Writing for the non-reader

Writing for the non-reader
Neelmani J Bhatia

The onslaught of mass communication in the modern world has given both print and electronic media a leading role in turning the wide world into a global village. In fact, today, all the human race has become one people. That, in turn, immensely widens the audience a writer can address these days.

One can write for money, vanity, fame, indulgence of a creative impulse or relief from pent-up emotions. Writing frequently reveals to us what we know and feel or what our real thoughts and emotions are. In Philip Roth's novella Good Bye Columbus, Neil King Man confesses that ``actually we did not have the feelings we thought we had, until we spoke them...to phrase them was to invent them and own them''.

Writings have passed through many vicissitudes but the electronic media make typical demands on a writer. The perestroika of these media and their ethos are likely to revolutionise the ways of writing. But they will never sound the death-knell for books as is feared by many. Books, like the phoenix, will re-emerge, even if it's in the form of cassettes or compact discs.

Literature has just turned a full circle from oral (folk tales) to aural (television and radio). Appropriate in this context may be these lines from Manik Bandyopadhyay's Pragitihasik: ``The moon in the sky has a past, the earth a history but the darkness that saw the birth of...and was to see the origins of a new life inside Panchi's body had no past, no history. It is primeval.''

The electronic media have come as a blessing to the visually or aurally impaired people. Good literature can be reached to them without their depending on Braille or readers.

Writing for these media is very different from writing for the print media. The new mass media have developed new languages; their grammar is still developing, their full potential as yet unknown. Of the new languages, TV comes closest to drama. It combines music, art, language and gesture, rhetoric as well as colour.

Those who write for the ears and eyes must be particularly sensitive to the sound of the spoken lang-uage. What T.S. Eliot called ``the auditory imaginati-on'' is to be learnt and developed by practice over the years. The writer must judge written words, if meant for the electronic media, by how they sound, for what may sound all right to the ear may not necessarily look right to the eye on the printed page. The writer must understand the technicalities of the particular media for which he is writing, though the objective of both print and electronic media is to ent-ertain, instruct, inform and educate.

The writer, whatever the me-dium, has to operate within the parameters of culture. There has to be an ethical code for the literary profession also. The individual's right to privacy has to be respected but at the same time evil has to be exposed. Truth must prevail but its expression should eschew malice towards others.

That places a special responsibility on the scriptwriter who must ensure that socially and ethically undesirable contents are avoided in the script. Studies have revealed that excessive violence on screen has the potential to promote anti-social behaviour in this age of all-round decadence.

TV entertainment has been called ``an anaesthetising and addictive narcotic'' and it might be very difficult to wean away the masses from it and re-inculcate the reading habit. It is for the writer of the print media to keep up with the younger media's pace of excitement, entertainment and education. It is for him or her to cater to the demands generated by the electronic media, as it is not possible for the latter to adapt themselves to the print media. The war between the two sets of media has to stop. They have to coexist peacefully for both of them to survive and flourish.