Arthur Attwell

I was hugely honoured to be invited by Robin Malan to speak at the launch of English Alive this week. The magazine of high-school writing has been published annually since 1967, and does an incredible job of promoting and inspiring young writers around the country. Here's what I had to say.

I was never in English Alive, I’m not sure why – probably because I never submitted anything – and it doesn’t matter any more. But in reading this year’s edition, I’m struck by the incredible quality of writing in it, and I’m almost certain that I wouldn’t have made it in had I tried. It did of course make me think back on my writing in high school. A few days ago my wife, Michelle, and I were sorting out some old boxes in storage, and I found a box of notes and clippings and pictures from 1993, my matric year. It included some really, really awful writing. Bad song lyrics, I think. So bad, in fact, that I didn’t even show Michelle – she thinks I’m quite a good writer, and I don’t think our marriage would have survived her reading it.

What pleasantly surprised me reading this year’s edition was that the themes, on the whole, are much the same sixteen years later as they were when my friends and I were writing in 1993. There’s a genuine engagement with social and political issues, love and family relationships, and the struggle between who we are and who we appear to be. While I’m still pretty young, as I get older I’m more and more worried that the world is changing without me, in a way I do not or will not understand. So it’s comforting to see that the big human issues, it seems, are not changing.

But there is no doubt that something very important about how the world works is indeed changing. We usually call it the Internet. I run a company called Electric Book Works, and I spend most of every day there trying to keep up with it.

The world is fast becoming as connected as the neurons in a brain. Sixteen years ago, had I written something I could be fairly sure it wouldn’t travel beyond the paper I’d typed it on. (Yes, I used an actual typewriter, with mechanical levers! And it was not long ago at all.) In the end though, the chances were that my writing would make no discernible difference to the world, because the world wouldn’t have a chance to see it. In my case, perhaps that was a very good thing.

The Web changes all that, as you know. And it’s only about six thousand days old. [UPDATE: I've added the link to credit that phrase to Kevin Kelly.]

Today I can go online, write a book, and using a free print-on-demand service have a print edition for sale on Amazon hours after I’ve finished typing. I’ll tweet the news on Twitter, and minutes later someone in India can be reading that book on their iPhone. If I’ve licensed the book under a Creative Commons licence, a teacher in Guinea could find it, searching for open-licensed material on Google the next day, and remix a chapter for a lesson on southern Africa. And a teen in Australia could be doing a TinEye image search and find that I’d taken my cover image from a Flickr user in China, and message them about it on Facebook. And, hey presto, I have a curious reader in China!

Perhaps none of this will surprise you, but it surprises the hell out of me.

And it’s only the beginning.

Well, don’t think too much about it if you don’t want to. Really. Get on with your lives however you like. The analog world has so much wonderful stuff to offer. Geeks like me tend to have an over-inflated sense of how interesting their work is to others. But, still, us geeks can’t help feeling that we’re kind of shaping the world, at least for the next few years. In my lifetime, I like to think, politicians shaped the 70s, lawyers shaped the 80s, accountants the 90s, and the geeks have been dominating the covers of Time magazine ever since. Maybe geeks will continue to do so until they invent code to replace themselves.

What us geeks are on about, in a nutshell, is this: how do we make every thing talk to everything else?

It’s as simple as that. How do we make this computer talk to that computer, so that we don’t have to? And as we get better and better at making things talk to each other, we start to wonder: How do we make that chair talk to the school’s asset register so the accountant doesn’t have to? How do we make my clothes speak to my washing machine so I don’t have to programme the thing? How do we make my car speak to nearby repair shops so I don’t have to figure out what’s wrong or where to go to fix it?

In other words, how do we get information from one point to another, to make our lives easier. (Ironically, we’ve made the search for that simplicity incredibly complicated.)

For you as writers, the geek question would be: how do we make my computer speak to my readers’ computers?

But a more interesting, human question is this: how do I make my writing matter? How do I give the world a chance to read it?

Geeks and businesspeople are hard at work solving that problem for you. Even five years ago the only way to make your writing available was to submit it to magazines like English Alive, or knock on the doors of a hundred publishers, hoping someone would risk loads of money and time editing, designing, printing and marketing your work. As writers we were constrained by the fact that writing was a physical thing, a thing of paper and ink, pens and tippex. And because physical things cost money, those with money controlled what got published.

Nowadays there is little need for physical things in the business of publishing. I need the physical thing that is a computer, but that’s about it. (My end reader might choose to read my work in a physical, printed book, but that’s their choice, not a necessity.) Technically, I could run a publishing company from a public computer in a library. Anyone can be a publisher.

Of course, there is a very unfortunate side to the fact that anyone can publish. And that is this: anyone can publish. All the rubbish writing in the world is going to descend on your computers. For publishers at their desks it’s like an apocalypse of raining paper.

Till now, what gets made public – what gets published, in other words – has been curated mostly by publishers, print newspaper and magazine reviewers, and physical bookstores. The cost of that physical infrastructure has made it important for publishers to keep quality (or popularity) high, so it naturally filtered out a lot of lousy writing.

And now that big brick wall of physical cost is gone.

So, at least two things will happen as a result, and are already happening.

First, you’re competing – for readers’ attention – against far more other writers than I ever was, though not as many as your children will be up against. I think you’ve already upped your game on what we were writing sixteen years ago at your age, but you have to keep at it.

Second, in the deluge of writing that’s coming, readers still need guidance about what to read. Someone still has to tell people what’s good, what’s worth spending time reading. This guidance probably won’t come from the big publishers and newspapers and bookstores who only work in the world of physical costs and barriers. They are falling all around us. Maybe it’ll be celebrities, bloggers, or computer systems like Twitter trends or Google Books that find the best and most popular writing and tell readers about it. It will certainly be collections like English Alive. English Alive is not a printed magazine, that’s just what you see coming out of it. Rather, English Alive is a process of curation, made of the collected efforts of people like Robin Malan. It is the work of guiding us, telling us what’s worth turning our attention to.

Whatever happens to the world of publishing as we know it, you will be writing for a new kind of curator. The systems that now make it possible to publish are no longer filters of quality, because they’re pretty much free. So, first and most importantly, you have to be your own curator. If you want to be sure you continue to put good quality writing into the world, and don’t embarrass yourself with bad writing, you have to be the harshest and most constructive critic of your own work. I’m very glad that I didn’t run that risk when I was at school.

There is one final thought I want to mention. If the Webbed world is very small, and is all about communication, then people who can communicate have a huge advantage. When I consider job applications, for instance, a person’s cover letter is far, far more important than what’s on their CV. You will build your careers on your ability to communicate far more than anyone has before now. Many of you will go on to do things completely distinct from creative writing. But your ability to write this well will always be your greatest strength.