T Cooper fears that unedited, ill-thought-out online reading and writing is crowding out the curated, edited writing that appears on the printed page. He doesn’t, he says, want to see a review of Keith’s book next to a picture of your cat. He is uninterested in kitty pix in general. The idea of a Twitter novel makes him want to “kill himself.” He said that he didn’t understand why people thought other people wanted to hear about what they ate for breakfast, clearly expecting a laugh from the audience that only sort of came. (That was when I started to cringe and think of Angie Tempura.) Nunez nodded vehemently: “I always tell my writing students that your first draft is like vomit — it doesn’t smell good and no one should see it but you!” she said. Both authors shook their heads in saddened disbelief about why anyone wants to spew their vomity rough drafts all over the internet for the world to see. They complained about being encouraged by their publishers to blog, to Tweet. They resisted the undignified idea that they would be forced to be available to their readers via online presences that they themselves would have to participate in creating. At this point, an audience member asked all the panelists how involved they had been in their books’ marketing campaigns. I don’t remember exactly what Cooper said but he seemed to regret that he’d had to be involved at all. In general the idea seemed to be that book marketing ought to be something that an omniscient, dogged employee of one’s publisher does while the author remains behind the scenes, unsullied by hustling.
What is the problem here? I just can't seem to wrap my head around this one. Blogs are good....stream-of-conscious journaling is good.....sharing your writing is good....more writers in America processing their shit online is good. What, exactly, is so goddamn shameful about a blog?
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