Every day war, hand-to-hand combat, where my risk is erasure. My adversaries are legion, ruthless, sly. Our weapons, words. The prize, your attention.
Never since the invention of the printing press have so many competed so desperately for a resource so scarce.
These days citizens of countries labeled developed have too much of everything except quiet, scarcity, and calm. Supermarket shoppers are importuned by a dozen flavors of a familiar cracker (beware, friends, the anisette Triscuit!). Every producer and politician paws for pence. Every gratuitous expenditure is promoted as an “investment.” A lifetime ago, Auden characterized the predicament of modern man as “paralysis in the void of infinite opportunity” – and the problem’s compounded since.
Few, given the choice, would opt for scarcity over abundance. Too many cracker choices? – what’s not to like! We forget that every choice, termite-like, nibbles our time and calm. We must devote attention to how to spend our attention. Time spent choosing crackers is not time spent on prayer, to draw an extreme contrast.
Nowhere does supply exceed demand so extravagantly as online. Supplicants for attention recall swarming beggars with their heart-melting snag-words and big brown eyes. (I’m thinking Ethiopia, but this shameful circumstance persists in many nations. In Ethiopia, when we visited, the snag-word was “Obama?”) Harshly, I swat away beggars, so my pocket doesn’t get picked. Each dawn, in my inbox, at my invitation, dozens of beseeching voices, and an infinitude panting just outside the gates. Substack, which brings you these paragraphs, hosts seventeen thousand scribblers, each with their pitch, each dreaming of eventual celebrity, all but a few doomed to disappointment. Winning the lottery is a safer bet.
Hyperabundance is good news and bad for both writer and reader.
Writers have incalculably easier, cheaper access to potential readers than ever. Even for anisette Triscuits, one might find takers. Readers can delight that somewhere out there – in the limitless blogosphere – there’s the writer who’ll suit them to a T, though their craving be anisette.
The bad news for writers is the excruciating difficulty of assembling an audience; for readers, the exhaustion and confusion of selecting one’s regulars, and remorse at rejecting also-rans. When I, who ask an absurd amount of my loyalists – six hundred words every day seven days a week! – am met with apologies for imperfect attention – “Well, I don’t read you every day…,” I blush. Lexically, syntactically, I hope intellectually, our time together is invigorating, no stroll in the park. Bless you for even wanting to check in!
The challenge of attracting attention affects how one writes. Composing weekly columns for the local newspaper I edited (circulation fifteen thousand), or monthly magazine columns for a national magazine (circulation half a million), or theater criticism for a closely followed urban weekly (circulation a hundred and fifty thousand), my gait and jaunt varied. The smaller and more reliable my audience, the less need to preen. Online I’m competing with… don’t get me started… a myriad, many with more urgent messages and/or more pungent prose. Unfair competition! And my risk is mortal – annihilation – for if writers aren’t read, do we exist?
Happily, nay, giddily comfy on the shelf of post-career, independent of editors or any need to fund the family, with no “brand” to protect, I can compose with unprecedented license, more candidly, perhaps more musically, than ever. I can, in George Herbert’s golden phrase, “dare to be true.” (Herbert, to protect his truth, elected not to publish during his lifetime.) Here I can write to the edge of my page – and must – for you are smart, discriminating, busy, and besieged by choices.