Books in Future (by which I mean Now)

I like books, but I am not one of these people who waxes poetical about the pleasures of holding a paper book in one's hands, the smell of it, and all that. For me, the content of the book is much more important than the physical presence.

But there are advantages to reading "on paper": dumb paper is incapable of telling you anything but the story you're reading. That means that the book you're reading will never try to distract you from the book you're reading.

When I read anything on my computer, I am distracted. I try not to be, but I have to remember to do an awful lot to avoid it. I have to turn off my email alerts (sound) and my twitter alerts (visual) and I have to keep from touching the bottom of the screen, to avoid seeing the pop-up menu, whose happy icons will remind me of X project on Photoshop and Y project on Dreamweaver and Z project on Word.

If I'm reading a book and I come across a reference that I wonder about (what's the singular of "castrati" again?), I generally file it away, and, if I still wonder about it when I'm finished reading, I'll go look it up. But if I'm reading on my computer there's no point in waiting. With one button I get a dashboard with a dictionary, or I can go to Wikipedia or imdb or just Google it. And knowing how link leads on to link, I doubted if I should ever come back.

We could invent a one-button "reading" mode, that would require you to restart your computer in order to do anything else. But that's like a television that makes you exercise to watch it: a lovely little trick that  no one would volunteer to subject himself to. After all, you might need to send an email or look something up rather suddenly, and it would be a pain to have to wait for a restart.

As a writer, though, I think of this from the other angle. What can we do to the presentation of text to make it so immediate and enveloping that readers would not want to step away, even for a minute, and open themselves up to distraction. Video does this nicely by moving always forward. Sure, you can stop and come back, but you don't want to: you want to ride the video the whole way through. If you want to stop for anything, it's to replay something particularly cool.

So books need a few more techniques here. Books need something to move you through time (an audio file?), and something to concentrate your focus (a timed puzzle?), and it wouldn't hurt if the text moved, animated, along the lines of poemflow. There should be images, and the images should be surprising, funny, like the guy drinking the milk at the Club Devo Song Study (which is genius, by the way). In short, the book needs to become a more compelling environment than the alternatives; it needs to out-compete the distractions by distracting the reader itself.

And that's kind of sad, because one of the greatest things about books is the complete focus and absorption of just "getting into" a really great book. Still, I think the distraction nest can be made to work the readers mind into a nexus of concentration... and I'm going to see if I can figure out how to do that.

Fiction in the Information Age

In an information-obsessed age, fiction and poetry have the disadvantage of not being information. They are written, which is a format associated with work, research, tasks; but they are not information. The exception is a work of fiction so popular (like Twilight, or Lord of the Rings) that knowing it well becomes a kind of social currency – in other words, the details of the story become information, with a clear and specific value, same as cash.

Otherwise, to have value among readers, fiction must seem to be a form devised to disguise information so scandalous or dangerous it cannot be told in the form of fact. Fiction becomes the act of obliquing: saying, “I have a friend who has this problem,” instead of admitting to your problem. Only more so, more removed. Because fiction claims it is not even the life of your friend, but of an entirely made-up person. In this, it is closer to religion than to fact.

Religion is of course the fiction that transcends its form: it is a fiction accepted as information by a large group of people, and within that group the “facts of the story” are vital information, information that is often utilitarian: it tells them their future, and how to behave, and what to eat, and who are friends, and who are enemies. Is there any more important and essential information in this world than that?

So fiction has become, to us, the form that speaks the truths that can’t be said. But this identity for fiction requires the subterfuge remain intact. We cannot go into a work of fiction aware that we are reading disguised facts. If we do, the disguise fails, the truth is found out, laid out for all to see. The author is exposed, and embarrassed, or shamed. See Orenthal Simpson, How I Did It, as an example of failed fiction. We must suspend not only our disbelief in the fiction, but we must suspend our belief in the ur-fact we imagine the story is derived from. And so the primary stated purpose must always be something else: entertainment.

Any resemblance to persons living or dead is simple coincidence. The story is fiction in whole – entirely made up for your entertainment. Here, friend, is a great lot of bullshit. Enjoy! And yet there is a wink behind that bullshit. Greater truths are being told than mere information could tell us. More than any other, fiction is a form that requires mental feats of derring-do. The mind must be capable of holding two contradictions at once: everything I read is true, some of what I read is false; everything I read is false, some of what I read is true. Religion, too, requires adherents to accommodate contraries and contradictions, and this extraordinary imaginative act, this resolving of opposites, has long been the fount of creation: it has created states, wars, paintings, cathedrals, treatises, dramas, stories. One could argue it has created culture itself.

Contrary ideas held in one mind are the matter-antimatter reaction of the human soul: the mind explodes with energy and that energy is set to resolving the problem, explaining how things may be both up and down, both yes and no. From this conflict spins a narrative. We want and need to believe in the narrative if we are to make sense of the world. And so the function of fiction is to be real, to stop being fiction, while insisting quite convincingly that it is nothing more than an entertaining lie.

To be continued: next time, non-fiction.

Venus Envy Online

Happy December! Getting the holiday season off on the right foot, Fringe published their 13th issue today, featuring my short story "Venus Envy."


Fringe is a fantastic journal, so by all means read the whole thing. But make sure to come back and tell me how you really think my story is the best thing in it.

Click here to read!