I Have it Easy? How Writing a Book Has Changed

I confess, I was feeling a little down on myself the other day. My quest for a literary agent is not going well, and my artistic juices are not flowing. I started to think, "this is too hard."

Then I said, "Suck it up, buttercup." It's not nearly as hard as it used to be!

First, in my own defense, it's true: writing is not easy. It can be lonely, time-consuming, and downright frustrating. I never thought I'd argue with myself over the use (or not) of a comma for ten minutes, only to be chastised by one of my reading team for my comma use.

Becoming a traditionally published author (the kind with a contract from a publisher) who you see at the bookstore and hear on the radio is a whole different circle of hell. The advent of technology is in large part to blame. In the good old days, to submit a book to an agent or publisher, you had to print/copy it, and pay to mail it to them with a self-addressed, stamped envelope. The author had skin in the game! It cost time and actual money to submit. Now, it's all online, and after the cost of my laptop, there's not particularly much cost involved at all. That means that anybody who thinks they have a sellable story can overwhelm agents and publishers with stuff. I know this because I've done it, and I would like to apologize to those folks. 

When I started thinking about the technology piece, I recall one of the neatest things I ever saw in my days working in a large thrift store. It was a printed reproduction of the draft copies of George Orwell's book, 1984. First, he wrote it by hand, then made edits and notes on that document. Then it was typed (probably not by him, but you never know) and incorporated those changes. Then he handwrote more edits and notes. If it went through further revisions, I don't know, but the process would have been difficult and time-consuming.

Then I was scrolling through the internet, er, I mean, conducting undirected research, and ran across a piece about Ray Bradbury. He couldn't afford a typewriter at home, so he used a coin-operated one in the library at UCLA for .10/hour. In a basement library, he spent about 49 hours or $9.80 to write Fahrenheit 451.

Yeah, I don't have it so bad. My laptop can store more stuff than I can imagine. It transmits my thoughts to the page as fast as my fingers and brain can go. It tells me when I have misspellings. It lets me access a universe of information. Want to see how a sentence looks somewhere else? Easy! My trusty online dictionary and thesaurus are there, too. And plenty of ways to reward myself for working hard.

So, evidently, the only thing stopping me is... me.