Coffee on the Deck - by Moira Allen
October 2009: Permanence vs. Accessibility (and My New Website)
As I was web-surfing the other day, I started thinking about the impermanence of the Internet. A great site can be here today, packed with loads of information or delightful stories -- but gone without a trace tomorrow. And once it's gone, it's gone -- though there are sites that "archive" the Web, the average reader is never going to find that information again. For that very reason, when my husband does research online, he always copies and saves articles he references, so that he can support the reference later even if the site has disappeared.
It's humbling to think that while today, Writing-World.com is visited by over 100,000 readers every month, one day it, too, will vanish into the ether, without a trace. It is, after all, nothing more than a nicely arranged collection of pixels and electrons (or something like that). It has no fixed existence; it is not "permanent." It may have more than 600 articles, but there is nothing you, the reader, can hold in your hand (except what you print yourself).
To be permanent, something must be physical. That, I think, is why we writers (and readers) are still drawn to "real" books -- by which I mean a construct of paper and ink that can be held in the hand. It's not just that many of us still prefer to curl up on the sofa, or a deck chair, or by the fire, or even in the pool, with a "real" book. It's partly the knowledge that even when we put that book down, it lives on. It will endure. It can be handed on, perhaps to a friend or relative, perhaps via a used book store, or even a library sale. (In February I talked about the roads taken by some of the books I've read in "Why We Do What We Do," at http://www.writing-world.com/coffee/coffee08.shtml.)
We also know that if the lights go out, we won't be reading the latest article on Writing-World.com. We'll be reading whatever we can read by candle-light (OK, maybe some of you will be reading your Kindles by battery light...). After "the great Seattle blizzard" of 1996 [yes, 1996, not 2008], I invested in an Aladdin kerosene lamp, which puts out a light equivalent to a 60-watt bulb -- more than enough to read a "real" book by. (I consider it something of a lucky charm; since I bought it, I've never needed it.) And if the day should come when the lights go out all over the world, once again, it will be paper and ink that endure, not websites. That, I think, is the reason so many of us want to see our words in ink, on paper -- knowing that copies of those words will last even after we are gone, that paper survives people.
The reality of that sort of "permanence" came home to me as I began to indulge in a new addiction I discovered in England: Victorian magazines. I love holding in my hand a book or magazine that was published, read and enjoyed more than 100 years ago. Had these been e-zines, they'd have vanished, never to be recovered. And yet... There's a flip side to "permanence," and that's "accessibility."
As I began to enjoy these long-lost fragments of history, I began to think about how other readers might enjoy them as well. But unlike a paperback mystery that might be found in nearly every used book store in the country, Victorian magazines are relatively scarce (particularly on this side of the pond). Nor are they typically in big demand -- if I were to resell mine to a dealer, chances are they'd sit on the shelf for another decade or more before someone else came along to read them. (Nor is that so different from what we magazine writers experience today: While the articles I've written for magazines may still "survive" in a nice, permanent physical form in a publisher's warehouse, those articles are as "lost" to the world as a dead website.)
And so, to bring some of these delightful articles and stories back to the "light," to make them accessible to today's readers, I've launched a website to make available selected articles from my collection of Victorian magazines. Already, more than 3300 visitors have explored the collection -- probably about 3299 more than would ever have encountered these articles if they were available only in "physical" form. While it is the physical "permanence" of these volumes that has made it possible for them to survive to this day, it is the ephemeral presence of the Internet that makes it possible for thousands of readers to enjoy them once again. And so we come full circle: Words endure when captured in a permanent, physical form -- but sometimes it requires an impermanent, non-physical form to enable those words to spread and find an audience once more.
Perhaps this is the ultimate answer to the apparently endless debate over ink vs. electrons, and the possibly silly question, "which will win?" Perhaps, in fact, it's not a competition and never was. Perhaps, instead, it is a remarkable partnership. The printed page gives our words endurance; the electronic page gives them wings. Why would we want one to triumph over the other, when, as authors, we gain so much from having both?
Oh, yeah, about that website...
My new website is called "Mostly-Victorian.com," because its content will be mostly from the Victorian period (but some publications will predate that period and some come from the Edwardian period). It's a wonderful place to research "what life was like" during the Victorian period directly from the publications of that period itself -- covering social issues, women's issues, fashion, crafts, food, home decor, Victorian life, Victorian London, world travel and cultures, history, royalty, and much more. There are already more than 500 articles on the site, and I plan to add about 100 more per month.
But it's not just a place for "research." It's a place for fun. While many of the articles I've posted are excellent research tools, others are just plain fun to read -- and I'm also posting a selection of classic Victorian stories from magazines like The Strand. These aren't transcriptions; all the articles are posted exactly "as is," in PDF format, as scanned directly from the magazines.
To get things started, I've also transcribed and posted (here) two articles from 1881 that offer "advice to writers" that could, for the most part, have been written today. After 120 years, we're still trying to tell writers the same things...
Literary Work for Girls - http://www.writing-world.com/fiction/GOP1.shtml
How to Write a Story - http://www.writing-world.com/fiction/GOP2.shtml
For the rest, please stop on by at http://www.mostly-victorian.com and take a look around!
Moira Allen, editor of Writing-World.com, has published more than 350 articles and columns and eight books, including How to Write for Magazines, Starting Your Career as a Freelance Writer, The Writer's Guide to Queries, Pitches and Proposals (of which a completely updated edition is forthcoming in spring 2010), and her most recent book, Writing to Win: The Colossal Guide to Writing Contests. Allen has served as columnist and contributing editor for The Writer and has written for Writer's Digest, Byline, and various other writing publications. In addition to Writing-World.com, Allen hosts TimeTravel-Britain.com (a site dedicated to historic travel destinations in Britain); Mostly-Victorian.com (a growing archive of articles and excerpts from Victorian books and magazines); The Pet Loss Support Page; and AllenImages.net (showcasing her photography). She can be contacted at editors "at" writing-world.com.
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