Writing Life: Change Creates Job Security for Writers

photo courtesy of jrewillis

If you read enough writing blogs, you will run into plenty of posts bemoaning changes – changes in language, changes in usage, changes in business. As humans we resist change and the attendant need to learn new rules and systems. What worked last week should work forever, or so the thinking goes. Rules drilled into us in grammar school become the standard with which we  measure ourselves and other writers. “Not fair,” we cry when we spot someone verbing nouns. We are smug when your average Joe does not notice a new writer’s tendency to carelessly split her infinitives.

However, as writers, change is our greatest ally. Change makes last year’s words obsolete and keeps our services in high demand.

Change creates job security for writers.

Every time something changes, the world looks to writers to explain the changes and put it in perspective.

• Is this a good change?
• What does it mean?
• How should I respond?

These questions are on many people’s minds and good writers capitalize on these questions by doing the research and supplying the answers.

For example, Facebook released new changes last week. I did a Google search on the phrase “Facebook changes” April 2010 that returned 87,000 results. I suspect there will be at least twice that many before everyone has comprehended and assessed the changes.

Change keeps contemporary writing in demand.

Some would have us believe there is nothing new under the sun and every story has already been told, yet people prefer to read novels and texts written in the current vernacular. Even genres like science fiction, fantasy, and historical fiction, which one would think possess an evergreen quality, seem dated twenty years after publication.

Language evolves. Even classic texts must be updated and rewritten from time to time. I read Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf, because I could not understand the original. They say it is Old English, but oh, it hurts my head to look at those words. I can read the King James Bible as written in the 17th century, but I fear I miss more of the meaning than I glean from the New International Version.

Writers benefit most from change.

We live in a world where the rate of change is accelerating. We never get a break. As soon as we think we have a handle on the latest technology:

• the platforms change the rules;
• new technology is released;
• everything we knew becomes obsolete.

This may unsettle us. This may make us grumpy. We find ourselves speaking a language our parents would not understand. However, being writers we should remember we are best positioned to react to these changes.

We benefit most from the world’s dynamic state and whenever we accept a new phrase or verbal construction we contribute to the evolution of language and create future opportunities for writers to write the relevant novels and texts of tomorrow.