Writing and Time, Time and the Essay

Abstract

I mid-May, I got to speak to an audience of student writers at DePaul University in Chicago. My youngest daughter Paige graduated from DePaul a couple years ago, so the trip was tinted with nostalgia. Paige now lives in Los Angeles, where she writes for Southern California Public Radio and additionally toils from 5:00 to 8:00 am at a Beverly Hills dog kennel. She can attest that the poop from dogs of B-list movie stars smells the same as the poop from your dogs.1 Still, as I told those students, Paige is making money as a writer, and these days that might strike some people as a little exotic and odd. Ours is largely an age of sound and image, YouTube and Instagram, where writing gets dolloped in tapas-sized scoops, where reading is snacking except for occasionally following the exploits of dragon-tattooed girls or teenaged archers in a society that makes kids kill each other. Sure, there’s lots of writing going on. It’s just that relatively little of it happens in extended chunks drafted and revised over time. We link and comment. We master the bon mot, we excel at snark. For every fledgling essayist or memoirist, there are a thousand status updaters, tweeters, and pinners. Of course, that ratio has probably been true for decades or centuries. But what’s striking about our current times is the seeming cultural desire to begrudge writing in general, to wish it away, to hope it simply pops up when we need it, to have it done quickly, for a quick fix, then on to the next thing. As I mingled with young writers that pleasant night in Lincoln Park, I contrasted their spirit with one just a couple miles south, on Wacker Drive, at the edge of the Chicago loop. A company there is called Narrative Science, and its motto is “We transform data into stories and insight.” Their home page is worth considering at some length: