What seems to matter more than anything else is in writing today is what a writer is doing in a functional sense.

It's as though once the perimeter of a writer's project is sketched out, once you get the general idea of what they're trying to do that is distinct, almost anybody can be doing the writing. I used to believe that a high degree of skill distinguished one writer from another, and especially on the order of the sentence. But this seems no longer true. In a word-processed culture, and for a generation that takes speech as the model of language and writing, there is no sense in speaking of the art of the sentence.

Put otherwise, nobody is crafting their prose anymore. At least, not in the old sense. In the past, when writing was on the whole more homogeneous, and the categories more narrowly defined and fewer in number, distinctness was found within sentences. What difference is there between five literary authors of the print era aside from their voice, as discerned through their approach to sentences? Today, among younger writers, something different is happening. Nobody will read younger writers for the reasons they read older writers. So younger writers, or all writers of the multi-media paradigm, become readable by virtue of the overall aims of their project as writers.

So, for example, the difference between writers like Coupland and Wallace and other writers seems much vaster than the difference between Atwood, Updike, and Monroe. All three are essentially carrying on a stereotypical, clichéd concept of the author as 'witness', 'chronicler,' 'storyteller,' etc. Atwood is Beckett, Sartre, and all her heroes. Updike is five or six American predecessors, with little alteration. All are essentially the same figure. The classical, print-era literary author. But Coupland appeals on a completely different level. The emphasis is not on the writing, but where writing is being taken, what is being done with writing per se.

But the idea here is best grasped in a non-literary sense, and not by accident. As we dispense with the idea of the literary, of the fine writer, of crafted prose, books become conduits, spaces, vehicles for a presentation that takes on a mainly functional role. The writer is now anybody. Whether they're writing non-fiction or fiction, the act of writing itself doesn't carry the same cachet of being a separate and distinct thing. The romance of the writer as figure is gone. (Yet many writers, like Atwood, still bathe themselves in its glow. Half of Atwood's writing is about characters with writerly sensibilities, the other half is spent telling you how glorious it is to have become a 'Writer.' Her central myth.)

A writer holds up the act of putting words to paper as the supreme activity, and their role in doing so as absolutely of mythic or transcendent importance. The most important thing for a writer, in the old age of the writerly figure, is that they're writing.

Today, having lost the sense of writing and language framed by print, we don't valourize or privilege writing. Because of the word processor and casual place of writing in everyone's life, writing is no longer a mystical, artistic practice. Those who conceive of it in some romantic/artistic sense seem regressive, clinging to the memory of a lost past. The language in its current state simply doesn't conduce to a sense of writing as artistic. (This is not the same thing as saying there is no longer artistry in writing.)

The writer is therefore no longer seen artistically (i.e., as an artistic genius) but as clever, useful, effective, humourous, incisive, etc., in relation to a given purpose. To a far greater extent than ever before, our reading and writing habits are determined in terms of fulfilling or attending to specific purposes. A given writer decides he will attend to this or that purpose, or tackle a complex set of purposes aimed at a specific market, or complex set of markets, and the writing is crafted to accommodate those purposes. The writing then becomes a vehicle for satisfying those purposes, and is, as result, no longer the focus.

A prediction: once the current generation of literary writers, Atwoods, etc., are gone, there will be no writers who do not fulfill a specific purpose (that is, one other than being the cliché, print-era 'chronicler of their time' in ornately sculpted prose). There may still be ornately sculpted prose, but it won't share the same pretence to being that old kind of writing. And authors who try to be straight-ahead literary writers will increasingly resemble Ann Marie McDonald. A good yarn, but essentially typing. The inescapable fact is that nobody under 40 conceives of writing in a way that would support the old approach. To reach an audience at all, to be published and marketed, the work will have to be deliberately shaped in terms of the purpose addressed, the marketing angle to be taken.

I get the sense sometimes reading a writer who is doing something I like that aside from the novelty of what they're doing, the writing is just talk, no matter how well crafted. With newer writing, I find myself spending more time thinking about how clever, how topical, how useful the purposes are (what the text/writer is trying to accomplish) and less time thinking about how these purposes or effects are a direct product of the writing itself.

New writing is anything that couldn't have been done in the earlier paradigm.

But unlike the avant-garde, the new writer doesn't think up something up that makes something possible that hadn't been before. The writer recognizes new possibilities that have come into existence as a result of the prevailing media conditions, and exploits them in writing. As an almost unspoken rule, virtually all new writing needs to seize upon something that wasn't previously possible.

In contrast to this, in the old print-era paradigm, the writer's aim was to become canonical. Writing had to be original in one sense, but in a more fundamental sense, it had to accomplish a kind of repetition of traditional greatness. The aim was to become the latest installment in a historical lineage of great authors. To internalize the tradition, and recast it in one's own way. Hence the literary author's stress on immersion in the literary past and a broad range of allusions to former great works.

It may be that literary writing is now just one of many genres of writing. Crime, Romance, Mystery, Self-help, etc. Perhaps literary writing can never be reduced to a mere genre, but this is the way the market certainly treats self-consciously literary writing. The literary reader is now as narrow and distinct a field of readers as that of any other genre.

When people choose to read Atwood, Updike, etc., they do so for two reasons. They want to be told a good story, and they want to read writing of a "literary" kind. That is to say, writing that dwells upon its quality as written (or writerly) and not spoken language. They want a quirky, unique sensibility or perspective for its own sake.

Kundera was the first writer to prove this theory. His work was the first to present literature explicitly as a genre in itself. He did this in a number of ways, but significantly by conspicuously theorizing the literary novel; dumbing down his writing to suit it for the broadest possible literary audience; and turning the field of literary allusions into a comic book caricature of literary history, so as to make it more accessible and readily consumable.

It would seem that one of the reasons no writer under 40 can break into the class of 'literary writing' -- without also serving some other significant purpose aside from purely literary writing -- is that we aren't able to reproduce that kind of writing effectively. Instead, we get a number of writers who are partially literary but also Indian, Japanese, Gay, Black, etc. These writers break into the genre because, once again, new writing is anything that couldn't have been done before, in the print era.

A literary writer must also be at least one other significant thing aside from a pure literary stylist because there are enough pure stylists as it is.

With few exceptions, writers are no longer both fiction writers and serious, useful non-fiction writers. Since all writers are now no longer craft or artistic figures, but functional ones, a writer's options boil down to which of their purposes can be mixed and matched, and which new ones are compatible and complimentary...