Going Digital

The recent publication of my memoir, Sipping from the Nile, My Exodus From Egypt as an eBook has made it instantly available in many formats alongside its hardcover and trade paperback editions. What does this mean?

As I focused more personally on the intense global conversation blooming unchecked on the Internet, I realized that buried in all the cacophony of concern and confusion, the voice least heard is the voice of the writer.

This begs the question: Why do writers write in the first place?

Writers have always written first to tell a story, to share their words and ideas with others. Lost in our love affair with words, we search how best to construct our stories for those we hope will read them. We ally ourselves seamlessly with our inner minstrel. We tell stories at the dinner table. We observe our world and draw from it a personal vision that blossoms into a universal inspiration. We long to connect with our readers. To learn that the words we have written with open heart have reached into the world and touched others.

Most of all, we want to share our stories. We always have, since early days of humanity. A quick flip though the ages tells its own tale. Storytellers shared their stories in a direct line through oral traditions to the great Norse sagas sung by minstrels in the mead halls of the ancients. Next came the exquisitely illuminated manuscripts of the Middle Ages, restricted to the privileged few. Finally came the paradigm shift caused by the invention of the printing press. No longer tales told to a rapt few huddled by peat fires on a cold winter's night, or restricted to an elite, stories came within the reach of multitudes.

The industrial revolution and the invention of the printing press created opportunity, but also distance, changing the minstrel into the writer, and the listener into the reader.

Today, huge economic edifices have arisen like the Tower of Babel, fracturing the average writer's world into a schizophrenic landscape. Teetering off-balance in the fierce winds of change they are trapped and buffeted by the powerful crosswinds of another revolution, one we have been reluctant to recognize as such.

I confess, I love my printed books. Bliss for me is the leisure to curl up in a comfortable chair, the weight and heft of a captivating novel in my hands, immersing myself in the world a skilled storyteller has created. I enjoy the faint rustle of pages turning, the subtle movement of pages stacking up as the tale draws to its close.

I do also own a device. It does not provide the same sensual pleasures. But it enables me to travel with as many books as I desire without breaking my back as I lug my suitcase up the stairs and swing it onto the security belt at the airport. My husband and I, avid readers both, find that audio fills long repetitive car trips with the magic of an engrossing tale. We have been known to arrive at our destination and sit in front of the garage door, engine idling, unwilling to leave the story to take our groceries indoors.

Interestingly, the variety of options is once again allowing writer and reader to face each other, intimately connecting the tellers of tales to those who thirst for the tales they tell.

While many of us gaze disbelievingly at onrushing vistas of digital possibility, reader communities are springing up, writers are being challenged to connect directly into the vast digital universe spreading at their feet. No longer needing to force an untamed wilderness into our own tidy landscapes, we writers are bound only by the richness of our imaginations in order to embrace this world of digital possibility.

Readers get it! Writers get it! Those of us addicted to the power of words can now access our stories in a variety of ways to match time, needs and opportunity. For whether stories and ideas reach us through the crisp pages of a book, through audio, or through the rapidly expanding universe of digital formats and devices, it is the story we care about. It is the voice of the other, reaching into our human isolation and connecting.

As we head at a fast clip into an unimaginable future, we need to keep a clear vision and a firm grip on what had meaning in the past. The desire to shape and share our stories is embedded in our DNA. It is one of the elements that make us human. Whether our stories are captured in a whisper, a song, a book, a Kindle, an e-book or a Sony Reader, it matters only that the communication occurs between writer and reader.

And so I wait, eagerly and with hope, to observe if my printed book holds its own as it jostles for position among its many new cousins.

Going digital has enlarged my world. I welcome the moment.

 

 

Comments

[garyd63]

“The industrial revolution and the invention of the printing press created opportunity, but also distance, changing the minstrel into the writer, and the listener into the reader.”

Naggar’s beautifully written observations on the changing nature of story telling, the delivery systems used, takes us into the world of reading on screens with a nary a murmur about what is being lost in the process. When print changed the “listener into the reader” didn’t it also change something in our inner worlds? Stories which were once heard and tumbled through our consciousness were performance pieces, the story and the story teller became one in the same. With print the performance of the story is within each readers abilities and levels of comprehension. As print is now viewed on screens, and increasingly accompanied by assorted audio and visual props, the performance is projected not internalized. And this is what is being lost: The making of the story our own because that’s what readers do.

[Jean Naggar - Huffpost Blogger]

You are, of course, absolutely correct. And often the movie of a favorite book is not nearly as powerful as the book itself, because what each reader brings to the experience is intensely personal, and transforms the work in an intimate and significant way for each individual.
But we want to share, do we not? That is one of the compelling reasons for writing. If a parallel but different experience exists that will expand our reach, should we be disturbed or delighted?
We can't fight the way the world moves. We have to move along with it or be stopped in our tracks. I am sure that the monks felt that their gorgeous illuminated works of art provided a unique and irreplaceable experience, as indeed they did. But it only served an elite.
I do not believe we are witnessing the demise of the printed book, or the loss of that experience for those of us who treasure it. I believe we are seeing an expansion of choice. Like a movie, these other options offer a different experience for those who seek it, and whether or not we choose one or the other, the fact that we are able to make such a choice is an expansion of the way in which we share our stories with the world.

[garyd63]

But Jean, of course we can fight the way the world moves. Isn't that what stories often do? Often contribute? Story goes beyond the village elders praising the past (themselves) and the future (as they see it). And it's telling that you mention movies, the now dead canary in the mine. We watch a great film from the thirties and it's filled with long scenes and stretches of dialogue, stories telling us something about characters in a world. Today's films? Not so much. Blink your eye and the next bit of special effects pop on the screen. The whole in movies today are never more than the sum of their parts. They're just the parts. And that's the direction we're going when story telling interfaces (such a bloodless term!) with technology.

[andreebrooks]

Jean Naggar's essay is a life-line for anyone who has turned away from the written word. It gives us a meaningful path into the Digitial age, the way the printing press took over from the travelling story tellers centuries ago. Kudos for a beautifully written, well crafted piece.

[Jean Naggar - Huffpost Blogger]

Words allow us to connect. Thank you so much for yours.
It takes a village to raise a child and it takes the insight of a writer to validate the work of another.