On Reading and Writing in the Future and Now – Blogs, Twitter, and the Kindle

Ben Okri (Nigeria/UK), photographed April 30, 2010, New York, NY. Photo by Beowulf Sheehan for PEN World Voices Festival

On a very humid spring day in New York City last month, I listened, intently, to four accomplished writers try not only to define their reading experiences in today’s interactive multimedia environment, but also to reveal their level of openness to such an environment and its effects, if any, on their work.

Responses varied loosely on reading experiences—we are, after all, living in a time when we can read Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina on the Kindle, iPad as well as in a bound book. We could even read snippets of it on a blog or come across a quote from it on Twitter.

Why not dabble?

The discussion on openness, however, revealed a strong yet eloquent, dissenting voice—that of Ben Orki, one of Nigeria’s celebrated writers and author of the award-winning novel, The Famished Road. As if referring to a distant past, Okri said that he loved the “tactility of books”; he also enjoyed “the peculiar feeling of wood, paper, and depth, words on a page—something to put in your pocket and travel with.”

There is, he believes, something very magical and enduring about books—and that magic is in part due to the fact that the book, which is “close to the tree, is a human work of art that retains the visual, aesthetic field of the natural world.”

Fair enough. But his example of reading the first line of a well-written novel and being transported via one’s imaginative abilities to another “world” cuts both ways. I confess that this has happened to me while reading on the Kindle—and it is the reason that I sometimes opt to buy (or not buy) a book after downloading a sample.

On the other hand, it is probably a very good idea to remember that technology and nature are not necessarily always “friends”—nor should they be. That afternoon, Okri quoted Octavia Paz to further support his views, saying “Technology is a criticism of the natural world and the natural world is a criticism of technology.” For Okri, this dichotomy still exists. And it should, apparently.

Albert Ruy Sanchez by Beowulf Sheehan for PEN World Voices Festival

Interestingly, though, writer and editor Alberto Ruy-Sanchez revealed that for him new media is a form of “translating the reading experience, which is very traditional, into another experience”—and one that is actually similar to that of using ancient scrolls before the book was invented. Are we, he asks, going backward or forward here in the experience of reading?

This is a good question for it involves some consideration of mechanics–are we reading differently because of all these new devices and interactive outlets, and is the reading that we are doing any better or worse?

Russian writer Sergi Sokolovsky added to the discussion, saying “there is indeed going to be a change in the way we read—and it will be an evolutionary change … one that might even involve our forgetting learned mechanics of reading.” He noted, referring to blogs, that we are even writing differently already—“people write knowing that their work is going to be read in an electronic format.”

But this may not necessarily be a bad thing, Alberto Ruy-Sanchez implied. He wrote his second novel, Los Demonios de La Lengua, using letters he got from people through electronic media, specifically from his blog. He found that the blog was a very useful way to receive feedback and may in fact alleviate the loneliness that is often characteristic of the writer’s craft. He also discovered that Twitter is a great way to “spread things.”

For authors, Ruy-Sanchez said, who often harbor a pathological need to reach readers, diffusion is better with interactive media, especially since one doesn’t need to go through any sort of establishment. So, is it thumbs up for Twitter?

For Ruy-Sanchez, that would be a yes. Last year, he kept a travelogue on a trip to India on Twitter, and at the end of the trip, he had compiled about 500 twits (with about 100 photos)—all images in their own right that reached his readers with an immediacy he liked. “Literature is made of images,” Ruy-Sanchez said, “and the challenge for writers today is that they have to find new ways of creating these images.”

Ben Okri, however, is more reluctant to embrace Twitter as a way of creating images–however, literary, lyrical or poetic–in his writing. He acknowledges Twitter’s explosive possibility for freedom,” citing various “twitter storms that have helped shape biggish moments in history.” So, to him, it works as an activism “tool” of sorts, but not quite as a literary one. He is known to have written the very first Twitter poem, which he read at the event that day. He wrote one line a day; the poem is to be read one line a day, too. I quite liked the poem, but Okri thought that if he had written the lines in a different medium, it would probably have taken him years, and as result the poem would be more richly layered and thus a much better one.

So is imagination, as Okri contends, somewhat stifled by all these forms of media? Is imagination amplified when fewer reading devices and media outlets are used or available to us? I had a good laugh when writer Ben Schrank said that we had to remember to question how the interactive media opens up to opportunity—and when this may become useless. He asked us to take, for example, “a novel which may ‘breathe’ in the future.”

Well, yes, let’s imagine that with a serious face.

If there is anything I learned from the discussion that day, it’s that we are surely living in a time of dread and excitement when it comes to the future of reading, especially with the e-book market’s expansion, the availability of multiple reading devices that allow for different levels of interactivity, and sadly, the “violence” this all may inflict on traditional bookselling outlets as well.

I learned another valuable lesson that day as well: we are living in a time when you can still be, like Ben Okri, a romantic about books. After the discussion, I bought another copy of Okri’s The Famished Road and stood in line so that he could sign it–and he did, thoughtfully and graciously. And as I left the Instituto Cervantes that afternoon with the Kindle in my bag, it struck me that one day perhaps the very act of getting a book signed by an author–with ink on paper, that is–could become a magical thing of the past as well, just like the very act of reading a bound book. Didn’t the scroll suffer a similar fate?

Sergi Sokolovsky by Beowulf Sheehan for PEN World Voices Festival