Why writers should celebrate readers

Michelle Griffin in The Age

November 6, 2010

Hell has no fury like a narcissist scorned. So literary critic Laura Miller discovered this week when she suggested, in her weekly books column for online magazine Salon, that spending November writing a novel as part of the NaNoWriMo project (National Novel Writing Month) was ''a waste of time''.

This unleashed the kind of bile you'd normally associate with the Fox News end of the US political spectrum, not hobby typists aiming to bash out 50,000 fictional words by December 1. Miller was called a killjoy, a snob and a bitch by a host of writers distracted from their daily word targets by the opportunity to practise a little retaliatory criticism. As is the way with any flame-out, it eventually descended to menacing threats.

Miller's crime was to quail at the prospect of hundreds of thousands of bad first drafts added to the world's rapidly growing slush pile. ''Why does giving yourself permission to write a lot of crap so often seem to segue into the insistence that other people read it?'' she asked. ''Nothing about NaNoWriMo suggests that it's likely to produce more novels I'd want to read.''

NaNoWriMo is proving as popular as Movember, if slightly more demanding than growing a moustache. In 2009, 120,000 people registered to attempt the 30-day writing streak, and 28,000 of them made it to 50,000 words. Most of them defended their efforts as a fun challenge, like running a marathon, something they could tick off on their ''to do'' list. Harmless.

But the shrill pitch of the counter attack suggests there's more than a nub of truth to Miller's assertion that all this focus on personal creativity comes at a cost, and that what we lose is an emphasis on reading. The creative writing industry - classes, workshops, how-to books - has outstripped the creative reading industry; that quaint outfit known as book publishing.

''Yet while there's no shortage of good novels out there, there is a shortage of readers for these books. Even authors who achieve what probably seems like Nirvana to the average NaNoWriMo participant - publication by a major house - will, for the most part, soon learn this dispiriting truth: hardly anyone will read their books and next to no one will buy them.''

Miller argues that we should celebrate readers as ''the bedrock on which any literary culture must be built''.

This debate speaks of a bigger problem in a culture where it is easier than ever to create, but increasingly difficult to find an audience that wants to engage, as opposed to just swap notes. Everyone is making their own movies on their computers, developing their own photo galleries, mixing sounds, uploading podcasts and, yes, bashing out their own stories. From primary school onwards, self-expression reigns supreme, uncriticised, and the dull, hard work of editing, revising and even discarding is abandoned. From little things, big things grow, but not as often as people like to think: mostly, little things remain minor unless people prepare for the long, brutal work of revision. Good novels are miracles made from hard, often unpleasant slogs in the face of daunting odds; they are not perky projects that kickstart a dull month. And then there are the hard, often unpleasant truths that loop back from review, feedback or, even worse, lack of feedback. And then doing it again. Surely the only people who should write a novel are those who feel helplessly compelled?

If everyone is an artist, who is the audience? Artists are solipsists, but many now are blithely, proudly uninterested in the work of those outside their own inner circle.
We could do a lot more to celebrate not just the readers out there but all kinds of audiences: for music, for theatre, for dance, for art.

The subscribers who keep our theatre companies and orchestras alive are often dismissed by the very artists they support as mere ''bums on seats'', but like the people who part company with cash to buy a new novel, their every act of engagement does more to keep the arts alive than any workshop ever could.