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Writers: Rights, responsibilities and reinventing the flat tire. 8/29/2013 4:51:07 AM
Writers must take writing seriously, to make the truth echo back War with Syria? American intervention in the middle east? Once again the news is full of grim reports concerning possible western intervention in a war-torn country that is at best marginally threatening to its neighbors, much less to us ten thousand miles away. In my lifetime I’ve read about the ‘Gulf of Tonkin’ incident, the ‘Pueblo’ matter with North Korea, Libyan conflict, battle in Kosovo, the Falklands, a hostage crisis in Iran, WMD in Iraq and subsequent bungling into war there. The Gulf of Tonkin affair eventually involved me, when President Johnson used that chimerical engagement between the all-powerful United States Navy and a few North Vietnamese fishing boats to nudge the U.S. into war in Vietnam.
We stand on another precipice, this time waiting to see what another U.S. administration will do, a non-ally having crossed ‘a red line’ in its alleged use of chemical weapons. This is all too familiar. Our recent debacle in Iraq had all the same markers, all the same pressures to act, all the same admonitions not to. Regardless, it appears we are, once again, about to use our military power to punish another country for its actions, albeit the flagrant action of using banned weapons against its own people. We are, in other words, about to reinvent the flat tire, to make war just because we can, just because our rhetoric has given us no room to maneuver.
What does this have to do with writing? According to Bowker’s Books in Print…estimates indicate that the number of books published in 2010 jumped…to over 3.1 million in 2010. Of these, 2.776 million were “non-traditionally” published books. Admittedly, very few of those 3 million books will have much distribution. Perhaps 1% will arrive in bookstores, or be available for purchase. Even so, one percent of 3 million, 3 thousand books, is a lot of books, a lot of information. If only ten percent are non-fiction, 300 books of so called non-fiction can impart a lot of information. It seems to me as one of those writers that we have a lot of rights, more than ever before in the history of publishing, to get our work in front of people and to brand ourselves as a voice in the marketplace of ideas. We also have a responsibility in this crowded modern literary agora to be cautious about what we write, in non-fiction at least, to avoid adding to the babble that often passes for truth.
In a recent work of fiction, Sage Book 3, Silver and Iron by talented writer Marian Allen, two of her characters are in conversation. Salali chats with Farukh about this and that, her long lost love, to the point where, as the author writes, “sound takes the place of truth.” As a writer, the line resonates with me, because so much of what we do can easily become such sound replacing truth. It appears that’s what our leadership fails to grasp at times, that sound is not, in fact equal to truth. It’s our responsibility as writers, even lowly, obscure writers of limited edition, independently published works to at least not add to the rhetoric, and at most to do the hard work of tracking down the truth and making it echo back.
