It boggles my mine, and has boggled it for years, that I haven’t bumped into good fiction on the internet. Maybe it’s there and just doesn’t have a spotlight, but as far as I can tell only webcomics have made their way onto the digital screen. And I don’t mean PDFs of books, or a couple short stories in pretentious literary journals that seem to be read only by the people who want to write for them. I mean fiction written specifically for the internet. Which seems strange, given the fact that most people reading are reading on the internet.
As someone who builds websites and also writes stories, I love both the internet and fiction. But I’m not into reading articles for the same reason I don’t like short stories: you can’t get attached. I like dissolving into a story, committing to its characters. Imagine, if you go to a party and you meet a person. You’re asking them questions about their life, with only a little interest. Why? Because your relationship will soon be over. If you this person was the father of your unborn child, you might actually be interested in his major. But he’s not, and he’s already gone. What was his name again?
And that’s how I feel about articles. It’s just a little ice cream taste test of a thing, but only enough to get you hungry. And I’m a hungry reader so I reach for the books.
This question was in my mind when I created my experiment in .fiction, Dead Book City, a book that I built into the architecture of the internet. I wanted to see if I could take advantage of the medium of the internet for the sake of fiction. Because I don’t really like the pretentious bullshit that so often comes out of our dying publishing industry anyway.
With readers (especially young readers) migrating to reading on the internet, the overall quality of fiction being produced was vastly affected. People who felt the book to be threatened became reactionary and a divide arose between Serious Readers and the readers of the internet who are actually looking to be entertained.
Garbage resulted on both ends. Clickbait is the kind of garbage we talk about, but in the book world an even more dangerous kind of garbage arose: academic literary bullshit.
This is the kind of fiction people specifically read in order to convince themselves that they are deep and educated. It uses many adjectives, is usually depressing (because happy is not deep). It’ll often be about two bored middle class people’s failing relationship, or perhaps a liberal wankfest of ethnicness (women in Afghanistan being depressed about being women in Afghanistan, etc.) This kind of stuff is so god-damned deep that it is absolutely painful to read at all.
So off went fiction into the bastion of academia (note: academia is very good at many things but making art is not one of them) and meanwhile fiction stagnated. Most of the authors I personally read are pretty dead (or basically should be) and writers bemoan the imaginary dumbing down of America.
The future of fiction lies on the internet; this is something I firmly believe. Not everything should require thirty seconds of concentration, and not everything should need a dictionary. Book-fiction has abandoned its readers, and the internet in turn abandoned fiction.
What would happen, I wonder, if great writing, was made for the web, and not against it? Imagine what would result.
In the meanwhile I’ll work on making answers to this question, and finding answers from others.
this is real this is fiction 