“The Golden Age for Writers”

I missed this article in Esquire when it came out last November, but it popped up on my Twitter feed and it’s pretty startling on the face of it.

Writers have always been whiners. For nearly a hundred years, since at least the time of F. Scott Fitzgerald, the death of the novel has been presaged. And now, egged on by BuzzFeed and video games and just general hypercaffeinated, e-mail-all-the-time ADHD, the book is apparently, finally, about to die. At least we’ll have good stuff to read while we wait. This fall alone, the number of big books published by major writers is astounding: Michael Chabon, Zadie Smith, Junot Díaz, Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, Salman Rushdie, and about a half dozen others. Not that the list has stopped anyone from complaining. Literary circles have been so full of pity for so long that they can’t accept the optimistic truth: We’re living in a golden age for writers and writing.

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The publishers are making money, too. Revenue for adult hardcover books is up 8.3 percent from 2011, and paperback sales are up 5.2 percent. Book sales for young adults and children grew by 12 percent last year. E-books accounted for 30 percent of net publisher sales in the adult fiction category in 2011 — compared with 13 percent in 2010 — but there’s little evidence that those numbers represent anything other than a shift in format. The e-reader is creating a new market, not destroying an old one. People with e-readers read more books than those without, and on average adult Americans read seventeen books in 2011 — a number that hasn’t been higher since Gallup and Pew began tracking the figure in 1990. And it’s not just crap books. The percentage of Americans who told the National Endowment for the Arts that they read literature rose in 2008 (their most recent survey) by 3.5 percentage points to more than half the population — the first gain in twenty-six years.

How about this graph:

Books, essays, web series, TV, there is some great writing going on. I see it with screenwriters as well. There seems to be a whole crop of writers who are elevating the craft. I have a theory on that.

Much like some of the great directors from the 70s — Scorcese, Lucas, Spielberg, Coppola — studied movies by the masters obsessively to help feed and inform their creativity, I think something similar has been and is going on with screenwriters.

Since the earliest days of cinema, movie writers were a hybrid sort of thing. Scenario writers, playwrights turned screenwriters, journalists turned screenwriters, and so on. Then the whole auteur theory blasted through in the 60s and beyond, relegating screenwriting to a secondary position relative to directing, at least in terms of public perception.

Next came the era of the spec script bonanza and with it a variety of screenwriting gurus, starting in the 80s and marching into the 90s. With that, an expansion of awareness about the craft and growth of screenwriting classes and programs at the collegiate and graduate level. In other words, in the last two decades of the 2oth century, there was an unprecedented amount of focus on screenwriting, not as a hybrid thing, not as a secondary aspect of filmmaking, but something worthy of attention on its own merits.

Today’s screenwriters, especially the young and new ones breaking in, seem to me to have a greater depth of understanding of the craft. They have decades worth of scripts as primary source material, and have been informed by dozens of theoretical approaches to structure and process. Plus this: These writers appear to have a passion for actually studying the craft. [If you pick up nothing else from all the interviews I’ve been doing with screenwriters, it’s their sheer joy at what they do and desire to do it well.]

I’m not suggesting that contemporary screenwriters are any better than some of the masters like Preston Sturges, Wilder & Diamond, Paddy Chayefsky, William Goldman, Robert Towne, although certainly some are (Scott Frank, Aaron Sorkin, Steve Zaillian to name a few). But my sense of it is on the whole, there is a breadth of awareness about the craft to go along with a depth of understanding that seems to have settled in among the screenwriting ‘community,’ a realization that there is no magic formula, no secret paradigm. Screenwriters have, I think, grown beyond that rather infantile way of thinking that accompanied the first wave of screenwriting gurus to a more mature take on matters: Study the masters, analyze scripts, immerse oneself in cinema, practice the craft, write pages.

Even the very look of a screenplay nowadays (at least selling scripts as compared to shooting drafts) mirrors this shift, looking much less like a blueprint to make a movie than something more literary. Stripped of ‘scripty’ jargon and directing lingo, they feel and read like a story, not the foundation of a story. We see this reflected by the fact there are publishing outfits like Newmarket Press who publish screenplays as books. Imagine that. Consumers buying screenplays to read a story.

So huzzah for writers everywhere! It’s never been more competitive, yet in some ways there’s never been a better time to be a writer. As the article notes, this goes for novelists and essayists. I’ve even read where short stories are making a comeback, the perfect length for a read by a commuter on their Kindle.

Plus with the continued emergence of online as a global distribution network and the presence of digital technologies to shoot and edit content, it’s an incredible time to be a content creator.

So keep at it, folks! Find great stories to write and write them well.

There’s gold in them thar virtual hills!

For the rest of the Esquire article, go here.

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