the value added by getting involved with the traditional publishing dinosaurs? I think that's something that the ghosts haunting the halls of the offices of the five remaining major New York publishing companies will still be asking themselves when they, too, melt into history.
There is a glimmer of hope, though. Of necessity, many smaller publishers have cropped up to fill the void left by the big publishers' abandonment of "literary fiction" in favor of cookbooks and self-help books written by celebrities. You might even find an editor or two out there.
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