The award-winning novelist Jonathan Franzen has kicked up a Twitter storm, after complaining on BBC Radio 4's Today program about the impact of social networking on writers' lives.
In an interview with Today presenter James Naughtie, Franzen said the literary world is now so obsessed with Twitter that agents refuse even to look at manuscripts by writers who don't tweet.
"What I find particularly alarming from the point of view of American fiction is that [social media] is a coercive development, agents will now tell young writers: 'I won't even look at your manuscript if you don't have 250 followers on Twitter'," said Franzen. "I see people who ought to be spending their time developing their craft, and people who used to be able to make a living as freelance writers, I see them making nothing and coerced into this constant self-promotion."
It's not the first time the author has hit out at modern techno-fuelled culture's effect on literature. In a Guardian article last month, Franzen asked:
What happens to the people who became writers because yakking and tweeting and bragging felt to them like intolerably shallow forms of social engagement? What happens to the people who want to communicate in depth, individual to individual, in the quiet and permanence of the printed word, and who were shaped by their love of writers who wrote when publication still assured some kind of quality control and literary reputations were more than a matter of self-promotional decibel levels?
Franzen's latest attempt to put the case for struggling writers was met with disbelief and derision on Twitter.
Francesca Main, editorial director at Picador – publisher of the Booker prize shortlisted novels Burial Rites, by Hannah Kent, and Harvest, by Jim Crace – tweeted: "Franzen says it's alarming that agents turn away writers for having too few Twitter followers. It's alarming J-Franz believes this nonsense."
She added later: "Most of the authors on Twitter have a book out far more frequently than those who spend loads of time grouching about it."
The Sunday Times columnist and novelist India Knight tweeted: "Lighten up, Franzo."
Franzen's latest book, The Kraus Project, is a study of the works of Viennese satirist Karl Kraus, a relentless critic of dehumanising technology and the popular media's twisting of reality.
Franzen said: "It [technology-driven culture] gnaws away particularly at my soul because I'm a fiction writer. For something like literature it's maybe not such a great model. You see this in any number of ways – very directly you see the demolition of the independent book business and the brick and mortar book business by Amazon. But also this crowd-sourcing model, everything shared, communal, it doesn't really work, not to pay freelance writers; and most important, the whole definition of literature is that people go off by themselves, develop a distinctive voice. It's not a communal enterprise."
by Liz Bury
pic: Jonathan Franzen speaking on BBC Radio 4's Today programme
@Guardian
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