Words' Worth
On the problems with writing in 2025
The internet and its masters have fucked our ability to read closely and think well. Addiction is a product which practically sells itself. The percentage of people who read books gets smaller every year, as does the percentage of people who understand what they read.1 Paying your bills by writing, despite a few nice websites, is more fantasy than strategy. Writing is in many ways an art in decline.
So what should we, the fools who write books, do about it?
Nothing.
Or, more precisely: if you've been honest, you should do whatever you were already doing.
I'll explain.
When I was 18, I saw what was coming. The internet and its elevation of dumb flashy shit would destroy American publishing companies. I grew up with Napster, but I also grew up through George W. Bush. In 2007, the future of enduring long-form thinking seemed pretty fucking dim. And well before the intellectual disaster of smartphones.
So what did I do as a cursed little teen? What wailed this mad horny Cassandra? I decided to never try to make a living from my writing. (Don't let them tell you ambition must be positive!) If a project or two made a little money: great. But yoking groceries or rent to some purse-stringed weirdo liking my scribbling seemed torturous. Backwards, even. Needing that money meant needing to compromise. I believed then—and believe more strongly now—that artists must maintain their independence of vision. We must nurture our incipient oddities. We need friction, fucked up-edness, frisson. Making your work more palatable to a market in an age of on-demand algorithm-friendly niche-stuffing AI is a waste of everyone's time. As Eric Raymond intones, we must grow deeply strange.2 I had a simple belief in that imperative back in 2007. Now I'm its fucking zealot.
Because of that youthful decision, I have rarely compromised the integrity of my written work. Mostly because I've designed that pitfall out of my life. More practically: if for some reason I thought I "had to" compromise—in order to get my book published, let's say—I just, instead, wouldn't. When the money doesn't matter, when there is no relationship between careerism and art, there is no compelling reason to (beyond an itchy desperation, which I don't judge; live your life). Again: I'm not trying to waste anyone's time. Detaching financial solvency from artistic production is a wise decision, straight up. I recommend it wholeheartedly. Don't grovel for pennies from institutions that merely tolerate you, for whom you are a small part of some yearly mandate. Particularly in an era of pandemics! People have said You could die tomorrow! as an imperative to do what you want right this second, but god damn is it truer than ever.
The obvious caveat: I've been lucky. Though indefinitely legally and often practically disabled, I've been able to find and keep jobs ranging from lucrative (TV) to sustainable (academia). I've had enough free time to make books word by word, to go sentence by sentence, to futz with them as long as I need to, to figure out how to design and distribute them. I've found a few hundred people who really give a shit—the folks who feel like family—and a bigger group who kindly keeps on the light of its curiosity. This might not be your situation. But regardless of audience and means, writers of all stations should remember that we've got it easy relative to other media. A pen and paper, a text editor and a printer, or even just an internet connection: that's all it takes to write whatever it is you need to see. Our medium of expression is a tributary of a body of water in which we've been swimming since birth (speech). Our only limitation, as Blake Butler says, is our own fortitude for fear and loathing.3
So even though the book for many is a neglected thing, a chore, some set dressing, or a source of meaning forbidden by addiction's fractured focus, writers are still in a real sense maximally free.
We have not and will not near the limits of our language. Ever. And thank god for that. There is still plenty to discover. This shit is so new. We, as a species, are still so new! "There is nothing new under the sun", that Ecclesiastical tale tarried in empires for whom an exhausted populace is a useful tool, is bullshit.
If you reject the desire to professionalize your art, and if you embrace the desire to get weird at your leisure, then many of the supposed "problems" of writing in the 21st century vanish.
What problems, then, are left?
Artists often forget to consider scale, particularly when thinking about their needs. That's why for years I've encouraged younger writers to ask themselves a simple question: "What do I need to keep writing?" Then, to break this question down: How big of an audience? What kind of distribution? Do you need a big publisher to pay your rent? Be explicit. If your needs are modest that's good, since getting a lot of attention—at least by legal means—is still really fucking hard. If you know what you need to sustain a habit of making art, making art habitually feels easier. That virtuous circle is real. When you're really cooking, making art feels more like an expression of desire and passion than of obligation and frustration, and the work an at-hand and modal proof of your perfect singularity.
Freedom of speech is often conflated with freedom from consequence. But fear in any form is not fertile ground for good work. Writers should feel free to experiment in public, to take risks, to wrench truth into the minds of one's contemporaries. If doing so puts you on some shit list—be it social or federal—then you'd be smart to run into the arms of homogeneity. But we needn't read pat truths. Get to the real shit! Luckily, a culture that learns how to respect and support artists is a culture that necessarily understands both power and the limited nature of our earthly toil. We only have so much energy and ire; rash posters or writers of survivors' memoirs are half-baked targets.4 Save your anger and organizing for the boring devils with actual capital—the ghouls who fuck your life up with policy and fascism, with fake laws and bad pay. We're not there yet, culturally—but what is a good post if not a fool's declaration of love and hope?5
There is also the problem of distribution. The internet enables maximally direct communication between artists and audiences. Yet all sorts of creeps interject: advertisers, tech bros, conservative twerps with long boring designs. The list goes on. Beyond the god damned websites, big publishers practice standard cowardice, and small publishers are sick as hell yet scant on resources. Writers have not yet organized for themselves publishing projects that pare away the pests. As a former publisher, I recommend to any writer interested in such a project: keep it simple. Let collaborators do their thing, make clear agreements, pass as much money to the artist as possible, keep production and distribution cheap and/or on-demand. The internet is best as a quick conduit and stable bridge. Put writers and readers in similar spaces, respect everyone's time and money, find your freaks, and don't overthink it.
This has been an attempt to lessen the jeremiads, those sad songs sung by folks fearing for their relevance. I don't say any of this with much (or any) judgment; life often feels like smiling as you're worked through a wood chipper. If it's what you need to wake up tomorrow, hit 'em with that dirge. But I hope the writing above has helped you think clearly about what writing is now, without aspirations for phantoms; I hope I've helped you stay alive to its factually innumerable possibilities. God knows the world, the great and terrible world whose evasive meaning we must pilfer for one another, is only getting more damaged. But there will always be a way to tattoo the truth on the skin of it.
I can’t properly evaluate the statistical rigor of any of these claims, but here’s a good rundown.
All of Eric’s work is good, but this essay gets to the quick.
From Blake’s exquisite series on forming a life as a writer in relation to collaborators.
A recent example of dumb cudgel-brained behavior: some of the uncharitable writing about the memoir Molly by Blake Butler. It takes very little time and attention to confirm the decency, love, and respect inherent in that book. But social media economies encourage misguided, petty, reductive moralizing. Our ground for clear thinking and honest sight is a bog of dogshit, and prosecution is an easy substitute for judgment.
Dril is one of the greatest American writers and I will entertain no objections to the truth of this claim. In the words of the great David Lynch, who passed away today: Fix your heart or die.