During
Margaret Atwood’s Negotiating with the
Dead: A Writer on Writing, she discusses how writers appear to have been labelled with a ‘socially acknowledged
role’, one that ‘carries some sort of weight or impressive significance’. This
I think can be agreed upon if we consider the term writer to only be associated
with the more traditional act of writing novels or poetry. That person certainly
appears to carry a level of respect within society, but what about those who
write video games for example, or perhaps adverts that go up on the side of
buses? Games are still criminally treated as a lesser art form, and it seems to
me that those writing adverts are judged as a less important writer compared to
the exalted novelists, poets and playwrights - those who are perhaps described as
artists, as opposed to just purely being a writer.
I don’t think
that any one individual and their attempts at recording the world around them
is intrinsically more worthy than any other. Sure, some documents are more
highly valued within a certain episteme than others. Right now I doubt that
many would argue that the film Inception is
greater than the novel The Great Gatsby
for example. But such a judgment is rooted entirely in the ideologies of the
moment rather than anything universal. Certainly I argue that Fitzgerald the novelist
is no more special than Nolan the scriptwriter, and he is no more worthy than
the graffiti artist who writes on a street wall. There is nothing that separates
any writer out as an artist, as special, except the bias of the time period.
