I have heard a lot of horror stories from Twitter. Apparently it's crazy on there: it's like the peanut gallery of the internet and the character limit must help to keep things sharp. People buy and sell followers, mores change in seconds, public figures are subjected to ridicule and blistering trolling, politics are dished out, sometimes people get fired for tweets. It is the people's battlefield of the 21st century, and everything is at stake.
Names and reputations, professional identities, personal legacies are all made and destroyed there - I am just now reading that some #breakdowns have actually happened. One wonders if the ever-looming specter of cyber-bullying has haunted Twitter, and to what terrible effect. I'm sure that people become #twitteraddicts just like people claimed to be addicted to Facebook because they were simply being dumb or extremely lazy.
With all this doom and gloom it is easy to get pessimistic about a world including Twitter, but there is also a brighter side to the social media darling. For instance, the guy who invented the #twitterjoke hashtag is now a few hundred thousand dollars richer. Of course he is richer due mostly to his well-paying upper-middle class tech job, but the good karma from his innovative Tweeting must have helped him feel better, thus upping his potential in the workplace, and ultimately his net worth as well (as well has his 'net-worth', too, eh? #twitterjoke).
There was once a street urchin from Calcutta who began to tweet one day, as the story goes, and found himself on television the next, getting interviewed by such industry giants as: Vice journalists, various mainstream media, and finally Oprah herself. This urchin is set to publish a book this November about the Twitter-launched journey, and immigration papers for the U.S. are pending. Talk about #heartwarming, right? But also #bootstraps.
Meanwhile in the United States, Seattle urban residents banded together to 'crowdsource' a recycling initiative that saved a local bookstore, reinvigorated a local park, as well as funded the gym of a new public housing complex. Talk about 'retweet' am I getting to you here? Does this not impress you? Serious things are happening.
I remember one story from the heyday of Twitter, when it was truly still the wild west, in which a band of libertarians managed to close a soup kitchen and shame its operators into leaving town. Truly, for activism of the slackiest kind, there is no better PR wing than a Twitter account and an opinionated but well-spoken Comm. graduate.
In another story, the guy who started Shit My Dad Says (which is very #2009, I know) became a minor sensation and also managed to capitalize quite well on his inherent ability to quote people for humorous sayings. I don't know much about him because I was TUNED OUT in 2009/2010 but apparently he became something like a 'W'-list celebrity. He got a book deal out of Twitter (and he's not the only one!), they made a TV show out of it (you can bet he got something out of that, too), and apparently he will soon release a highly-anticipated 'solo-project' (which, don't worry, will include his dad). Twitter has done more for comedy than the next three internet 2.0 social media outlets combined, and that's a #fact.
The best part is none of these people got anything by Tweeting angrily or negatively about anything. They never went 'on the attack', never sold out, never complained, they never shilled for anything or anyone, it was just pure Twitter savvy that got them anything. They kept their noses clean and didn't start tweeting about politics or anything, they didn't ever chase scandals or sensationalism – all they ever did was try to help society, or try to be funny so that society was a bit less terrible... there's hope for all of us who see Twitter as an occasionally funny pile of shit.
Showing posts with label success. Show all posts
Showing posts with label success. Show all posts
9/13/13
11/8/11
The Unpublished Writer
There's really no worse type of writer. There are hack writers, there are pretentious litterateurs, there are boring scholarly writers, there are award winners, there are profound writers, there are dead writers, there are exciting but empty pulp writers, and there are amateur writers who fund 200 copy runs out of pocket and sell most of them to friends and family and get interviewed in small town newspapers. All of those writers are doing what they love and are not worried about tomorrow: they produce, sometimes they get published, often they are the victims of overrating and hype. For the most part they are just adding to the colossal pile of wasted paper that represents literature in situ.
Then there are unpublished writers. Like cockroaches, they are headless survivors, unable to feed on their aspirations, often orphaned from inspiration, hiding in the shadows and mostly consuming (when they can, headless and all) and producing filth. It's impossible to really understand how many unpublished writers there are, or what drives them. Beyond merest subsistence, this type of writer has few goals that are concrete. A poem-a-day work quota, three hours of prose/day, or half a screenplay each night are not unbeknownst to the unpublished writer, but they are better acquainted with day-jobs and drinking binges and hopelessness. When they set down to work on half-forgotten characters and plots, these poor souls get caught in a vicious cycle of re-reading and compulsive editing. They are procrastinators, and in fact their relation to cockroaches is facile and untrue.
The cockroaches, at least, get published and exist in the tedious middle-ground of writerly success: readings, signings, 10-15k a year plus some royalties if they're lucky, and maybe some articles and exposure pieces to round out the old portfolio. They could go into television or radio writing. They could go into various types of copy writing. Marketing and advertising are the prime escape vectors, but times are hard. Sometimes they're shortlisted for a prize and their cachet goes up for a while and they entertain visions of success.
Compare this to the spider that is the unpublished writer: day job madness, late nights, drugs, hair-pulling typing escapades with open source word processors. They see themselves as hopeless moonlighters. Somewhere in an immense tangled web of wasted promise, these writers slowly produce tortured works that are blurred with self-revelation and inconsistent style. Then silence for weeks or even years. Inspiration comes brightly and passes quickly and leaves no marks. No, the unpublished writer is wretched, and each year passes without a printed work or anything noteworthy for the portfolio. Queries are shot down in flames, credentials are nonexistent and mocked, routes to success are suggested, and the book is closed.
And another year passes, and with it any hope of true and honest publication. All they ask for – these withered shells, who write from their soul, who wouldn't use a vanity publisher if they were paid to, whose every word is wearied and grim – is a spot at the corpse-crowded table where the hacks drink greedily and pontificate about saleability and audience, where the old guard hoard awards, where the bright new prodigies bullshit openly, and where the eyes of the reading public are focused like the glimmering eyes of wolves in the dark... yes, the reading public, waiting for their three or four inspired works per decade, habitual readers who yearn for something new – something, perhaps, that has been overlooked, a supposedly worthless bauble in the cold, dying grasp of the unpublished writer.
Then there are unpublished writers. Like cockroaches, they are headless survivors, unable to feed on their aspirations, often orphaned from inspiration, hiding in the shadows and mostly consuming (when they can, headless and all) and producing filth. It's impossible to really understand how many unpublished writers there are, or what drives them. Beyond merest subsistence, this type of writer has few goals that are concrete. A poem-a-day work quota, three hours of prose/day, or half a screenplay each night are not unbeknownst to the unpublished writer, but they are better acquainted with day-jobs and drinking binges and hopelessness. When they set down to work on half-forgotten characters and plots, these poor souls get caught in a vicious cycle of re-reading and compulsive editing. They are procrastinators, and in fact their relation to cockroaches is facile and untrue.
The cockroaches, at least, get published and exist in the tedious middle-ground of writerly success: readings, signings, 10-15k a year plus some royalties if they're lucky, and maybe some articles and exposure pieces to round out the old portfolio. They could go into television or radio writing. They could go into various types of copy writing. Marketing and advertising are the prime escape vectors, but times are hard. Sometimes they're shortlisted for a prize and their cachet goes up for a while and they entertain visions of success.
Compare this to the spider that is the unpublished writer: day job madness, late nights, drugs, hair-pulling typing escapades with open source word processors. They see themselves as hopeless moonlighters. Somewhere in an immense tangled web of wasted promise, these writers slowly produce tortured works that are blurred with self-revelation and inconsistent style. Then silence for weeks or even years. Inspiration comes brightly and passes quickly and leaves no marks. No, the unpublished writer is wretched, and each year passes without a printed work or anything noteworthy for the portfolio. Queries are shot down in flames, credentials are nonexistent and mocked, routes to success are suggested, and the book is closed.
And another year passes, and with it any hope of true and honest publication. All they ask for – these withered shells, who write from their soul, who wouldn't use a vanity publisher if they were paid to, whose every word is wearied and grim – is a spot at the corpse-crowded table where the hacks drink greedily and pontificate about saleability and audience, where the old guard hoard awards, where the bright new prodigies bullshit openly, and where the eyes of the reading public are focused like the glimmering eyes of wolves in the dark... yes, the reading public, waiting for their three or four inspired works per decade, habitual readers who yearn for something new – something, perhaps, that has been overlooked, a supposedly worthless bauble in the cold, dying grasp of the unpublished writer.
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