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I advise the students majoring in English at my university - 1,000 of them, about 150 of whom are creative writing majors. (Others focus on literature, film or teaching English.) That number is up from just 50 creative writing majors a couple of years ago, and it's a growing national trend according to this guy. They write poetry, short stories, creative non-fiction, plays and screenplays, and the numbers keep growing. Every week a handful of students meet with me to declare that they want to major in creative writing. I wonder if in a couple of years half our English majors will be creative writers?
Let me tell you it's tricky as an adviser, especially in this economy, to strike a balance between encouraging young people to write with a vengeance, and tempering their expectations to become the next Elizabeth Alexander, Cormac McCarthy, Sofia Coppola or Simon Beaufoy because it takes a rare combination of talent, timing, perseverance and who-you-know to succeed (i.e., make a living, not just get famous). Many want to go on to graduate school for a Masters of Fine Arts in creative writing. $30,000-40,000 later, what will they have? Not a teaching job, those are too few - maybe one for every 300-500 applicants. And they would almost certainly need a PhD to be able to teach at university if they are one of the lucky few to get a job.
Our English department has a subscription to The Writers Chronicle (put out by the AWP - Association of Writers and Writing Programs), and when I have time and inclination, I read a piece that catches my eye on the cover. So I was reading an article titled The Rise of Creative Writing & the New Value of Creativity by Steve Healey in the February 2009 issue, and this line stopped me:
"It's true, of course, that readership for traditional categories of literature, especially poetry, is remarkably small despite the growth of Creative Writing programs."
Does that give you pause as it does me? The number of writers grows; the number of readers shrinks. Yikes.
And I immediately thought about blogs in the same light. As bloggers you and I know new blogs are created every day. In February 2008, the Blog Herald stated that it was tracking nearly 113 million blogs in English alone. Of course there are millions in other languages as well - maybe nearly 100 million in China. Has the number doubled by now?
- Have you been to a bookstore lately? How are books selling in your neck of the woods? For every book that is published, how many copies are sold? I've read that the average number of copies sold of new books is 6,000. (Not if you're President Obama though. His 2008 royalties income from his two books Dreams From My Father and The Audacity of Hope totaled more than $2.4 million.)
- Is blogging just a free and easy way to publish for those too lazy or discouraged to get published in print? (Thinking of myself here.)
- How many blogs are there? How many are actually read? Ever chance upon a really good blog and see 0 comments for every post?
- What led to the rise in creativity, especially among young people?
- With all the new writing out there, new thoughts expressed, who's reading it? Will the gap between new writers and readers keep growing? Will we keep turning to the classics instead?
Every so often I ask myself what the value of blogging is? For me here at synch-ro-ni-zing it is:
- writing practice
- creative expression through photos and design
- a salon for sharing ideas with interesting people
- exploring a city
By the way, I recently received an email from a PhD Communication student at the University of Kentucky who is researching blogs, asking if she could use mine as part of her research. I agreed, and I'll be getting a survey from her soon. I'll keep you posted. I'd like to hear and share her findings.
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