Friday, January 4, 2013
Media Are Writers the Worst People Ever?
Posted by Kristin Iversen on Fri, Jan 4, 2013 at 1:18 PM
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The thing is, though, "classic journalism" doesn't really exist the way that it used to. In order to make a living as a writer—and, yes, even writers deserve to make some kind of a living—flexibility is paramount. This might mean that a writer makes a living from both journalism and memoir-writing. It might mean that, in order to even get hired for a job with a steady paycheck and maybe even health insurance (this is a needle-in-a-haystack-holy-grail situation) writers must build a platform on Twitter or Instagram or Tumblr where they share details about their lives that don't really have any place in their journalistic pieces. This might seem kind of sordid and it might be a situation where narcissism is fostered, but it is not mutually exclusive with writers producing something of value.
There's a lot of bullshit, shock-value writing out there right now. Nolan mentions xoJane as a venue for the kind of first-person accounts that are all about exposing the most private and, frequently, humiliating experiences of the writers. And while these posts might provide a lot of pageviews, if the writing isn't good, the writer sure as hell isn't going anywhere beyond xoJane or maybe Thought Catalog. I understand Nolan's point that promoting this kind of writing in aspiring journalists is breeding a generation of writers who are solipsistic and eager to expose the sometimes tedious minutiae of their lives just in order to get more Twitter followers.
But when haven't writers been navel-gazing? When haven't they inserted themselves into their work, whether fictional or not? Nolan thinks that writers' lives aren't that interesting and that what is lost by this generation of "robotic insta-memoirists" is all of the stories that go untold because writers are writing about themselves. Stories, though, are only as interesting as the storytellers. Just the other day a friend of mine told me about something that happened to him, a night that involved theft and police and missed flights and while the pieces were all there, it didn't come out in a compelling way at all. Because he's not a storyteller. So, while much of the writing that is out there is bound to be shit and while much of the writing that is currently out there is shit of the first-person narrative variety, that doesn't mean that there isn't a lot of potential for great writing. It's just probably not going to be posted on xoJane.
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