Not terribly long ago, I wouldn’t have been able to tell you what a blog is. Now I’m sitting down to write my first blog entry for an online literary site. My conversion from print writer to online writer may finally be complete.

Yesterday I saw an article in the Isthmus (Madison, Wisconsin’s free arts paper) called The Book’s Next Chapter. It contained interviews with local writers. The topic: Is the printed book dead? The responses varied from one extreme (‘Yes, literature and civilization have been killed by the Internet.’) to another (‘Yeah, books are dead, but who cares?’) I find myself caught somewhere in between, loving old books, but struggling to catch up with a generation that seems to have been gifted with unlimited opportunities to express their creativity.

As a young writer in the 1970s, I filled notebook after notebook with scribbled stories. I laboriously transcribed them on my typewriter, using tons of that funky old erasing paper that left white flakes all over the place. When I got my first computer in the 1990s, I initially used it as a really expensive typewriter. As far as I was concerned, creativity and technology were completely incompatible. To abandon my notebook was to abandon my Muse. But then I gradually realized how much easier it was to rework, rewrite and redo at the keyboard and I was hooked. My Muse and I can’t even imagine writing with a pen anymore!

I was slow to embrace the Internet until I discovered the heady freedom that the technology that I once despised gives to the ordinary writer. Now, rather than write in isolation, any author can join an online community and start posting stories for comments. And –wonder of wonders – just as I was reluctantly beginning to consider reworking my quirky existential book, Eternal Café, to conform to the mass-market sensibilities of the big print publishers, along came online and print-on-demand publishing. Not since the Lost Generation writers pooled their resources to create their own magazines have writers had such control over their own literary futures!

So yes, I still prefer to take a print book on vacations with me, but since I nervously entered the online literary world a few years ago I’ve gained virtual writing friends, embraced the freedom to write stories outside the mainstream, and edited a book of short stories (WomanScapes) written by an international group of women who I would never have come into contact with pre-Internet. And now I’ve written my first blog entry.

I suppose my response to the question raised in the Isthmus is this: Yes, the print book may be on its way out, but creativity isn’t. Literature has little to do with pens and paper and everything to do with writers connecting with their Muse. And the Muses seem right at home in the virtual world.

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Posted on April 24th, 2007 by EJ McFall
Filed under: General