My Robot Is Pregnant theme song!

Art revolutions are never within one genre. Zeitgeist creeps across streets, so that the music, the television, the the style of cars all have a feel to them that point to a certain time.

We are in the time of reality television. Reality television is no longer a fad. It is how people, audiences, want their stories given to them. The same spirit that drives reality tv is driving the internet. Blogs are reality tv of the written word. The record industry is falling apart because of Myspace and other online community sites allow kids in garages to reach the masses without having their sound created in the studio of rich producers. It is a more “real”. Reality music. Reality is the new Zeigeist.

When I see Seinfeld reruns, I look at the cliched structure of that show. It is basically a play being filmed and called television. There is the same sense of an audience and a stage as theater provides. Actors play roles. Kramer opens a door and there is no sense that the hallway is real, that anyone else lives in that apartment building. We get that its a stage.

Still, Seinfeld was revolutionary. It helped prepare audiences for reality tv. It was a show about nothing – just everyday life. Once audiences accepted a show about everyday life, it was no longer necessary to have a stage. The audience was ready for reality tv.

I’m in a creative writing masters program. Very few people think about writing novels anymore. Even less people think about reading them. Not new ones. There is too much content to watch online. Too many text messages to send. An art revolution is about whole new forms. That’s why blogs and reality tv are a revolutin in art.

Blogs are the reality tv of the written word. Novels rely on a formulaic stage just like old sit-coms. We enter them knowing what to expect. Blogs don’t follow that formula. They are often about nothing. About everyday life. “Why am I reading about scottish terriers?” I might find myself asking, having clicked through ten links and wound up on a woman’s personal site about her six pets.

It’s because I’m not in the mood to sit down and enter the heavy world of a novel, where over the course of a hundred and fifty pages I’m going to be shown indirectly what makes this person tick. I’d rather have someone throw themselves out there, and I can interpret them. “She’s really crazy about her dogs, and way too rich and unconcerned about humans.”

I want a different course selection in my Master’s Program. Writing is now the infrastructure, the famework, a first step of a visual production. In six years the internet will be 90% more video. That much less written word. But my lesson from Los Angeles is that it takes writing to make reality tv. But a different kind of writing.

I pitched a few shows to tv producers down there and they all told me, “You are writing too much.” My writing program needs to prepare me and the students who follow behind me how to write for the new reality, the new market.

The Creative Writing major is dying, it should be called Creative Storytelling. Story telling predates writing, was pushed aside for words, and now story telling is coming back with these confessional faces spilling their guts into tiny camcorders and posting it on YouTube. I enjoy being a writer, but I’m not holding my breath for my first novel. I want to write The Great American Video.