RhetoricVille

Last night my wife and I had dinner in Ann Arbor with some non-novel writing folks. Nita mentioned that I was writing a novel in a month. Nobody in the group had heard of NaNoWriMo. They seemed to think it was all a little strange. That surprised me, given that we were in Ann Arbor. You would think they would be more enlightened.

Someone said, “You know, the world really doesn’t need anymore novels.”

That’s true enough, but the world does not need even the novels it has. It doesn’t need statues or paintings, either. Indeed, depending on how you define “world,” it doesn’t even need us.

It has never been a question of what the world needed.