Ryan Turner

Yesterday I printed out the entire double-spaced manuscript to pass off to my final reader before officially passing it along. It’s sitting on the table in my office, and I catch myself stopping in the hallway sometimes just to admire its heft. I notice that a central part of my writing has to do with the physical. I like to use inanimate objects as focal points or as a means of conveying a hint of the people to which they belong. As a result I notice how some of my characters are almost anachronistic in the way their lives revolve around the construction or reparation (the in-depth knowledge) of objects in an age when our relationship with such things is so rapidly changing. A quotation from the book I’ve been writing can serve as an example: “He thought of email. There was nothing sensual about email. You couldn’t rip it or fold it or burn it. You couldn’t hold it up to the sun to see through the envelope. You couldn’t smell it. The medium itself held no memory.” Writers are often asked the question, how will technology shape the future of literature? And when this question is posed, what is intended is a discussion of medium, but I can’t help but think of content. If a book is set in the present, how much less is at the author’s disposal? Instead of the scratch of the record, the fold of the paper, the smell of another person, will we not continue to move along the path of the implosion of the physical world into a singularity (the tap of a finger on a smart phone, for example)? This doesn’t need to be read as a devolution. But it will mark a steep decline in the very things – literally - which the author can use to create his or her imaginative world. In the short term, I don’t see the medium affecting the way writers write. It will perhaps be the quickly-changing landscape of the content of the world that will force this writer at least to rethink the way inside his characters (either that or write perpetually of the past).