Finding the will to write in the post-literate, post-hope, post-truth era

Are you dictating your future, or is someone else doing it for you?

This is sounding familiar…

In the last fortnight, I’ve heard various thinkers telling us in no uncertain terms that we are absolutely down the rabbit hole, in a post-truth, post-hope, and post-literate era.

James Marriott

’s viral piece, entitled ‘The dawn of the post-literate society’ has been sent to me multiple times, and it paints a grim picture of a future where books and deep literature are devalued or forgotten, replaced by endless screen time and scary silos. However, he begins by recounting the dawn of the literate society, and it sounds somewhat familiar:

Reading began to be described as a “fever”, an “epidemic”, a “craze”, a “madness”. As the historian Tim Blanning writes, “conservatives were appalled and progressives were delighted, that it was a habit that knew no social boundaries.”

This transformation is sometimes known as the “reading revolution”. It was an unprecedented democratisation of information; the greatest transfer of knowledge into the hands of ordinary men and women in history.

Do you recognise this? Aren’t we in another such moment of ‘epidemic’ and ‘madness’? How strange to think reading was once regarded in some of the same ways as we view the internet and AI now.

Now, everyone can be a creator

While the reading revolution may have been seen as ‘unprecedented democratisation of information’, it hasn’t proved to be so. Many people do not have equal access to books or the necessary education to read them. So could it be that the open access to the internet and AI may provide possibilities of a truer democratic landscape? The tech bros would like us to think so – but their assertions can’t be taken too seriously when their fake news and deference to power is also out of control.

And yet, despite that, everyone can be a creator now. Everyone can write and publish their book. But if creative democracy has arrived, it’s beset by problems of both quality and quantity. We’ve got no idea how to stand out in a market where everyone can join in, and we’re also being tested to find out just how much slop and artifice we’re prepared to put up with.

Meanwhile, the existence of 24/7 screen entertainment is undeniably killing engagement with books. As Marriott continues:

The average person now spends seven hours a day staring at a screen. For Gen Z the figure is nine hours. A recent article in The Times found that on average modern students are destined to spend 25 years of their waking lives scrolling on screens.

If the reading revolution represented the greatest transfer of knowledge to ordinary men and women in history, the screen revolution represents the greatest theft of knowledge from ordinary people in history.

I’m not happy about this, of course, but I’m curious too. This planet-altering, incredible tech has just been born, signalling a giant move forward – or sideways or backwards – for our species, so surely it’s predictable that we’re all acting like newborns in its thrall, our brains grasping at things we don’t yet fully understand, filled with anxious possibilities and outright terror alongside the excitement of discovery and potential. That’s a lot of high emotion to cope with simultaneously. So of course life feels like a hot mess right now.

But does it really mean that books and quality writing has to die? Because nothing about this can stop us deciding, as individuals, what we value enough to take with us into this unknown new world.

Marriott continues:

The tradition of learning is like a precious golden thread of knowledge running through human history linking reader to reader through time. It last snapped during the collapse of the Western Roman Empire as the barbarian tides beat against the frontier, cities shrank and libraries burned or decayed.

As the world of Rome’s educated elite fell apart, many writers and works of literature passed out of human memory — either to be lost forever or to be rediscovered hundreds of years later in the Renaissance.

Are we being led into a new Dark Age?

If we are being led into a new Dark Age, which texts are important enough for you to carry with you, to share in moments of light? If it’s Dickens and Austen, that’s great – but please let’s choose whatever speaks to us as individuals as much as what’s ascribed to us as culturally important. Personally, I just can’t get along with Dickens, and I also live with a scientist who barely reads anything fictional (although he has read the entire Sara Foster catalogue multiple times, because he’s awesome) and a dyslexic thinker who much prefers visual literacy to heavy text. Neither of them will ever be drawn towards any classics, but both are highly intelligent and capable of critical thinking and empathy as much as I am. They will choose very different texts as their keepsakes.

We cannot give up

I believe that authors really need to band together and keep each other going right now, which is why I take time away from working on my books to write these posts. I don’t write to you from a place of total failure or from the heights of roaring success, but from the messy, convoluted, confusing space in between, where pretty much all of us find ourselves. I passionately believe that new stories and new books can add value to our world, but I also know that I want to dig deeper and push back against those who encourage us to do the hot-take, to get the books out faster, to take the shortcut, to please the crowd. I believe we all write best when we are brave.

Nor do I want to pay too much attention to doomsayers. We cannot give up. As a collective we might write across many genres, but we share a vital commonality: that we have been so deeply moved by stories to want to create our own. We’ve decided to devote great parts of our lives to working around a business model that is clearly in many ways elitist and outdated – in the hope that we can override this merely to attach our story to a reader’s heart, thereby forging deep connections, just as humans have been doing since they painted on walls, way further back than the printing press revolution.

Books may be threatened, reading habits may be changing, but the power of stories isn’t going anywhere. So I ask you: are we going to keep daring to write more – to find new and original ways of getting our work into readers’ hands, and to be more vocal about why we believe books are so important? Or are we going to sit back and watch everyone binge on computer-generated waffle that serves only get-rich-quick schemes? The truly post-literate world begins only if the current generation of authors stops believing in what they’re doing, not because the population doesn’t read Dickens and Austen as much any more. Of course we need to know about the great writers of history, but we can’t cling too hard to the past as our only guiding light, when the way forward is still unwritten – and we are the ones who are here, right now, digging in and doing the work.

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PS After Jane Goodall passed away recently, I paused in the days that followed to think about all the valuable lessons I’ve learned from her work over the years. I also watched her incredible hour-long, pre-recorded, only-to-be-released-after-death interview that’s just come out on Netflix, called Famous Last Words. Please, please spare an hour and watch it. She is a true legend, and her message – which I won’t quote here as I’d rather you watched her speaking – is a vital call to action for all of us.