The Brave New Literary World

The writing game ain’t what it used to be.

In the old world, you wrote and hoped to dig up an agent and a publisher who’d spread what you wrote to the world.  In the new world, you can publish your random thoughts instantly from a cell phone.  And, in the new world, content isn’t just there – Rap Genius proves that.  There’s always more to say about art on the web, and there are always more people talking.

So when I wrote, it was mostly to hear what other people said about it.  I wrote because I wanted to hear from the people in the world whose sexuality flexed the same way mine did.

I wrote, briefly, a story of flexible sexuality afoot at the festivals of San Francisco.  I used real scientific studies as the basis for the characters’ discussions about sexuality.  Fifty years ago, I couldn’t have published or sold fiction with footnotes.  But my fiction is enhanced by the footnotes, I daresay – my story has oodles more color if you get the references.  And the relevance of my story is directly proportional to how accurate my readers think the book’s claims about flexible sexuality are – including AFTER they’ve looked at the original sources for my theories.

This is why Rap Genius is positioned to be the new literary frontier.  They’ve already changed how hip-hop artists display their work to the world; now it’s time for novelists to join that game.

I can give people an enhanced free preview of my work and give them the chance to decide whether they like it enough to buy the whole novel.  I never have to feel like I’ve tricked anyone into buying.

I can explain plainly what’s fiction and what’s real in my book; more than that, I can show my readers the real science and the real history I’m talking about and let them judge it for themselves.  Before Rap Genius, that would have required no less than an interactive e-book I paid someone else thousands of dollars to help me build.  Now it’s simple JavaScript, and I can crowdsource YouTube videos of the shows that are settings from the book from the actual show I attended before I wrote it - so my readers can experience more of what I experienced and wrote about.

This sets my devislish imagination aflurry – ye gods, what of a world where every book I read gave me direct links to their sources so I could tickle any tangential interest with a simple click?  What if we could know whether those sources were accurately interpreted because the source authors had commented “yay” or “nay”?  What if my readers actually managed to update my imagery with the latest and greatest photos they’d taken themselves? 

I mean, when I failed to initially explain the meaning of the world “furries” in No Church in the Wild, a generous RG editor provided a hilarious photo for me.  Wow.

Despite the many glorious fantasies I had about where this novel could go when I wrote it, I never even imagined asking for a platform to get precisely the kind of involvement and feedback I’d craved, much less get it for free.

I make a lot of bold statements and my book is only a small collection of those, but here’s one more: Rap Genius can change the art of writing books forever.  For me, it already has.