PXL8

While browsing at a bookstore yesterday, I picked up a book that brought back to mind an old argument I've been trying to keep away from. It was this book:

My conundrum centers around the question, "Is it better to be prolific or excellent?" Or rather, "Do you want the world to see you falter?" 

I've always erred on the side of quality. To most, you are only as good as your most recent work. If that's true, isn't it tremendously important that each piece of writing do a little to raise that value? On the other hand, that mindset sets up a lot of barriers to overcome: If every piece needs to be the best thing you've ever written, than it's easy to conjure up reasons to kill a project.

Later, I read a Vox article on the same topic that answered my question in a way I'm not sure I agree with.

"...it was a world built almost entirely around voice — whether that voice came from a single person or from a carefully crafted editorial identity... The future belongs to the fleet, to the fast, to the instantly assembled hot take."  -- Todd VanDerWerff, "2015 is The Year The Old Internet Finally Died"

As of now, "Content" is more important than craft. One of the chapters in Show Your Work declared: "Show something small every day." The steady stream of content you give away will gather and lead an audience towards your big, important things. It's pretty much the strategy behind all content in 2015. 

After all, it doesn't matter whether your most recent work is any good if know one knows who you are. The content deluge has flooded over the point of no return. We must create constantly or risk drowning. 

So I've been worrying for nothing all this time. As it turns out, the measure of a writer is not the quality of their prose —their rhythm, their judgement, their capacity to convey emotion— but their ability to play fortune teller and guess exactly what's going to pop up in the back of your mind the time you scroll over a Facebook post about...

Strawberries!?

Did I guess right? Of course not. I was never cursed for running over a drifter's dog. Most writers haven't, I think?

"...making money on this new internet requires scale," VanDerWerff said, "and if you need to always keep scaling up... Thoughtfulness is almost beside the point, in many cases, if you can produce something enough people will want to associate with the curation of their core beings."

On the new internet, writing is no longer a craft; it's arts and crafts. Writers are making little candy charms to put on your bracelet to show your friends. That's fine, in theory. There's a certain vanity to be gained from being able to say that I'm the guy that made you look cool and interesting for a day, an hour. But writing is an inherently selfish act. I'm asking you to read my words; listen to what I have to say. Great writing comes from the writer trying to give the reader something. The most thoughtful gifts don't come off your Amazon wish list. They're a product of effort and thought.

Writing to appease readers' whims, rather than inform, educate or entertain their minds, is like trying to crack a password by guessing all of the combinations. Again, if the goal is to unlock a reader's interest, rather than engage their mind, than there's very little value in producing "great" writing. If writers don't need to develop a voice, than stringing words together is just another skill, to be mastered and slapped at the bottom of a resume alongside such valuable career assets as "PC proficient," "Social Media skills," or "southern accent." 

There are definitely more failures than successes, but it is possible to write with voice and succeed on the internet. VanDerWerff points to the fall of The Dissolve, a longform-heavy film criticism site, to suggest that quantity is the be-all, end-all for sustainable media enterprises. He does so, however, while ignoring the like of sites like The Atavist, which have managed to build a niche following based on a scarce stream of high-quality writing. Vox's sister site The Verge wrote a profile of The Awl, a blog too weird to excel through any metric other than quality. The common denominator between all of these sites, successes and failure, is scale. Good writing takes more time and costs more money than bulk writing. 

"If you were going to assemble a business plan for a web site," the late David Carr said of The Awl, you would look closely at everything The Awl did and then head in precisely the opposite direction."

From now on, instead of than asking whether or not it's better to write well or write a lot, you have to ask: How much are you willing to sacrifice to be proud of what you do? You don't want to be half-remembered as the rambling schmuck-blogger, do you?

The following is a short essay written in the style of The New York Times Magazine's backpage series, "Lives." Written according to series' pre-relaunch sensibility, it is a first-person account. The essay was written for a Personal Narrative writing course in April, 2015.

 There’s a story about me that my mom loves to tell. She’s told it to family friends and work acquaintances: She likes to bring it up when she’s feeling nostalgic or wants to make me blush. Over the years, I’ve formed a memory around it; not actual the chain of events, but the story I’ve heard a million times about a young boy also named Michael.

In the spring of 1989, when I was almost three, I had been brought next door to play with my neighbor, Lizzie, and some other kids from the neighborhood. It was sunny, but we were playing inside: The kids’ nannies —four or five twenty-somethings— set up shop around a table on a covered porch at the back of the house. The kids were out of sight, but the nannies weren’t worried. We were too small to reach a doorknob and thus deemed sufficiently wrangled. They didn’t consider that there had been contractors renovating Lizzie’s basement. Or that Lizzie’s parents normally stashed her toys down there, which must have been why I peeled away from the herd.

Once I made my way down and found plastic-wrapped walls instead of a playroom, the backyard beckoned. Sunlight shining through an open door drew me out from the dark basement.

From here I could only guess what happened, but I’m fairly certain I know the route I took: There was only one way for someone my size to safely reach my destination.

After climbing Lizzie’s steeply sloped driveway, I would have been halfway down the mild hill to the end of our street. I would’ve waddled down the sidewalk and hooked a left down the next block, a few hundred feet of open road, to reach a set of concrete stairs just off the street.

The steps would have been challenging. Each increment would have required a waist-high drop at least, without a railing in reach. I had never left home alone. Scaling stairs would have been an activity I took on with a partner: Someone who would have eased each leap from a free fall to a gravity-defying float. In the same position now, I doubt I would’ve risked it.

I didn’t shy away from it, though. I don’t know how, but I made it down without any tear inducing scrapes or bruises. From there, it was a straight shot across the parking lot to the Yonkers public library, where my parents had taken me many times.

Back at the top of the hill, the adults were about to panic.

Shortly after my departure, Mom returned home from shopping. When she came to check in and could not find me among the playing children, she found my au pair among the communing caregivers and asked the magic question:

“Where’s Michael?”

It didn’t take long for the young women to discover the open path outside. Upon finding they had built their confidence on false pretenses, the group fanned out to search the yards, front and back.

Before long, my Dad arrived home to join the search. Together my parents came up with a plan. Dad would drive around the neighborhood, while Mom called places where they’d escorted me on foot before: Nearby friends, my grandparents’ house.

As they searched, my parents feared the worst. In a time of “Stranger Danger,” hooded strangers pierced their thoughts each time they called my name.

It didn’t take long for them to find me; 20-30 minutes tops. The middle-aged woman picked up the phone at the library and, just like that, she alleviated their fears with a few words.

“There’s a boy here by himself in the children’s section,” the librarian said. “Yellow-checkered shirt, black pants, yellow sneakers?”

“He was walking around the library, telling people his name was Mickey Mouse.”

Mom cried with relief. She said, “I think that’s him,” but she knew. Even if she hadn’t dressed me that morning, she said it sounded like something I’d do: She imagined me marching around, recruiting a legion of quiet young readers into my personal choir.

“M-I-C! K-E-Y! M-O-U-S-E!”

When she got there, I wasn’t leading a parade. I sat in the children’s section, alone, drawing with crayons at a pint-sized table. I smiled. I had no idea my first field trip drove everyone in my life to the brink.