I'm not sure that's true about fiction writers (or creative works generally) - most of my many great-aunts and great-uncles either wrote, or were really into making music, or painted, or did some other visual art, or were notorious raconteurs, or several of the above (Grandfather wrote poetry, did fine woodworking, and told stories well enough that people came to visit just to hear him talk). There's more people making art now than in their day because there's more *people*, but I don't know that the proportion of artists to non-artists has gone up that much.
The huge change is that Great-Aunt Eppie wrote her poems in her little black book with no expectation that anyone would ever read them except maybe a few good friends and family, or maybe she'd get to read one out at a church picnic, or the factory newletter would publish one for her coworkers to read. Even if someone when she was young in the '30s really wanted to become a professional writer, it would have been hard just to find out how to start - from her small rural town, it would be sending letters to strangers completely cold hoping someone in the industry would decide to be nice and tell a complete stranger who to write to next to find a publisher or what book to mail-order to find out how to make money writing (and hope it wasn't a scam) (and hope you didn't only hit people who didn't think women could be writers, or didn't think people of your race could be writes, or didn't think people without a college education could be writers, or didn't think people from your state could be writers, or whatever, and just wrote back to say don't bother.)
But now that it's much, much easier to distribute art, all those people who would have written in a little black book with no expectations or done oil paintings just to give to friends are putting their stuff online to compete in the scrum with all those other people, and a lot more creators are visible.
I don't know if it's better or worse overall for creativity that now there are a thousand people actively posting their stuff online trying to get readers where a hundred years ago there would have been ten people being published in magazines and ninety working hard to get published and nine hundred who never even thought they had a chance. There's certainly a lot more people being strung along for years thinking they have a chance of making a career when they never really had more of a chance than that nine hundred. But there's also more people who might have never had their work seen at all who have ten, or twenty, or a hundred avid fans, and I feel like that's a net gain.
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The huge change is that Great-Aunt Eppie wrote her poems in her little black book with no expectation that anyone would ever read them except maybe a few good friends and family, or maybe she'd get to read one out at a church picnic, or the factory newletter would publish one for her coworkers to read. Even if someone when she was young in the '30s really wanted to become a professional writer, it would have been hard just to find out how to start - from her small rural town, it would be sending letters to strangers completely cold hoping someone in the industry would decide to be nice and tell a complete stranger who to write to next to find a publisher or what book to mail-order to find out how to make money writing (and hope it wasn't a scam) (and hope you didn't only hit people who didn't think women could be writers, or didn't think people of your race could be writes, or didn't think people without a college education could be writers, or didn't think people from your state could be writers, or whatever, and just wrote back to say don't bother.)
But now that it's much, much easier to distribute art, all those people who would have written in a little black book with no expectations or done oil paintings just to give to friends are putting their stuff online to compete in the scrum with all those other people, and a lot more creators are visible.
I don't know if it's better or worse overall for creativity that now there are a thousand people actively posting their stuff online trying to get readers where a hundred years ago there would have been ten people being published in magazines and ninety working hard to get published and nine hundred who never even thought they had a chance. There's certainly a lot more people being strung along for years thinking they have a chance of making a career when they never really had more of a chance than that nine hundred. But there's also more people who might have never had their work seen at all who have ten, or twenty, or a hundred avid fans, and I feel like that's a net gain.