Writing in Public

What the "tsunami of crap" really represents

Hey y’all, it’s KimBoo! I’m an author and a podcaster who is also a librarian, text technology historian, and former I.T. project manager. I write about a lot of interesting things, I hope you agree! Please consider supporting me (and my dog!) so I can keep throwing errata & etcetera into the Scriptorium!

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I've heard so much chatter over the last twenty years or more (to be perfectly honest, closer to forty years…100 years? 2,000 years?) that the quality of writing in the world has dropped significantly. We are deluged by a tsunami of crap, and it’s all the internet’s fault! Or self-publishing. Or A.I. Or common core curriculum…take your pick, really.

But I maintain that the sudden tsunami of crap showing up everywhere is not a new phenomenon. No, there has always been a tsunami of crap written in the world. What’s new is that technological advancements such as the internet and ebooks allow us to see it out in the open.

Back in my day (she says, curled up in her rocking chair and waving her cane at th’ yoots), when we wrote crappy stories they stayed locked in our spiral bound notebooks in a box under our bed.

And yes, of course, I am talking about the Star Wars mary-sue fanfiction I wrote when I was around ten years old in 1979… but I digress.

(No, I will not be sharing it! NO! Stop asking, damnit!)

I hand-wrote that damn thing in a spiral-bound notebook, but that was because I was sick in bed when I wrote it. Most of my childhood writing was typed. Yes, really.

I honestly can't even imagine a home with my mother in it that did not have a typewriter. It was a two-for-one deal with her. I grew up with typewriters and therefore assumed that was how ‘writing’ was done. I demanded to learn how to type when I was about seven. Mother got me one of those stand-up books that taught you how to type and let me loose to run through a whole lot of paper and ribbon.

I typed and I typed and I produced reams of stories (literally). Most of them remained unfinished, unsurprisingly, and all of them are absolutely awful. That didn’t matter because I had a great time writing, being in my own little world!

Then my mother would take those pages and inspect them and give a little moue of displeasure before marking it up with her red felt-tip pen as a training exercise on my way to becoming a heartbreaking genius of staggering potential.

Here's the thing that you may know already about those kinds of baby!writer edits: they make you feel like your words are very precious.

All authors go through this phase of feeling like their writing is both terrible and precious, honestly, but in a world where no one sees the precious until the terrible has been extracted, it’s easy to confuse the final product with the whole process.

But technology changed and over time writing in the modern world shifted to being digital-first (MS Word, scrivener, [insert-name-of-your-fave-writing-tool]). It is very common to write a story and fling it out there into the wild. Even if it is unedited. Even if it is unfinished. Even if you are ten years old.

For a lot of younger writers, that means online-first. They don’t just write using apps on their phones and tablets, they write directly into the input fields of sites like Wattpad, RoyalRoad, and Archive of Our Own. They write whole stories on social media apps. They write and draw and play games while streaming on twitch or YouTube. They write in GoogleDocs, export it as an epub and upload it to Amazon.

The more we started using the internet, the more we started writing on the internet. Instead of all the drafts and under-cooked stories hiding in a banker’s box in a closet, they are right there, out in the open. All the terrible parts are just sitting around, waiting to be read.

Anyone who wrote a lot before the digital world hit us all like a truck will tell you that the majority of our writing was not very good, but no one cared because no one would see that work unless they were carefully vetted first, such as a critique group or an editor or an agent (or Mother).

People cry about the aforementioned “tsunami of crap” as if a pile of crappy writing burst, fully formed, into the world, but to me, it's less about the digital environment encouraging a lot of bad writing than it is about writing itself moving from a private to a public space.

Bad writing has always existed, but now we see it.

The question is: is that a good thing, or a bad thing?

It was our privilege in ye olden days to write something and then rest easy knowing that you, dear reader, will never see it. My mother got to see all the dreck I wrote, mark it up, and watch it disappear into a box under the bed…but also she died in 1994 so she can’t even bear witness to all that terrible writing. There is no Wayback Machine to port over that hard copy to you. It will never surface in an online search because it can’t. It is unscanned, unphotographed, untranscribed, and un-digitized.

Until I admitted it exists here in this very blog post, there is absolutely no way anyone could have found out about it until after I died. It is not about plausible deniability; it is about complete and utter deniability. If I destroy it tomorrow, it might as well have never existed.

Writers used to hide all our mistakes away. The tsunami of crap was buried, burned, stuffed into a trunk in the attic. Some would argue that is where it should have stayed, but I think that misses the fact that sharing stories is a powerful way for us to build community.

Writers love to come together to share our crappy work, talk about how crappy it is, and share plans on how to make it less crappy. We have done this forever, really, via critique groups or workshops or seminars or classes and many writers still want to share in such controlled environments.

But, on the other hand, many writers want to share their work out in the open.

The digital future-now has changed how we share stories by making it very easy, and I argue that has changed how many writers feel about their writing. They view it as a group activity, something to be shared openly with others, no matter how terrible or precious the words are. Humans are wired for community and compassion, and we tend to be kinder to others’ faults when we have to openly acknowledge our own.

To you it might be a tsunami of crap, and I agree there is a lot of low-content bullshit on the ‘nets. But to me, “writing in public” is a tsunami of community building, between writers and other writers as well as writers and readers.

All that said, I want to close with a bit of advice for all those people offended by the tsunami of crap. It is a wise old adage from the fanfiction community that I think would serve many of us in good stead:

Don’t Like, Don’t Read.

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