The 2020s in Writing: Looking Ahead

One hundred years ago, in January, 1920, Woodrow Wilson was President. World War I was two years in the past. The 18th Amendment, prohibiting “intoxicating liquors,” was the law of the land. The 19th Amendment, guaranteeing women the right to vote, lay eight months in the future. Seems like ancient history, but there are people alive today who were alive then.

The world was on the cusp of the new. The quill had given way to the typewriter, which would hold sway until the 1980s, when “word processing” appeared. In the past decade, online publishing, self-publishing, print-on-demand, author websites, podcasts, videos, and online channels have created a vastly different landscape from what went before.

Gazing into the decade ahead, what can we expect?

No one knows for certain, and ten years from now I’ll look back at this column and enjoy a good laugh at my own naivete. But I’ll take a stab anyway.

• Story-wise, expect more genre bending and blending. This is nothing new; writers have been doing it for centuries. But in the latter half of the 20th century, writing became ever more compartmentalized, and many readers became trapped in a “this-is-all-I-read” brain-lock. Writers had mined every tunnel within their preferred genres, but enterprising writers over the last couple of decades dug deeper, finding rich veins we now recognize as new subgenres. And subgenres of subgenres. Many are appalled at this. Not me. It’s a way to slip these surly bonds of earthbound categories.
• Nonfiction, if you want to actually sell your work, will still be king. The ever-increasing demand for online “content” ensures this.
• Regardless of your silly desire to feed your children, publishers will still pay you as little as they can get away with. Or not at all. This has been the constant truth of writing for centuries.
• Speech-to-text software will make even the laziest among us writers. It’s going to hit us like a ton of ancient typewriters anyway, so it behooves us to see if we can tease something of value from it. Let’s hope it at least puts an end to the rampant texting of nonwords. FWIW. LOL.
• Likewise, text-to-speech software will make it a snap to produce audio editions of your work, without hiring voice talent. And the results will make you want to gouge your eardrums with a pencil (if pencils still exist).
• Audiobooks will continue to explode. I know readers that were firmly in the “audiobooks never” column, but are now avid fans. And audiobooks will become ever more sophisticated, even becoming interactive with the listener.
• Graphics. Young people love visuals, and graphic technology is leapfrogging ahead. Look for the graphics of augmented reality to enter the world of writing in a big way, and not just in cover art. Look for it in ebooks, ezines, and graphic novels. The medium of the graphic novel, by the way, will keep growing and opening up jaw-dropping new ways to tell a story.
• Outside of augmented reality, there’s something new afoot called “augmented writing.” Already, software no longer merely corrects your grammar, it now heaps scorn upon your work, questions your parentage, and snoops through your medicine cabinet. You may need to switch it off so that you can actually write something intentionally ungrammatical. Like dialogue. Sentence fragments. Stuff. But that’s nothing. Augmented writing takes the old spell-checker and grammar police software way further. Its artificial intelligence will deduce from the text written those that will have the greatest impact on different individuals, and craft alternate language that will appeal even more to those persons. It’s a marketer’s dream, but may rip the very soul out of original thought and writing.
• Some startup upstart will put a dent in the monolith that is Amazon. She will do this by doing something crazy, like selling really good books for ten pennies. A million sales generates a hundred-thousand dollars.
• Interactive books will be huge. Books in which the reader actually participates in the story. Books with multiple endings, some happy, some not.
• As if to spite so many premature obituaries, books printed on paper will keep selling. And bookstores and libraries will survive.
• Jet packs. We’ve been promised jet packs for years but we’re still not getting them.

All these things will come to pass. Or not. Who knows? But it’s a brave new world out there and we need to be flexible and choosy. However, bet the mortgage on one thing; come what may in literary fashion or technology, and however bad it may be for the writer, real writers will keep writing. We can’t help it.

It’s what we do.