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Here seems to be a question for all of you, is writing becoming a dying art form? I know there are many different kinds of writing and in reality journalism is still very strong. But I am not talking about journalism, but maybe I just think that it has become a less desired field, or maybe simply overlooked. Maybe I just don't hang out at the right spots, either way, just curious.
   Also it seems that most writing now feels more like slop on a page anymore, hell look at my own. Grammatic errors abound. Though especially in youth through texting has it become to look even more bleak. What are your thoughts, opinions, hell even some guidance on some places to hang out maybe, whatever.
Thanks all-

Nope. If anything else has increased with internet. Also, contemporary literature is beautiful. BEAUTIFUL.

The perception of gradual downward social trend is near-universal and can be observed in historical literature dating back thousands of years.  The basic formula is thus:

1. In a given medium, the majority of cultural output is garbage.

2. Garbage has a much lower chance of enduring through time than quality media.

3. A period of time is perceived according to the works of media that endure from that time.

Therefore, the past is perceived as a more enlightened time because we look back at its works and we see that a stronger portion of the survivors are non-garbage, as compared with the present, rife with garbage that has not been so thoroughly subjected to the cultural filter.

Nice addition Evan. Never really thought about things like that in that light, makes sense. And Thanks Antonio. I guess I just really felt bored with reading lately, but then eh I guess thats a phase.

Writing will always be one of the most powerful ways to convey powerful stories and topics.

The information age has brought us a lot of words that have little or no meaning. The amount of written words the average person processes has increased dramatically with the internet and social media (an unresearched conjecture). In this light I can see how it's easy to consider writing as 'dying'.

I thought I was sort of 'beyond' books myself recently, and then I picked up Terry Pratchett's The Fifth Elephant and I couldn't put it down.

Words and writing will continue to be a passion for a portion of the populace, and some of those writers will be great, and push whatever medium they're writing for to a new height. This forum is full of people who love writing for games, and I for one will never stop writing!

:beer:

Interesting line of thought:  As the human population increases, the ease with which a producer of media can achieve global visibility changes in loosely inverse proportion.  Counteracting this, a greater global audience and pool of makers lends itself to an ever-broadening diversity of niches and specialized tastes.  What will the consequences of this be for artists a hundred years from now?

This. Writing can never die as long as there is the limitless human imagination

Off topic....but I am totally stanning for that Attack The Block pixel gif.

"Writing can never die as long as there is the limitless human imagination."

Let's look at Hollywood, re-created movies and stories, why? Is it because everything has already been written in one form or another. There are few "new" concepts in development, and those that are currently being produced are not "really" "original" ideas. So I inquire back, is imagination really limitless.
  I suppose many of you are correct, through new technology the ability to write and create written works has never been easier. And there will always be those who wish to read the words as long as it has coherency, action, and/or point.

Make a defense of this statement and I suspect you'll begin to see its inaccuracy.

well, the percent of the people who read for pleasure, and read books to completion (excepting those assigned to them by school or university) has actually *always* been very low, and has remained at a low level for quite some time. it's typically about 13% of the population

so i wouldn't say writing is a dying art, it's just that it's always been a hobby of a small group (typically the educated elite)

still, 13% is nothing to laugh at. j.k. rowling and stephen king made enormous fortunes on that 13%, to say nothing of amazon.com and barnes and noble

but definitely part of the reason the writing novels and short stories have such a high standard of quality compared to the writing in games, movies, and television is that it has a more discriminating / highly educated audience

but no, that selective audience isn't *shrinking*, as a percent of the population it's always been very small, and in terms of absolute numbers the total number of people who read for pleasure is going up (with population size)

Writing will only die with civilization itself, at least in the sense that it will not continue to grow. I'm not so worried about that, per se.

It can, however, lose its way. And I do think this is happening to some degree.

The current turn writing is taking, at least around the circles where I currently cohabit. There is this growing unease that all the old traditional forms of dramaturgy have given us all the same plots over and over again. This has lead to a revival of a strange form of poetry that is skillful writing, in that it is difficult to successfully write, but ultimately says nothing of its own merits and only serves to impress the reader. Christian Bök is definitely the one who started it, that much is for certain.

I disliked this turn of events so much, I actually made a game (http://incongruousquarterly.com/iq4/signalmosaic/game/) dedicated to the purpose of making fun of this trend. ("Fun" as in ridicule.) Here is what remains on the top of the leaderboards, which after so long finally won out two of my own works:

http://incongruousquarterly.com/iq4/signalmosaic/game/display.php?i=51

Is it good writing? Well, objectively, yes. It is a univocal lipogram using the most difficult letter of the alphabet. It had to take quite a lot of consideration even get as much as it did under the game's constraints.

But does it actually say anything? Well, no, it doesn't. It contains no message, and I don't quite think I can forgive it for that. (Then again, it beat my high score, so maybe I'm biased against it.)

But, this is what's out there now. Increasingly, it's the stuff that literary magazines and small presses will bias themselves towards, and online it's usually the stuff that is also the most meme-prone. It's the cheap, advertising-friendly writing that's becoming more and more common in the mainstream press, and I despise it.

It's gotten so bad that in my own mind I'm beginning to see "writing" and "poetry" as two entirely different fields of art. Yet, whenever I go to any writer's confrence, the poets and the novelists freely intermingle. That wouldn't be so bad if it weren't for the fact that the poets are clearly running the show by now, and their audience is even more insular than the 13% Paul Eres already mentioned. I used to think there could be a lot of overlap between books and games, but now I'm not so sure.

Who knows? Maybe I'm just looking in all the wrong places.

Thanks for this. I never thought it that way before but it really makes a lot of sense. The trick is to be able to filter the garbage out for what the current times provide us I guess.

Read books, lots of books.

There is a lot of garbage in the books medium too. I do read a lot and I am quite disappointed by some very popular novels out there.

It is easy to find books you are disappointed in. It is hard to find ones you love. But there are plenty of the latter. You find them if you pursue them.

Right now, we live in an age where more people than ever can easily get into a creative field such as writing, game making, ect and start producing things. Of course the majority of this will be bad, like Evan described, but I think that's a great thing.

The more people make things the more trash there will be, but it's due to that constant regurgitation of the old that the art form is able to advance: the medium's flaws are more glaring than ever and so people start to make revolutionary works that change it, which eventually feeds back into the public and starts the trash-improve cycle again until a reasonably solid groundwork's been established, such as with books and movies. Game writing it still in that cycle of improving, trying to figure out what it is and how it can fulfill it's potential the most. The more people even attempting this, creating awareness and trying out new ideas even if they suck, the better.

 

108 billion global revenue from one source, for book publishing. Video Games is 70 billion.