Introducing Lyrica

Picture an island called Lyrica. Its’s got about five million people on it. Nice place. Temperate climate. Beautiful Scenery. Ancient culture. Things have changed, though. In this time its technologically advanced. Really advanced. It’s got a world class education system, a strong economy, a highly educated population, a decent health system, a strong social welfare system, good housing, adequate infrastructure and, despite its violent past, crime is relatively low.

Note: The terms ‘Books’, ‘Written Works’, ‘Writing’ , also references to ‘works of art’ implying mainly works of fiction, all refer to new books written on the Island of Lyrica. It does not refer to online ordered or foreign imports of books to the Island, or to historical books – such as previously published novels and works of fiction.

The primary goal of art on the Island of Lyrica, as it is everywhere else, is to mediate reality through the agency of the artist. This is achieved through the use of stories, whether through poem, play, script or prose. A story is a causally linked sequence of events that describe a possible scenario in time and space. Stories mediate meaning in the world. We tell ourselves and each other stories all the time in everyday speech, in the media, in writing, or in our personal reflections. The use of story enables the reader to engage more deeply in the world. This is because in story the reader’s experience meets the writer’s work. this enables the reader to reflect on their experience through the writers work. Stories can change and have changed an individual’s or whole societies’ grasp of reality. This happened in Lyrica.

1. The Flowering of Art in Lyrica

Lyrica has something of a storied past. It was once not so rich and cultured and cultivated. In fact it was once a vassal state. It was starved, exploited, and left to stagnate. Lyrica, with its deep history, rich mythology, beautiful music, and dark mythic dreamlike poetry, was for many many years under the dominion of another country. It had a dark past, filled with pain, economic and political and artistic oppression wherby there was a serious attempt to eradicate its culture and language. The poverty and destruction to the economy led to massive emigration. Time passed and empires fell. After a decent interval of inertia and time spent growing and struggling with a new identity and new options on the domestic and international front, things took off. The economy recovered bit by bit, and, in the midst of this turmoil and economic growth and urbanization there came a flowering of the arts, a lyrical dawn of original novels, plays, music, painting, sculpture, you name it. Writers were able to shake off the oppression of the past and tell new great stories. Stories, if sufficiently engaging for the reader, and these new stories were, allowed them to suspend their own presuppositions about the world.  It allowed them to see the world anew or differently. On this basis people were able to make new judgements about what it means to live in the world, validating some or all parts of the new story these writers had written based on their own experience. This new art was in some ways transgressive, challenging norms and rules and questioning society’s customs and traditions, as it might be argued, art should. These writers, not living in Lyrica, were free to express their view of the world as it appeared to them. There were no ideological or other constraints on these writers to limit their own capacity to work effectively.

So, despite being far from Lyrica, these artists wrote about home and from afar they helped effect a huge change. Not only did the arts bloom despite problems with stultifying moral and intellectual inertia borne of religious oppression and a large dose of social conformity and class rigidity, but the original language of Lyrica came back into use as some of the most brilliant novels and poems and plays were written integrating English with a blend of the styles and music and structures of the original works so powerful they changed the face of writing and art on Lyrica for many generations to come. But this was in the future. At this time the powerbrokers in Lyrican society, reading the exile’s books and seeing their resdent artists as not in any way either a threat to the status quo nor in any concievable way a source of revenue, largely had a hands off approach to writers and artists.

This all caused the new Lyrican leaders to pause for thought. Lyrica, they mused, was well named and they, the new generation were ambitious to succeed in all aspects. They were better educated, modern and aware, technocratically savvy, richer and more powerful leaders of this rather evolved, small but perfectly formed, Island. They, the leaders, had done rather well, and they knew it. They wanted to capitalize on this artistic reservoir for the future. It was too good to lose. But the problems associated with doing this were not trivial. Finding a way of channeling all this talent and potential was like bottling lighting. How do you do it? The problem was, those aforementioned seminal works of literature that had changed things, were not native. They were written elsewhere, not on Lyrica actually. Some of the top writers and artists stayed, but most left. It was a strange phenomenon. These writers (particularly writers:- there were some artists and musicians too, but mostly it was writers) were quintessentially Lyricans. They seemed to love the land. Loved its people. Yet they couldn’t live there, so some admitted during more vulnerable moments. It was almost as though they needed the distance from that thing they loved in order to gain perspective, though some of those writers seem to deploy more the tough love approach than a kind of unqualified endorsement. Whatever these writer’s intentions were, they certainly made a major splash with what they produced and soon they became part of an indelible image of home, seen as a place of deep spirituality and learning and talent, all of which was true, but in no way depicted the multifaceted character of the Island or of its immensely complex peoples. The problem, they wrote in countless books, poems, plays, songs, and other works of art, was an oppressive atmosphere of societal stagnation formed of a hatred of former oppressors, an over identification with certain forms of religious and social conservatism, a type of xenophobia borne of a kind of idealization of Lyricas mythic and poetic past, and a refusal to see how much the world had changed irrevocably through war and technology and huge cultural shifts. New empires had arisen. Lyrica, despite its immense potential, was still rather inward looking and deeply threatened by how things had changed.

2. Art and Democracy

The decades passed and politics in the Island evolved and changed. Then, successive governments, in concert with artists and technocrats, business advisors, bureaucrats and lawyers, not to mention social media influencers and advertising consultants, got together to make the arts sustainable. In other words the idea was, over an extended period, to make the artists self sufficient. Self sufficency means not dependent on handouts or grants, not based on occasional donors and external patronage. The idea was to shift from a policy of the brightest and the best not really making a living to those with talent making a living. Thus making Artists successful self funding creative people serving a growning market that was hungry for brilliant and interesting Lyrican prose. It was a wise move they figured. Policy dictated that Lyrica have a vibrant arts scene, one that allowed artists of all stripes to work with untrammeled freedom to express the contents of the cultures creative consciousness. It was after all one of the key indicators of a functional democracy unlike in countries where things were less free and therefore Artists lived in fear and had to curb their various creative enthusiasms lest they fall foul of the politically sensitive socially oppressive powers that be.

This was a new order and times had changed. Money was plentiful. People were more educated, more open, less held back by the past and less fearful of the future. A new age, a lucrative age of the arts would flourish, just as the economy had flourished, just as so many things in Lyrica had succeeded: How did they work this? Well, through careful planning, well placed funding, research into how effective their investment had been, and, from this future funding, decisions would be based on solid research and statistical analysis. Despite the bureaucratic and technological oversight, these artists would be free to express themselves as they chose and they would be given a stipend to keep on keeping on bring out those timeless classics in the way they chose. The problem with this otherwise excellent plan was that the innovators of yore left Lyrica because of its perceived conservative and restrictive culture, something that didn’t really change with time, just assumed a more subtle and noncommittal form. In society as the churches lost their grip on society through successive scandals, values changed. Religious and spiritual correctness shifted its focus to a kind of political correctness. The norm became not virtue in the accepted form, but wealth and success became the new currency of social power, that coupled with a kind of newspeak, a correct language that one dare not countermand lest one be cut from the herd and left to die without funding. The problem with this otherwise noble aspration of loving inclusiveness is that art has no sacred zones it cannot touch, no area that it cannot explore, no rule of law it cannot throughly and respectfully explore, no dark and secret place it cannot shine a light upon. Forbidding words and ideas as ‘bad’ can be as dangerous and divisive in a society as free speech absolutism and can lead to societal polarisation and an ‘us and them’ situation. Critics rather than legislation exist for such deconstructive work. Without freedom of expression there can be no growth, no new creativity, and all we are left with is a kind of politically correct propaganda that wordships the past and the status quo at the expense of the art of the future.

3. Lyrica, we have a problem…

Meanwhile over successive governments a huge funding rollout occurred. The media championed a new era of extraordinary funding for a truly liberal arts innovation. The committees formed. Writers of various stripes and disciplines were rightly celebrated. Funding was allocated. The artists got busy. But very quickly problems emerged. Lyrica was small, too small to really have a sustainable artistic economy. The Island was top heavy with talent, which made for too many writers (for instance) and not enough readers. Big talent that emigrated to other economies generally made it big there, allowing for addiction, self destruction, bad luck, and poor choices. But, to keep things rolling in Lyrica, well, this necessitated economic alliances. Therefore the government, through the arts council and affiliates, made deals with major publishing houses to keep them in Lyrica, a perfectly reasonable process, something that ensured a solid return on investments made by taxpayers, businesses, and the reputations of politicians who understandably did not want to see valuable political gains squandered on expensive projects that went nowhere. This very equitable arrangement ensured a functional arts system run by paid professionals, arts graduates and experienced civil servants, all of whom understood the mechanics, the pitfalls, and the people skills necessary to make the Arts departments, publishing houses, and open mic reading circles find new writing worthy of promotion and profit.

4. The Writer’s Career Arc

A new order had been inaugurated. Artists were being recognized for what they were: something essential to the well being of any civilization, a preserver of free speech and an expression of collective consciousness. Being an artist and a writer was finally no longer seen as an embarrassment, or the writer spoken of as a loser or dropout or a drain on the economy by the influencers. Whereas before, Lyrica’s most gifted writers tended to live in exile and poverty and ignominy, some sadly drifting into addictions and self destructive behavior. But no more – now society recognized them. No longer could a young person, for instance, be told to get a real job when they told their families they wanted to follow a literary (for instance) career. With writing there was a definite career path one could follow, courses one could take, a route towards a lucrative career in the literary trade. A new kind of writer appeared, the product of courses and coaching and occasionally qualifications in creative writing. They were were now savvy, had media training, and well developed self advertising social media skill sets. On their media accounts they listed their agent’s names, the books they had published, and the covers of their latest work. This was not unusual. This was the age of surveillance capitalism. Moreover, as Universities had long opened their doors to creative writing programs with affiliations with distinguished Universities and Publishing houses across the Globe, getting onto one of these excellent writing programs was a smart move. Award winning celebrated writers were poached onto these faculties. They were usually sympathetic, vastly experienced, and glad to help promote good art. Having a real life award winning writer on your faculty gave your university courses credibility, as of course, they should. To look at it from another angle, were you a gifted writer looking for a career, young or old, all one had to do is get oneself into one of these programs, do a Bachelor or a Masters (or even a Doctorate if one wanted to teach full time), in creative writing or the Arts. The idea was to distinguish yourself. Be the best. If the Head of Department or some well placed faculty member or visiting artist would see just how good you were, then things would happen. Dreams would be fulfilled. One could land oneself a publishing contract.

5. Competition and Collaboration

Competition, especially in artistic circles, tends to decrease collaboration and increase artistic isolation. It can be a genuine good when it pushes writers to excel. It can also homogenize the work produced and increase fragmentation in any artistic community, as one writer sees what gets another writer a deal so they imitate rather than innovate in order to make a living. As funding for the arts became a game of complex bureaucratic submission policies and careful filling out of endless receipts and progress reports and projected expenses and oversight, those who knew the game well and understood the kinds of work that sold well, they got funding if they needed it. Others who didn’t, well they got bupkis or survived on vapors or a kind of complex ponzi type scheme whereby one book sold funded a second and one found oneself running on fumes. Some even started their own publishing houses, just to get into the game. But it never lasted, not without a profit margin. And if you had no marketing or advertising, making a profit or even breaking even was next to impossible in a small market like Lyrika.

6. The Price of Dissent

There were also the skeptics who cast a cold eye on this new policy. It seemed at first analysis, that this was a really good idea. But it had its down side, especially for those writers on the more innovative edge of writing. They tended to eschew identity politics, viewed left and right wing politics as a distraction to good writing, who didn’t want to be held back by committees or oversight, and who didn’t view profit as the main motive to be creative – not that those who had no issue with a grants system were there to make money either or played any kind of political game.

For instance, those who viewed this new culture of centralized control of the arts via funding with a measure of suspicion, or who asked questions as to why there was such excessive oversight, or the had issues with the effect of such excessive oversight on the quality of the work produced – found themselves deemed unsuitable for further support. After all the work they produced was usually highly experimental and genre defying. Thus it was rarely reviewed, rarely published or publisjed in obscure magazines. The economics and cost benefit analysis that drove the arts funding Maching for Lyrika was built on an investment ideology, and this kind of work, fringe writing with a highly experiemental basis and therefor few readers, simply did not justify funding. this is also the fate of smaller publishing houses, who slowly disappeared from Lyrika. The point being in this instance, whole careers dissolved as this new regime of funding for the arts were rolled out. Those who could play the game got money. Those who couldn’t bring themselves to fill out endless forms and surveys and answer questions as to numbers of people at readings, didn’t. Others simply blanched at the prospect of bureaucrats running their creative lives, didn’t even try and went along the route of self funding or crowd funding, to limited success.

Now this is not good for writing and for art in general. If you have no one out there on the far margins of an art form pushing the envelope like back in the day when the Lyrican exiles wrote those books that pushed forward the boundaries of society and creativity, well, the general result is stagnation. The stagnation happens maybe not today, but inevitably one was going to have the bland leading the blander. Sadly the effect of this halting of progress was quickly seen, as it is seen wherever something other than the pursuit of truth beauty and excellence is replaced in artistic endeavour. Even distinguished, long standing committees, members who were reading deeply and widely for decades or longer, were disbanded in favor of a more functional economically driven ideology in board members who ticked the right boxes and asked no questions. Many resignations from committes and boards of distinguished writers followed all over Lyrica. Some of these made the news, most of whom didn’t. While the new shiny era of universal arts funding was trumpeted in the media as part of the forward march of democracy, many of the very talents that had made the Lyrican reputation in the first place quietly moved out of the game and found themselves work elsewhere. If one couldn’t get funding, then one couldn’t write. So, many innovative artists had to stop long term projects and take jobs just to get by. Working nine or ten hours in a regular job, then coming home to your latest eighty thousand word novel when one has a family and a mortgage is an exhausting and time consuming and ultimately impossible task. These are the ghost writers of the new era of absolute funding of the arts community in Lyrica. In a sense Lyrica had inadvertently lost its vanguard, the very thing that had made this shift in arts funding policy a viable option in the first place.

7. Marketing Issues and Quality Issues

Aside ffor the innovators there were those who prodced more conventiaal works. Allowing for proper funding and sales, the next big issue was actually selling ones work. Only major publishing houses have the budget, the reach, the necessary connections to properly market books in Lyrica. As mentioned, once an artist begins to make their work so that it fits funding requirements, thus making it marketable, this affects the composition, the structure and that nature of the work. However much an artist might want their work to be free of influence, if one is writing (in this instance) for a market then the sale of the work begins to compete with the degree of innovation, creative storytelling, subversion of tropes, character development and conclusion of a story.

So, within Lyrica, literary and artistic problems began to emerge. Writing became homogenized, markedly so. One could tell where you did your MFA, who taught you your writing skills, who your editor was, and so on. It was as if everyone was writing the same nice, charming, funny, safe, well written novel. Of course there were the others: the literary novel filled with knowledge and depth and erudition, the murder mystery, the romance, the historical novel, and so on. And the truth was, they were all the same, just with different writers writing them. Writing had been established as an industry, a job, a cost benefit thing you did to make a regular mortgage payment. This is perfectly fine, if that’s what you want. But it comes at a price. Similarities of style became marked among writers. This was unsurprising. You could go to school and learn the writing trade from the same teachers as everyone else. you could graduate to a university level in fiction or poetry writing, work in a writing retreat, get a job in a publishing house and then, when one had established a good network of professional colleagues, establish oneself as a writer of adventure or detective, or scifi or historical, or rom-coms, or perhaps one of those nostalgic war of independence or exile return type novels that have proven so popular in other markets.

8. The Rise of the Editors

If the writing industry had not produced enough of the sameness, we had the arrival of the editors. Are you, perhaps, unhappy with your novel? Do you have grim grammar and spotty punctuation? Does your spelling make you blush? Well, fear not, Dear Writer! We have the perfect editorial solution to your structural, stylistic, grammatical, and literary issues. Get yourself a top notch editor.

A gifted editor is a godsend for any writer. As competition between writers escalated for limited spaces on the publishing schedule of various publishing houses escalated, the stage had been reached in the Lyrical economy that every manuscript had to be professionally edited. If you didn’t have an editor, then your manuscript was at a huge disadvantage. Previous to the rise of the editors, and with a few exceptions (always the case within any timeline) most manuscripts would have grown and been sustained by the various funded reading groups throughout Lyrica. Many of these groups, following the development of texts up to a certain point, would have access to or recommendations for a given menu of professional editors. The growth within the literary ecosystem of a forest of mid level professional editors and writing doctors and literary mentors, all necessarily well connected with major publishing houses, agents and Universities of various stripes was due, as already suggested, to the increasing competition between writers, which by definition, decreases collaboration, had a seismic effect on the Imaginary Island writing industry. It served the purpose of increasing the average quality of the writing on a structural and plot level, removed and inconsistencies in the story line, made the characters a little more consistent, while also making every novel as inoffensive and safe and fun and mildly compelling and ensured no one made the mortal error of asking any one of those painful existential questions that previous unedited types that wrote before the advent of the New literary Industry Imaginary Island. Who needs deep books? Life was deep and demanding enough. We needed escapism, not re experiencing the absurdities and disappointments of everyday life when we open a book.

9. Demand and Supply

This was always down to money. Demand calls for Supply. If there was a demand for a certain type of writing, then by the law of supply and demand, the market would supply. Competition by definition also increases productivity. So the availability of funding plus the education of budding writers and the expensive but necessary editing of novels also increased by an exponential the number of novels being written, both through MFA courses and being produced through the extending of contracts to established writers via publishing houses of various stripes.

A substantial artistic literary economy now flourished on Lyrica, this time with a big emphasis on economy. There was a demand for good, well written, exciting, intellectually engaging and emotionally affecting, preferably literary books on Imaginary Island. There was an occasional backwards glance on a golden age of greats, but still, the Island was still a place for artists. After all, the literati commented in a rather self congratulatory way, the Island’s readers had pretty much seen it all. For such a tiny Island they had had so many world historical literary geniuses (who had mostly emigrated to work on their books – something glossed over). But others commented, why are there no more of these giants? There were so many books now, so much talent. Also, there was so much money and time and opportunity. Pundits and analysts commented how the internet and e-readers and Google’s scanning of all the books ever written had failed to kill off books. In fact the opposite had happened. Books now flooded the market, books written and published so quickly you couldn’t keep up with them if they were placed side by side and you ran as fast as possible. Any business needed some assurance of a solid return on investment. But this sounds as though things were bad. Not at all. Things were good. Following the well established, well funded route determined by the literary machine built over the decades, very often led to many Writers winning many high literary awards, had their books turned into movies, and they were celebrated thusly in newspapers and sites with heavy connections to those aforementioned publishing houses, universities, and government departments. It was clearly a triumph, right?

But, really, it wasn’t. It was rather like an Andy Warhol Campbell’s soup can. It looked fantastic, but it was a knock-off, which was Warhol’s brilliant and funny point. These novels were safe, clever, well written, and deeply superficial. Depth and artistic merit had devolved into a selling point. Dear Reader, do you need Art? Well we have it for you: Take three poems and a chapter of this new work of literary art and you will be fine. The new Order of Writing was a well oiled machine, driven by an effective ad campaigns, reviewed in the best papers, even won prizes and discussions on arts shows. But they were forgotten when the next batch of new great books came through. It was depressing and worrying. The golden age seemed gone. Commerce and marketability replaced individuality of style. The artist seemingly served the market, not her muse.

10. Business Models

The problem with this business model is exactly what has already been outlined. Its about money, not so much about quality. This vast support network, this huge complex carefully constructed and executed funding system was a business model. It was based on an investment-profit model. You fund authors or Publishing houses or agencies or reading groups and they foster writers and publishers produce books which cause revenue to be generated and profits flow through the economic system. This makes sense, to an extent. It looked great on a spreadsheet and sounded great at a conference as a presentation. The problem, though, was quality, meaning the quality of the material being produced. It began to suffer. The problem with Lyrica’s Literary and Artistic Business model is not the support structure built for writers and artists over the decades. Its the gradual elimination of any alternative model for writers to get into print, and more importantly to get into circulation. If a writer fails to follow the given model they find themselves without any support structure whatever. They drift, generally from one low paying literary gig to another, mostly self publish, and have the physically and spiritually draining task of selling their works from one open mic to the next. As emphasized many times already, many (not all) of these writers are top notch and they, mainly because they have families on the Island, cannot move to another country to actually have a viable career, places where there are many independent publishers who rely little or not at all on state sponsorship, and who are allowed to make their own artistic decisions as to to whom to publish, and whom not to publish. Because few if any are reading them, nobody knows about them, and slowly, over time, the requirements of actually making a living and supporting themselves makes producing anything substantial more of an ideal than a realizable thing. The best metaphor would be problems associated with genetic degradation from cloning. Say you got this vast intricate machine that clones things. Problem is, eventually the clone you produce just isn’t the same quality as the previous generation. One can see where this metaphor is leading, so there’s little need to spell it out. Because of the degree of oversight, both from the industry itself and government, there has developed what might be regarded as the ‘optimal novel’ with just the right ingredients of drama and emotionalism and adventure and characters learning through crises and resolution that has a proven track record of success. As there is considerable investment involved in both commissioning and publishing and advertising a new book there is little encouragement for authors to voyage out into unknown waters of innovation and experimentation. the result is a slow but gradual stagnation – novels that offend no one. Therefore it behooves those of a more experimental mindset to operate outside the accepted borders of a writerly existence. Interestingly there are a considerable number out there, many moving to other countries to work in a less controlled environment – which is not good news for those who set up the arts grant schemes originally to encourage artistic development and innovation in the first place – on the Island. Artistic innovation/experimentation and the profit motive are uneasy bedfellows. They keep each other awake at night.

Conclusion:

Its impossible at this early stage to quantify the overall long term effect this newly minted policy has had on Lyrican art. Its also true to say that the more one commodifies and commercializes artistic output, the more it is created for consumption, the poorer the quality of the work, as it is commissioned not for its inherent artistic worth, but for its potential sale-ability. Innovation on the other hand comes when the artist concerned actually creates the very taste he or she or they, the artist, are creating. The greatest danger lies in Lyrica actually losing its artistic core, its soul, as piece by piece the very thing that made all those wonderful works in the first place gets merchandised piecemeal to the highest bidder.

Overall Lyrica wanted to keep its literary power alive, and to my mind, its not really working – for the very reasons outlined lengthily here. They, the giants of old who started this literary revolution on Lyrica, are long gone. They, the giants, didn’t merely break the rules. Their work was the new rule. They made the game their own. They created the literary taste whereby their new original work might be loved and appreciated and learned from forever. One read these people because they told you about what it means to live in the world. One read them because their work was like a light in the dark. One read their work because if you were a writer you learned from these people how to write. These were the masters and mistresses of the trade, and they had gotten there by blood sweat and tears. One can teach the tricks of the trade. How to write, how to schmooze, how to make friends and charm and work the system. But writing was something more than people skills and a publishing contract and good reviews. Writing is more than efficient word craft, formation of plot, execution of dramatic peaks, resolution, and then the end of the affair. It is a delivery vehicle for meaning, the meaning of how it is we mange to survive and live in the world. its not about money. Its about life: life and death and the afterlife and art and love. Art is life. Those writers had something in their soul. At the risk of sounding rather old fashioned, even romantic, genius really cannot be learned, only fostered, and looking through the biographies of the great and the good, rarely was it fostered within a business model driven arts funding system. Johnathan Franzen, for instance, when he taught writing at Swarthmore used walk in on the first day of class and write down two words that he said was the very essence of good writing. Beauty. Truth. No mention of money. Or publishing. Or good reviews. Or an editor. Or an agent. Franzen has, by the way written a bunch of best sellers and won all the prizes known. This is due not to good marketing, or a cracking social media presence, or the amount of times he did Saturday Night Live. Great works always sell. They have that one thing that assures and eternity of ongoing sales: quality.