Hal Duncan Author Of Escape From Hell!

Writers And The Influence Of The Internet On Them

Jul 5, 2009

Science Fiction and Fantasy writer Hal Duncan shares his thoughts on the potential of the Internet to affect writers and the publishing industry, whether for good or bad.

Suite101: Has the Internet significantly changed writers, for good or bad?

Hal Duncan: It depends what value you put on "significant". Research is a whole lot easier and procrastination is a whole lot easier, but I'm not sure how much that changes the way writers work any more than having a good library at hand or easy access to recreational narcotics. A lot of writers will, I'm sure, be happily going on as if the Internet didn't exist, cutting themselves off from the outside world, writing on a typewriter, distracting themselves with a rubber ball, getting drunk, typing "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy". And so on.

I know I got all excited when I discovered the joys of the street view on Google Earth, the fact that even if you've never been to a place you can zoom right in and take a virtual journey round the streets of a potential location, see the lay of the land, get a feel for the place-visually, at least-as if you'd made a visit. But how far is that really distinct from the old school style of research where you read books about a place, used photographs, maps, travel guides, TV programmes and movies and whatever you could lay your hands on. It's a whole lot easier but is it a significant change if it doesn't really affect your approach?

There's more feedback, of course, both positive and negative. You don't just have to hope this critic or that will review your book in a newspaper or magazine; you can look at those Amazon reviews, or do a vanity Google and find out how some moron on a forum considers your work a personal affront to all that he holds dear, how someone else thinks it's the best thing they've read ever.

There's more opinion to obsess over, if you're neurotic or egoistic and since more writers are one or the other, it probably doesn't matter that most of that opinion is just hot air. On the one hand, it's great to know that you *are* actually being noticed, that you *are* actually being read. On the other hand, well, it can lead to some... embarrassing scenarios like the infamous Anne Rice Amazon rant. Writing used to be the sort of gig where you were pretty insulated from the applause and the catcalls, outside of the odd review and the occasional public appearance. Now it's right there on your computer screen, if you surrender to the temptation to look for it.

Actually, if you're the type of person that likes interacting with an audience, if you're more the pavement café socialite than the attic flat recluse, you can pretty much put yourself out there in a way you never could before - not unless you were living in some boho corner of a big city. You can make yourself as accessible as a member of a gigging band at the bar after their set; all you need is a blog or a LiveJournal and you've basically opened the door to friendly chat. You get a whole lot more interviews- like this one-because the Internet facilitates a whole culture. It's like the zines of the past but on a massive scale and with the production values boosted big time. Which is pretty ****ing cool.

There's more support as well. Any writer who's stuck in the middle of nowhere geographically should pretty much be able to find themselves a community online, where in the past they'd have been looking at a possibly dispiriting isolation, surrounded by people who think writing is a nice hobby that they'll maybe take up when they retire because, you know, everyone has a novel in them. In a way, it's not unlike what the convention scene has always offered - informal networking, an interconnectedness based on shared interests - but the Internet does make that ongoing and unbound by location.

Has that changed what it is to be a writer though? I'm not sure if it's just a matter of degree, or if there's more sense of... celebrity associated with it because of the Internet, more sense of being in the public eye, even if it's pretty much the Z-list.

I realise I haven't really mentioned the Internet's effects on the economics, the impact of the new media on traditional models of publishing and distribution, but that's really a question of how it *will* change writers. And it's a question I don't have an answer for.

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