Too Good Books and Hot Cocoa

Call me old school but reading a book is never better than settling in a comfortable place, a mug of a favorite drink, with the time to savor and enjoy a tale superbly crafted and told.  Admittedly, it may be a sign of my age, after all, I have been reading and writing for nearly 30 years and when I started there wasn’t the plethora of e-books and self-publishing options available to writers now.

Don’t get me wrong I am glad that there are so many options open to writers to get their works out and sharing them with the public. These writers are setting forth on blazing paths carved from the traditional structures of creating stories that don’t fit in the modern paradigm of e-publishing, where the world is indeed open to writers because they don’t adhere to “old-fashioned rules” or in some other way are written in an outdated manner that doesn’t connect with the modern reader.

However, I am more and more concerned about the decline in truly quality writing. In our quest to get our work out there, to be read and devoured by the masses, we have inadvertently created a way for writers to by-pass the long slough of learning to actually write well. Because of the advent of the rapid communication technologies people are taking short cuts with their words and story craft that is becoming notable in self-published writing. Where sentences no longer carry full words, but the text equivalent, I believe an entire book is written this way.

I understand the inter-webs provide everyone with a portal to share their fiction with a vast audience, an audience they probably would not be able to garner had they to face an editor.

I enjoy working with younger writers, people who have great vision but little direction. I think that these talents can produce some amazing works, but just because publishing has become easier doesn’t mean telling stories has. It still requires work and understanding how to build tension, dialogue and learning plot structure. 

Character development appears to be a lost art as so many characters are M/Gary Sue’s (See my post on this) and they can do everything with little or no growth in the story. After all how many teen-age wizards, witches or vampires can save the world?

I love to read a good story, and I look for new and upcoming talent but I find myself increasingly going back to my library of established writers to get my fix.