Writing used to be one of the most respected professions, and now it is seen as a cop-out job for lazy people living in their parents’ basements. Why has writing become the butt end of career jokes? 

Aaron Hanlon’s presentation centered around the origins of the novel and Royal Society. The Royal Society was a group of men who valued experimentation and had a distrust of words. In their minds, nothing was true until you could recreate it yourself. Even at a time when factual knowledge was valued, novelist were revered as intellectuals contributing to the growth of society. Books were used to spread knowledge, enforce social norms, and provide a written account of the culture. Novelists not only brought joy to dark times, but they also boosted creativity and encouraged imagination.

Their purpose hasn’t changed in all this time, but popular opinion of the prestige of the career has decreased dramatically. If novelists are still creating materials that benefit society, possibly even in even more ways, why did we degrade the profession? I have a theory.

Primarily, authors that were recognized for excellence were limited to white men. As women’s suffrage gained traction, as did other civil rights movements, the boundaries that separated those dubbed the elite from the rest of the population slowly disintegrated. Writers who wrote before the convergence began to be recognized for their work. Words began flowing more freely on paper. The public began to explore books that were written from diverse authors with differing opinions and backgrounds. While it’s naive to think we all have the equal opportunity to become renown authors, the doors began to open to the best of the best, rather than just the most famous white men getting every recognition.

Time rolled by, and the age of technology took over. The internet gave a new meaning to freedom of speech. Social media connected millions of people around the world. Blogs allowed people to claim authorship and write absolutely anything they wanted. Entire novels could be produced and published electronically. Anyone with a computer and an internet connection could write for the world to see if they so desired. While not everyone has access to a publisher to create mass production of hard copies of their books, the common man had the ability to claim their own kind of authorship.

Because everyone now has the ability to have their work seen from around the world, there is nothing special about publishing. Everyone has to write papers in school, so a firm grasp on the English language is universally expected in the U.S. For this reason, many people view a career as an author to be nothing special, and a job that requires no serious commitments, no deadlines, no formal workplace, and no exceptional skills. While some of these things are true for some authors, it takes exceptional skill to create an entire novel that passes a published and created in mass quantities for the world to read. Since authorship is no longer limited to the most elite (who incidentally played a large part in forming social norms and societal opinions), it has been labeled as an inferior career.