Unpacking some boxes last week, I found a magazine I bought when I was thirteen years old. It was the June 1989 edition of an American magazine called The Writer, and I read it in bed the other night – chuckling my way through most of it.
I was shocked by how much the writing life has changed in less than twenty years. In most ways, I’m glad it has, because the advent of the internet, and blogs (I wonder what we would have guessed a “blog” was back in ’89) has certainly helped me to write more.
Back in this 1989 edition of The Writer, AIDS was a big topic, and fonts were old and, to today’s eyes, ugly. Calls for submissions gave only snail mail addresses and encouraged writers to telephone an editor with queries; an article to help beginner writers included a list of typing conventions that are laughable today.
Above all, reading this magazine reminded me that the writing business was slower back then. Every query you’d send would wind its way around the world, and hopefully back to you, by snail mail. Writers would have a long time to forget about pieces they’d sent off and they had the excitement of waiting for the postman to bring some good news amongst the daily bills.
There’s something quite appealing about that, but I don’t want to go back. My editors shoot me editorial schedules on Sunday night to publish on Monday, magazines are starting to prefer email submissions. I get paid regularly, a maximum of a few weeks after writing.
When I think about my fiction writing, though, I can’t help but wonder if I would have been better off back in the 80s. Fewer distractions and deadlines, and perhaps I wouldn’t even write non-fiction at all – I might have a regular day job and devote my spare time to writing beautiful fiction. Short of finding one of those elusive time machines, I’m just going to have to switch off my router and pretend that I’m back in the internet-less 80s and get my fingers dirty with my novel.
