The Future of Stories

The history of literature--such a grand topic, isn't it, stretching back to the dawn of recorded time. Because humans have always told each other stories in order to make sense of their lives, literature in some form has always existed. Furthermore, the form of the stories has evolved over time.

Of course you know that the earliest stories were told orally--including Genesis and other early books of the Bible--and passed down several generations until someone was able to write them down. The same process occurred with the epic poetry of Homer. Then gradually the Greek tragedies were developed, and the process continued.

Every literary era seems to have its preferred form of literature. Long epic poems, once mainstays of many writers' careers, are no longer publishable (I for one am thankful) and anyone who wants to make a living as a poet may have a struggle ahead. The novel dominated the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and it's still with us--but how long will novels as we know them be the primary way we tell our culture's story?

New Ways to Look at Books
I recently received an email offering me a free e-book. It's the first novel, never published, of an author who has gone on to have her next two books published conventionally. It sounded good, plus "free" and "book" are two words that get my attention anyway, and when used together, I couldn't resist. I downloaded the book as a pdf file, read the first few pages...and closed the program.

I couldn't read it. It probably wasn't the best writing I've ever read, but if it had been in book form, I could have kept going. I just didn't like reading a novel in such an unfamiliar way.

I'm probably just a hopelessly old-fashioned stick in the mud who's resistant to innovative ideas to get readers interested in literature when there are so many different types of media competing for their attention. I think some of the other ways people ingest books, while not my favorite, could really work. I don't listen to books, but the ability to download books on CD onto an mp3 player, (for free, even--my library lets you do this now) seems a very convenient way to ingest literature during a commute or a workout. I wonder how successful Amazon has been with their wireless reading device, the Kindle. It seems pretty cool, especially since it claims to eliminate the eye strain caused by reading a lot of text on a typical computer screen.

Technology Changes Literature
It's hard to imagine that literature will remain unchanged by these types of advances in technology. Our impatient era has already caused some changes. People still write long novels, of course, but not the rambling, gossipy tomes popular in Victorian times. Modern readers want books to get to the point. And writers, particularly ones writing popular fiction, have to give the public what it wants.

There's always the possibility that novels and fiction in general will not stay in their current form in the future. I had a professor who believed that film will become the dominant genre in the future. Which is kind of depressing, when you see what Hollywood puts out--but one thing I know for sure: writers will keep telling stories, and people will keep reading (or listening, or watching.)