November/December 2022 Issue

Page 40

Unique Characteristics that Authors Share By Taylor Basnight When it comes to today’s technology landscape, what characteristics define a writer? Before the advent of mass production and computerization, authors simply wrote and waited for their thoughts to be printed on paper and bound into a book. As far as we were concerned, an author was someone whose name appeared on the spine of a book that could be removed from a shelf and read. The publication of a physical book was essential to the development of the author’s craft. Books didn’t just appear; they were created by authors. The modern author’s life is rarely as idyllic as the image of a reclusive individual working on a typewriter in a dark attic. Without the need for physical paper, the act of writing may be entirely digitalized, with the resulting text appearing on the reader’s screen. Have traditional books lost their special value in the age of e-Books and other media formats? Can a writer who hasn’t published a book become an author? Can everybody who publishes an e-book be called an author? To what extent may one benefit from self-publishing? In the modern era, anyone can start their own publishing house. In today’s modern era, all it takes to reach millions of Kindle readers is a few hundred words compiled into an eBook and distributed through Amazon. Is that enough to label us as writers, though? There’s just a bad “vibe” about it. Our guts tell us it’s not the case. In that case, what makes a writer special? Authors can take on several identities. They are more likely to be readers than watchers. They’ll probably end up being authors. Very few writers actually begin penning works before they can read. Nonetheless, you can find them. A person from a culture with a long history of orally

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