The Same Direction
As of this writing Author’s YouTube page is slightly less than 9,000 views away from cracking half-a-million total views. While I understand that a video of a sneezing aardvark could pass this number in 24 hours if the social media stars aligned themselves correctly, I think this is a respectable number for a page dedicated to fully-dressed, mostly middle-aged writers talking about the writing life. I will stop short, however, of saying this number in anyway strengthens my hope for reading, or writing, or books in general. This would suggest that my hope ever needed strengthening in the first place. I do not know what the future holds for the written word. I do not know if bookstores will disappear like the dinosaurs, or if novels will be transmitted straight to my brain where they can be thought instead of read. What I do know is that human beings always bend their artistic, intellectual, and inventive energies in precisely the same direction.
And that direction is toward other people. I watched a documentary last night called Indie Game, which portrayed the anxious months leading up to the release of small, independent video games. One of the film’s most sympathetic game designers was a shy, tattooed young man named Edmund who explained early the film that he was drawn to games, first as a player and then as a designer, because he, “basically hates people.” Yes, people can betray you and people can say and do strange dishonest things. Video games are more predictable.
That, anyhow, was his story at the beginning of the film. By the end something had changed. By the end, his game (Super Meat Boy, if you’re interested) had become a bestseller. He explained that while he was glad for the great reviews, and that he was certainly glad for the money, what moved him most – and here, he who “hated” people began to cry – what moved him most was that somewhere a little boy he’d never met was staying up all night to play the game he, Edmund, had designed.
I know the world is changing quickly, but we’re the ones changing it. No one asked us to change it; we did it by our own freewill. We changed it the same as a writer changes a sentence in a story - because something slightly more interesting has just occurred to us.
Remember to catch Bill every Tuesday at 2:00 PM PST/5:00 EST on his live Blogtalk Radio program Author2Author!
You can find Bill at: williamkenower.com
