I was on a guided trip to New York City over 20 years ago and we ended up in one of those horse-drawn carriages in Central Park. Our host, the nice lady who was showing us around town, told the Irish carriage driver that I was a writer. He turned around and looked me up and down.

“I’d like to write a book someday,” he said in his heavy Irish accent.

“What would your book be about?” I asked.

“About my life!” He said.

“Well, that’s good,” I said. “But there are a lot of lives, and most of them are only interesting to friends and family, so they can be hard to sell to strangers. Maybe yours will be remarkable, but I hope you do write it.”

I wonder if he ever wrote about his life. I think I might like to read it.

Any writer who has had any notable success has run into the scenario (dozens or even hundreds of times) where someone will say – “I have an idea for a book. I’ll tell you the story, you write it, and we’ll split the profits.” I do laugh out loud every time someone says that to me. That idea highlights how little people know about the writing business. Any good writer has a million more great ideas that they’ll never get around to writing. They have a couple of dozen they are working on, and they dismiss better ideas every day than most people will ever have. And that doesn’t even get to the root of the problem. Writing itself is 99% of the work. Having a good idea is the simple part. The craft is making an idea readable, and even then – probably no one will ever read it. There is a whole industry designed around the monumental task of getting rid of writing. The publishing industry’s main function is to build a rampart (complete with shredding machines and delete buttons) to block and eliminate almost everything that is ever written. From slush piles to agent assistants, there exists an army of people and systems designed to firewall the decision makers and keep them from being buried in a tsunami of writing. Most of the people deciding what tiny percentage of stuff will get through to the decision-makers are very young, twenty-something, interns who are given a very strict set of guidelines describing what the decision-maker is looking for.

And there are these facts:

1. Most writing is bad. Almost all of it.

2. Most good writing is boilerplate and adequate, but forgettable and without any unique voice. Now that there is AI, many of these adequate writers will let Skynet write their books for them… or they’ll have to compete with AI because average readers will not be able to tell the difference.

3. Most people do not read anymore, and when they do read, they are not looking for anything beyond the top 10 books at the top of the bestseller lists – lists that are the product of the system I described above.

And the publishing industry is a complete clown show today. Anyone can self-publish, and that’s a fantastic thing – but the old-world idea that you can just sit down and write an interesting story, and someone out there will want to pay to read it… well, that’s a fantasy. Indie publishing is wonderful. I’m glad that anyone with a keyboard and some spare time can produce a book they can hold in their hands. That’s the good news! The bad news is that anyone with a keyboard and some spare time can actually produce a book they can hold in their hands. This means that the tsunami of bad writing goes straight to the e-bookshelves – millions of books a day. Most self-published books (some of which are indistinguishable from mainstream published books) will never sell more than a few dozen copies. Mostly to friends and families of the author.

I’m not complaining. I’ve been very successful. There is a point here, and the point is that we’re going through one of those watershed moments in time where everything is changing, and we don’t know yet what the other side will look like. The forces deciding what we will be reading (and how we will do it) are as important to our future as the people you choose to rule your country.

I have ghostwritten books, and I have been paid to write books by people with great stories to tell. I wrote a book for a Cambodian friend that is one of the best things I’ve ever written. It’s the true story of how his family escaped the Killing Fields and genocide in Cambodia in the 1970s. This book is perfect for today because what was happening in Cambodia is exactly what is happening in the world today. It’s a history lesson AND could be ripped from today’s headlines.

If I could get a majority of the people in this country to read that book, they would see (some for the first time) what is happening to them.

I told my friend when he asked me to write the book with him, “Listen. I’ll write it. I think it should be written. And it’ll be great… but no one will read it. No one wants to read a book about genocide. They want self-help and cozy murder mysteries. How-To-Be-Awesome gurus and single, interesting murders, but not genocide. Not true stories of a family trying to escape through the jungle while communists are murdering everyone. The book is called “God in The Storm,” if you’re interested – but you’re probably not.

There is no easy answer. We all grew up in a different world. Forty to fifty years ago, a book was a window. It was a time machine. It was a mind-expanding trip through the possible.

Writing is the most important pillar of civilization. Without it, civilization would not exist. We exited what was called the “Dark Ages” because of the printing press. Everyone talks about how important Education is, but Education primarily exists to teach people to read – that’s its most critically important function, because (theoretically) if people can read, then they can learn anything.

There was a brief moment in time during the development of the computer/online age when the individual, personal blog became a thing. And it was kind of wonderful, because for a while you could tune in to people and read what they think, and they didn’t need to be Hemingway and didn’t need an agent and a bevy of editors to show you their inner world. You could find a few people whose thoughts were worthy of your time, and I think that was a cool time. Now, we’re buried in memes and plagiarism and AI-produced drivel, and most people read on a three-inch screen and type shorthand with their thumbs. What will become of us?

I hope that one gift of value I gave my children was that they need to read. I hope they will read all of their lives. I hope they never stop reading, and I hope they pass the love of reading down to their own children and grandchildren forever.

Thank YOU for reading.

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Michael Bunker is a local columnist for BrownwoodNews.com whose columns appear on Wednesdays and Sundays on the website.