““Rosalind Porter: As a writer, how important do you feel it is to engage with the digital revolution? Margaret Atwood: I don’t think it’s important. If I do it, it’s because of my insatiable curiosity. But people are trying to pile stuff onto authors, like you have to have a blog, you have to have this, you have to have that. Various party tricks. You actually don’t. I would say that having done it, the blogging and Tweeting and so forth reaches possibly a different kind of reader than the kind you may have been used to hearing from. But an author’s job is to concentrate on the writing, and once the writing is finished what you essentially do is throw it into a bottle and heave it into the sea, and that’s the same for any method of dissemination. There’s still a voyage between the text and the unknown reader; the book will still arrive at the door of some readers who don’t understand it – who don’t like it. It will still find some readers who hopefully do, and the process is still a scattergun approach.””
