Writing for the Facebook Generation

What has consistently bothered me about the founding tenet of The Writers Block—immediate impact above all else—is that it is a response (perhaps a concession) to an apathy, a lack of urgency in the public at large towards the literary arts. This consideration of one’s audience and social context is a precarious line to walk: on one side of the tightrope looms dumbed-down simplicity, and on the other lies complexity, intertextuality, and dismissal on the part of the average reader. This opposition, of course, is deliberately polarized, but it gets at the crux of the issue: at what point does good, innovative writing suffer under the restriction of having to make an immediate impact on an audience permeated by facebook, twitter, and smart phones?

Everyone will have their own answer to this question. Perhaps a more solvable and provocative question is this: how can writers nowadays create works that are new and unique, but also accessible? The writing I receive at The Writers Block—while often very compelling—seems lost. Aside from the inevitable narcissism and mimicry, the pieces of writing I subjectively deem “good” are quite disparate, both in content and in form. While this has been working just fine for the last three or so years, I can’t help but long for a more coherent aesthetic philosophy for the magazine than simply searching for work that produces an “immediate impact.”

Part of me is convinced I’m just naïve and ignorant to what is happening around me in the world of writing, that there are movements of writers and schools of thought, etc. that are pushing writing in this and that direction. Surely they exist. Yet, if I am unaware of such movements, I would guess that it is likely that many of the contributors to the Block and similar magazines are in the same boat, and that whatever these movements are doing, they're not having much of an impact on the average writer. What shape does writing need to take at this current historical moment to be socially and/or artistically effective?

For me, certain aspects of Imagism are attractive in this direction: sparse, well-crafted work that is built on pregnant images and uses less to convey more. As always, Ezra Pound's "In a Station of the Metro" is the ideal embodiment of these ideas (http://www.bartleby.com/104/106.html). I think it’s safe to say that at the present moment long-windedness has no place whatsoever. No one has the patience to read an issue of an online literary magazine composed primarily of four or five 6000 word “short” stories. Connected with the sparse beauty of Imagism, I would emphasize a continued focus on character development as well. If long-windedness has no place, neither does pure abstraction. When the succinctness of Imagism is grounded in the familiarity of human beings, the result is often an intriguing combination of complexity and immediacy. Ever since Issue 4 of the Block, which had as its theme, “People,” I have noticed myself gravitating more and more in my editorial decisions to work grounded in some way in the thorough exploration of the human psyche.

While these suggestions are not revolutionary, they begin to propose a direction for writing today that hopefully will become clearer and clearer as the apathy of the current generation continues to grow. These two trends cannot help but affect one another.