The Future of Writing

The idea for “The Future of Writing” goes back a few years, from when Becca (Schuh) read the 2018 version of the NYT’s ‘25 Songs that Tell Us Where Music Is Going’ feature and started thinking about how that concept could be applied to writing. She and I started scheming not long after, but it wasn’t until we found an incisive collaborator in Daisy(Alioto) and Dirt that we felt we could accomplish what we wanted to.

It's not the worst part of being alive right now, but it's up there: a lot of today's thinkers simply are not enough for the moment. Striving for fame has replaced moral standards and solidarity, leading to watery intellectualism. Our public intellectuals have made so many compromises in the race to gain the biggest platform that they are unable to see (or perhaps just admit) that their selfish application of morality is the problem. Everyone is in denial. 

I've often witnessed public intellectuals display a complete lack of awareness while betraying the fact that they don't take their own opinions seriously when confronted with evidence that some people in fact do. An amateurish cognitive dissonance that would be heartbreaking if it wasn't so flagrantly attention-seeking, and also stupid. And the hallmark of our times.

This is being nowpilled. The worst things are exalted; writers who are only smarter than stupid people get attention; the absconding of accountability and responsibility live amidst posturing and grandiosity, obviousness is everywhere.

This is being nowpilled. The worst things are exalted; writers who are only smarter than stupid people get attention; the absconding of accountability and responsibility live amidst posturing and grandiosity, obviousness is everywhere. It's like, we're alive during a "relentlessly shitty period of history" as Kyle Chayka said, and some deeply unrigorous people are actually benefiting from it by being taken seriously. They shouldn't be. Ten, twenty years ago, they wouldn't be. 

The critic Merve Emre, years ago, said that “too many people writing have nothing interesting to say and no interesting way in which to say it.” And so the flattening of culture has hit us hard, and it hits us everywhere. If you think fiction is off the hook, it isn't, and Emre’s point, originally made about the personal essay, feels applicable to contemporary novels. But in fiction, the problem is inverted; fiction is nowpilled, too. Subjectivity rules us all— the subjectivity of people who have bad taste. The writer is no longer trusted, having crossed over into a Dadaist space where readers, and publishers, our gatekeepers are not off the hook, take a look at a work of art and think, "That's not how I would do it." This isn't the future though, it's the present. I can't think of a perspective with more paucity, so distant from what the future could hold.

But when I think of the future of writing I think of all the writers who have agreed to participate in this special collaboration issue of Dirt & THR, but I also think about Dirt and everything it’s doing itself. It’s heartening, almost, to see so many writers I respect andadmire circling, diagnosing, the negativity of the now, but still able to envision something bright and exciting, the work they hope to make and read someday. (It wasn’t hard to look through the Dirt and THR archives for pieces to point to.)

The future of writing is reading, and it always has been. The future of writing must be generous, because when we can trust a writer to tell us the truth, we can follow them anywhere. The future of writing is giving people things to read that aren't boring. So the future of writing is a burden shared by us all. It's like what the poet CP Cavafy asks in “The City”: "How long will my mind endure this slow decay?" Not much longer, if I’m honest. And so the future of writing will be a reactionary backlash against deadness. 

Monika Woods is a writer, literary agent, and founder of Triangle House. She lives in Springs, NY and Brooklyn with her family.