Talking about literature development…

I spoke to third year students on De Montfort University’s Creative Writing Degree Course today, invited by course leader Jonathan Taylor and lecturer Will Buckingham. It was my usual canter through my twenty five years of work in literature development, pausing to consider how writers are used by organisations and the wider world and finishing up with posing a few questions about the migration of writing onto new platforms. By platforms, of course, I meant digital about I was happy to add live real time performance and book based. When you consider text-creativity to have a number of different platforms, none of which is necessarily more important than another, suddenly things become clearer. Just as stories for many people migrated from the oral to the written book platform so they are now moving from the written book to the written e-reader file or the audio file or even back to the oral platform. Nothing is new. There is nothing to worry about, except how writers moneterise their creativity. You cannot pass the hat round the digital crowd.