Volunteer-run Writers orgs do more than just shoot themself in the face in public with regularity, and those missions are worth continuing, (SFWA Emergency Medical Fund, community outreach, Awards, etc.) but the thing about writers orgs is 50 years ago there was no distribution monopoly and no internet book sales and no viable self publishing and no major competition in media creativity for the written word in books. Everyone was sort of playing the same game at the same scale, and it made sense to form a kind of semi-union.
Unless any writing organization is large and powerful enough to hold Amazon in check, to break Penguin/Putnam, to command the market share of a genre’s talent pool… The good things the writing orgs do need to continue, but the organizational volunteer run structure that does them is obsolete, and full of very distracting problems over and over and over.
It’s not really clear, yet, how to reconcile the good things with the obsolescence and the distractions, for me.
Join or not. Try to reform or not. But the time I spent typing this came out of time I could spend producing new work, and it seems like not the best use of my time.
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