The Droves of 20-Something Writers

The crisis Franzen described 15 years ago this month would seem doubly urgent for today’s young writers, yet twentysomethings are entering the literary arena in droves. The question’s not “Why Bother?” but “What gives?”

From a piece in the Millions...

Still, the existential crisis Franzen describes in his essay would seem to be doubly urgent for today’s twentysomethings, the generation of so-called Millennials born after 1982. When “Perchance to Dream” was published, the Internet browser was just two years old. Few people used email, wireless was still an old-fashioned British word for radio, and you couldn’t download a movie to your computer, much less to a smart phone or iPad. Even TV was simpler. If you wanted to watch a show, you had to sit down in front of your set at the prescribed time and watch it. (Television, like much of mass culture in the pre-Internet era, was an authoritarian regime: you did what you were told, and maybe you’d get in a chuckle or two between the endless parade of ads.) In other words, novelists of Franzen’s generation stood at least a fighting chance of sinking their pitons into the monolith.

Today’s pop culture is a far trickier edifice. Not only are the distractions of movies, songs, YouTube videos and web memes ubiquitous and easily accessible; they now proliferate from the bottom up. In April 2007, to take one well-known example, a 16-year-old from Batesville, Mississippi named DeAndre Way posted a low-budget YouTube video of himself and some of his friends in an empty swimming pool demonstrating dance moves to his song “Crank That.” Within weeks, Way, under his stage name Soulja Boy, had signed a record contract, and by September the song had broken into the top 10 of the Billboard Hot 100. How is an aspiring novelist intent on telling a quiet tale of romantic love supposed to compete with a home-grown rap tune whose signature line runs: “Superman that ho”? How does a young poet stand a chance against the AutoTuned novelty of a Rebecca Black?

But look closely and you’ll see that young writers are entering the arena in droves. The web is teeming these days with literary blogs and ’zines written by and for people under 30: The Rejectionist, HTMLGiant, and Full-Stop to name just a few. Two of the best novels of this year, Téa Obreht’s The Tiger’s Wife and Karen Russell’s Swamplandia, are by women in their twenties. According to blogger Seth Abramson, who tracks creative writing program rankings at The Suburban Ecstasies, the twenty most selective MFA programs are now harder to get into than Harvard Medical School. And you have to go down to No. 49 on the selectivity list – Georgia College & State University – before you find an MFA program that accepts a higher percentage of its applicants than Harvard Law. Maybe in 2011, the pertinent question is not “Why bother?” but “What gives?”