Driving to the New World

My curiosity piqued by the Guardian’s article on fan fiction (see Wednesday's post) I turned to the interweb to investigate further.
The reason why yesterday’s post was a filler photograph of Horseguards’ Parade featuring a man sweeping up discarded thongs after the Olympic beach volleyball and not an incisive follow up from the previous day’s fanfic funfest was that I got sucked in to the mælström and didn’t manage to escape its clutches until way past bedtime. As to what I witnessed within: I am not, as you well know a frequent user of the phrase, but I feel justified at this point in exclaiming “What the fuck?”

Over the past few years I have observed – and frequently bewailed – the mass emigration of many fine folk from Blogville to such brash and trash locations as Facebook and Twitter. Old neighbours who would happily read and write reams of pertinent and often hilarious copy gradually drifted away, leaving just the empty husks of once beautiful blogs. Now all that remains is a ghost town through which we few hardy yet bewildered survivors shuffle amid the tumbleweed and discarded cat photographs.

Driving over from Blogville to visit my old friends in the community of Facebook is – like a trip from Springfield to Shelbyville - a disheartening experience. People there seem to have had their previously lengthy attention spans shorn mercilessly short and to be incapable of reading more than a paragraph – sometimes no more than a sentence - without glazing over and starting to dribble. They have lost the ability to write anything more than “look at this … LOL” and post links to bad photos or large print witless aphorisms. It is an appalling loss to the world.
I’ve never driven as far as Twitter but I’ve heard rumour that things are even worse over there.

Last night, however, armed with a new and strange map I discovered that the condition of the written word might not be as tragically hopeless as I had feared. Driving out of Blogville along a narrow road I had never used before I discovered not a new town but a whole new world! What the fuck? Where did THIS come from? People writing! Reams and reams of the stuff; whole cities full of fiction fans writing entire libraries full of fan fiction.
Some of it is even good!
I soon got lost. Having followed the Guardian’s directions I was sucked down side roads and decoyed along back alleys, racing through the sleazier districts (and there are a lot of those) but cruising slowly through much nicer neighbourhoods with kids’ playgrounds and community centres.
There are real writers here.

Of course, for every gemstone there's a ton of worthless gravel to sift through, but walk into any library or bookshop and you’ll find much the same situation. My own local bookstore has miles of aisles of Zelebrity diarrhœa, TV tie-ins, faddish cookbooks that nobody will ever use, a humourless “humour” section, ghostwritten biographies of yet more Z-listers and of course endless wasted shelves of bad writing masquerading as novels.
A small bookcase at the back contains poetry and “classics” and even those are mostly tied in to TV adaptations.
Yet there are great books to be found in there amongst the dross.

The same goes for the crazy planet of fan fiction. Drive through entire cities of people whose apparent appetite for accounts of Harry Potter and Draco Malfoy snogging and fiddling with one another knows no bounds and you might just find a single shop catering for those who wondered what happened with Kitty and Levin after Anna Karenina painted the train red.

Last night I was only window-shopping yet I bookmarked far more short stories, novels and serial fiction than I can possibly read and this evening I shall probably go back for more. I’ve only driven through a few districts in the outskirts and there are whole metropolis … isses … (metropoli?) still waiting over the horizon.

I’m actually quite excited by the discovery that the written word is not dead, and that – while an infinite number of chimps are frantically hammering at their keyboards - just occasionally one of them will indeed write something more readable than Fifty Shades.