Nashville Knucklehead

The write generation

My mother made me take typing in eighth grade. We had to be aware of the bell for the carriage return, and had to figure out how to end the line by breaking a word at the proper place for hyphenation. Make a mistake, and you had to rip out the paper and start over. The typewriters at school were electric, but the typewriter at home to practice on was mom's old Royal manual from her college days, where you built great finger strength and slapped the little silver bar at the end of the line. The biggest advance to come along when I went to college for writing papers was liquid paper, because "five typos and you get an F." At least you didn't have to start over at the end of the page.

Most of you probably have no idea what I'm talking about.

Oh, yeah, and it was uphill in the snow both ways.

So between the big-ass dictionary and the thesarus and the liquid paper, typing was a big pain in the ass. I never, ever considered being a writer, simply because of the chore that it was to get it done correctly.

Writing by the masses had fallen out of the culture ever since long distance phone calls came along. Nobody wrote letters once you could pick up the phone and call people, and eloquent letters in fine penmanship went the way of the Edsel and the backseat handjob while parked at Lover's Leap. The old-schoolers would pine and wax poetically about the lost art of letter writing.

Then Al Gore invented email. Traditionalists cheered for the renaissance of the lost art of letter writing thanks to email. We communicated with the written word again! Hooray, spelling and grammar are on the way back! Little did they know that in a generation it would devolve into "I M Hrny! R U 2? Snd pix!"

When I got my first computer, solely because of the convenience of the backspace and delete keys, I decided to write. I can still picture the first time I sat down to write fiction, in a little apartment in East Nashville. The first line I wrote was, "I cradled the phone in disbelief. Stood up again." Because that was exactly what had just happened. I didn't have a date, so I thought, why not write a book? It was the beginning of the next great American novel, or so I thought. The only reason I started writing was because it was physically easier than it was before. No one seems to think twice about it now.

The reason I started this blog was as a personal writing assignment. I had high hopes of making every post an eloquent statement about life, complete with clever turns-of-phrases and witty observations of the common human experience, but it quickly turned into my nutty ramblings about blowjobs I got in the 80s. But that's OK, it makes me write. Actually, it lets me write knowing that other people are going to read it. (Try writing an entire novel and have nobody read it. It takes some getting over.) And I know that alot of other bloggers do this for the same reason. But right now, everybody and her cousin does it to some degree, whether they can write or not. Just spend some time at My Space to see what I mean.

Today, it occured to me that most people of a certain age think nothing of looking at videos every day online. And getting video on their phones. And uploading video. And I thought about the ramifications of that. Technology keeps moving ahead, and pretty soon the "video phones" I was promised by Walt Disney will be a reality on the internet or on some portable device you have implanted in your eyes in your choice of ever-changing colors, depending on your mood. And people will go to video-talking instead of writing on these devices for nearly everything, even the most mundane communication.

I think we are in the middle of a generational blip in history of when people went back to the written word for a lot of communication and expression. Especially expression. I don't think magazines and books will go away anytime soon, but everyday writing for recreation by the masses is on the way out. Again.

The people I read since I've started doing this are all great writers who have something to say. But I think that very soon the recreational writing of people who don't really care about the "art" of writing is going to end. People are just going to upload "wassup" videos and bad skits, and 95% of the blog world will be replaced with one big interactive, virtual-reality, multi-media, nudity-filled My Space account. Which is fine with me. Because it will make the 5% who are writers with something to say easier to find.

posted by Nashville Knucklehead @ 8:34 AM