Going Viral, Fame, Essays, and Books
In which I say "dude" a lot and talk about nonfiction and publishing
I’m teaching Publishing, Magazine Writing, and Creative Nonfiction right now, and the other day, I had the opportunity to rewatch a zoom talk delivered to my class by Tim Nudd, who has decades of magazine-writing experience and who has worked for People, AdWeek, and Ad Age among other places.
Tim (who I do not know through publishing—he also happened to be my high school boyfriend) talked about the clickbait era in which many magazines collected ad revenue only if they attracted the maximum possible attention from anyone on the internet. As a result, people were writing attention grabbing headlines and short pieces with sensational angles: “10 things you’re doing wrong” and “Jennifer Aniston’s bombshell announcement.” (Apparently all the people who wrote headlines in that era have moved over to writing subject lines for political fundraising emails: “WHY WON’T YOU RESPOND? ARE YOU EVEN STILL A DEMOCRAT?” Dude, I was on one of the earliest fundraising calls for Kamala and because the donation link didn’t seem to work, I kept pressing it, and then it turned out all the donations went through. I am covered for this election cycle, trust me.)
But I digress. What I’ve been thinking about since I re-watched Tim’s talk with my students is the era of “Going Viral.” It made careers, in a way that I am now explaining to my publishing students as publishing history, and this was aided by the previous iteration of Facebook in which links could be shared much more easily. (Now a link to a post is buried and no one sees it, as an overcorrection.) You could exactly hit the zeitgeist at the second it was cresting, and boom, you were a star. Or you had a shot at being a star. I should have asked Tim what the actual years were for this era—apparently, according to Wikipedia, the tide was turning in 2014.
I remember feeling myself affected as an essayist, because each publication was a potential lottery ticket, each a chance to catch a wave. I caught a small eddy with a blog post called The Shadow Syllabus. And it made me feel brilliant, that surge into public awareness. It felt like the sticky glitter of fame—that one piece of it stuck to your face two years after an arts and crafts project.
Anyway, now what strikes me as odd and awful is the very phrase: “Going viral.” Well, we all went viral. We are still going viral. And on some huge level, are we not that scared of a virus like covid because for the longest time the metaphor of viral spread was a good thing? Still, there’s that strange idea hovering in the fictive-health space that our immune systems will only be made stronger by a challenge like covid. And how strange, too, that this is the habitual ending to an essay that I just warned my students was a cliche: “And all of it has made me stronger.” And that old chestnut, “I am trying to live every day like it’s my last.” Dude—no, let’s not glorify being on the brink of death and then connect that to really living.
And how odd, really, to equate the mechanism of an illness with fame, with the flash of a fever. But maybe that’s not so surprising, either. (I googled “Trauma Fame” and there is too much there that I don’t want to dive into, but it’s a lot if you’re interested in a rabbit hole. I myself am half rabbit, so I’m cutting myself off right there.)
The buzz of that era of essaying is gone, and to be honest, I miss it a little bit. It is harder to share published pieces now, and I also miss the resulting crossover sense of relevance. We are relevant, but the actual work of it is slow. But on the other hand, it was easy even as an essayist to get sucked into clickbait, into pitching and writing pieces designed for those headlines. One of them happened to me, turning what I had written as a thoughtful piece into its exact opposite, just with a bad headline.
But that doesn’t mean the era of the personal essay is over. Lord have mercy, no. It had nothing to do with culture, it had to do with economics. On the other hand, nonfiction itself is apparently in a crisis, or has been for the last five years or so, with major publishers wanting to take fewer chances on researched nonfiction, as described in
’s piece, “The US has a Nonfiction Crisis.” In that piece, he describes hearing a talk by , whose book The Business of Being a Writer is required for most of my classes. And if Jane says it, I’m listening. Anyway, Whyte sums up an observation he’d thought was just happening in Canada but it’s clearly also in the US: Publishers are tending more toward memoirs of famous people, giving us a shot of that glitter that they think we want, or at least what will sell. I don’t know much about this; I’m interested to learn more and am paying attention. If it’s affecting the number of books that get published with actual facts in them, books about history and current events and the environment and a thousand other things we need, then I am concerned. The only thing we can do, as readers, is to request that our libraries buy nonfiction books published by university presses, the unsung heroes of publishing.Random Neat Stuff:
Did you read Rebecca Solnit’s three-sentence essay on blue, water, and the Virgin Mary in LitHub? It’s so good! Rebecca Solnit on Meghann Riepenhoff’s Cyanotype Prints Made in Freezing Landscapes
We have a houseful of old sneakers so I googled and you can get paid to recycle a huge bag of sneakers! My massive bag is winging its way to GotSneakers right now, and they advertise doing it as a fundraiser, which I think is a cool idea.
It's weird that that was an era. Like, sometimes I forget it was an era--the era of the potentially viral essay-- and I share an essay, and it doesn't do nearly as well online as previous ones did, and I think it's me, or my work, and then I realize that was an ERA! Probably due to Facebook algorithms. Now it's like the piece slips into a vague cloud. Now there are 5 different ways to share it, and none of them add up to what one single Facebook post did. It's confusing. It was ... an era.... And it was just 10 years ago.
I think about the allure of fame and “going viral” so much. It’s hard to resist the temptation to try to write something you think might sell (in terms of likes and clicks) versus just writing what you think matters or just writing what you think, period. Because it all matters, just not always economically.