Last week Stephen King accepted an award for his contribution to American literature. In his acceptance speech, he pointed out there really wasn’t much value in deliberately staying out of touch with your own culture.
The icy response he got from a woman who claims she writes in longhand and doesn’t own a TV really brought back some memories. Before I published my first two novels, I belonged to an online discussion group for writers, and there was a lot of that same elitism and exclusivity floating around there. I can’t forget one lady who had 500,000 words of a novel written in longhand in spiral notebooks. Even though this was several years ago, I’d be willing to bet she still hasn’t finished or published the thing.
I think that writing is about communicating an idea of some sort to as many people as possible. Literature shouldn’t be reserved for an imaginary, limited group of people who somehow are equipped to see something in books that the rest of world does not. That’s why libraries work so hard to get people in to browse their shelves, use their computers, or whatever services they have to offer. Librarians want to see literature in any form in the hands of as many people as possible.
Because the book-length works I write have more to do with entertainment and the ideals of ordinary people, I’m sure I’m in no danger of ever being nominated for any kind of “literary” award. I want a lot of people to read my work, and I don’t care who those readers are. To me, there is absolutely no point in writing books for a limited group of people who are deliberately ignoring the rest of the world, anyway. The attitude that because a book is popular automatically makes it less “worthy” somehow is insulting – not just to the author, but to the readers, both current and potential. This attitude is ultimately damaging to the cause of literature, because it discourages people from reading books of any kind.
Now that’s a thought – what if those who are writing and publishing this exclusive, award-winning stuff are the ones who are actually responsible for the downturn in the publishing industry as a whole? Maybe there’s some unspoken, invisible warning around what is perceived as “excellent” literature, something like “Don’t even think about buying this book! You are too stupid to understand it!”
Maybe the book awards people are cutting off their own noses to spite their face. H’mmm…
