“A good part of any day in Los Angeles is spent driving, alone, through streets devoid of meaning to the driver, which is one reason the place exhilarates some people, and floods others with an amorphous unease.”1
I think about this quote from Joan while driving, and I think about how women used to drive with one hand drifting out the window, and they used to smell like cigarettes and powder. I need to wash my hair. When I’m driving down Amabel a car comes speeding towards me, forgetting it's a two-way. I beep, and her oval face mouths ‘I’m sorry’, which I find myself touched by. A brief respite from amorphous unease.
Recently, I heard someone say that every woman in journalism school (in L.A.) wants — no, expects — to be the next Joan Didion. To cleanly pierce the exterior of a place and get to the muddy center. To excavate the point at which real people are just the characters they play. The point at which everyone is a character in a city that dresses up as itself, in an essay about the city it’s dressing up as. I felt a kind of smugness when I heard this jab about everyone wanting to be Joan Didion. I even thought, I do not want to be the next Joan Didion. I just want to say what I mean. Besides, I’m not in journalism school and I only smoke cigarettes on weekends, if anything I’m— never mind. It’s too humiliating to admit.
The urge to imitate is a human one. It’s part of a forgivable drive for social inclusion. To be accepted as a version of something that already exists is to exist already yourself. It’s the reason authors get other authors to offer pull quotes on their debut work: to be worthy by association. But what happens when you introduce other forms of imitation, ones that are built around algorithms? Why does a lot of writing feel inauthentic, or just bad (think of the recent flood of personal essays sparking Twitter discourse)? The nature of the internet means that the gap between writer (or really any kind of artist) and reader has become smaller, with readers having more immediate access to writers and vice versa. The social response to a piece is at the forefront of producing it; the platform on which you publish is as much a part of the process as the inherent drive to create. This has always been a factor in creating art, but the rise of the “artist” as an identity with a particular social capital confuses the artistic process. It’s harder to extricate your central motivations for creating from the accompanying social motivations. On Substack specifically, this might look like getting likes or getting ‘restacked;’ getting validation for your work that resembles the same kind of validation you might get for sharing a photo on Instagram. A simple stimulus-response. Instead of sitting in some lit mag editor’s inbox for months, there’s an immediate sense that your work is being valued, or at the very least, perceived. The shrinking gap between writer and reader has had another effect on creative output; the writer/artist is more readily prepared to view themselves from the outside. It’s easy to take on the position of an onlooker; you switch your page to viewer mode or read your work back once it’s been formatted and published. Once it looks like it could just as well have been written by a stranger. If you, as the writer, have more ready access to this ‘reader’ version of yourself, how does that affect your relationship with your own work? Who are you creating for?
In her recent piece, On Creativity, Cydney Hayes wrote about the effects of the disintegration of institutional journalism on our recent generation of writers2, saying:
“there is a steepening trade-off between craftsmanship and exposure, and it’s exacerbating the homogenization of not just the content we see but the feelings we have on it and so too the content we go on to create.”
This idea of creative “homogenization” was broached in another piece, Everyone’s Writing Sounds the Same Now by Eliza McLamb. That piece began as a critique of the universal “voice” of the Substack writer, and tapered into a more general acceptance of this trend, affirming the necessity of embryonic, even simply bad work. I read this piece before Hayes’ essay and felt something like a call-and-response between the two. While McLamb seems to accept the homogenized voice as an embarrassing but necessary stage in the artistic process, Hayes interrogates the role of algorithms and the breakdown in journalistic learning institutions as culprits in the commodification of online writing. Essentially, this isn’t a ‘natural’ stage of the creative process for young writers, so much as it’s a product of our shifting social and institutional literary landscape. Written work has always been a commodity, but how it is regulated has changed only recently. This can be both a good and a bad thing. Barriers that may have excluded people outside of higher education (writers who are not institutionally ‘vetted’) have given way to platforms that are largely impartial to institutional prestige and more interested in site traffic. However, this also means that writers are tasked with writing pieces that generate clicks, driven to mine their personal reservoirs for content-worthy material if they want their writing to be noticed.
Now this is where I admit something: I’m a perfect example of the so-called ‘Substack’ writer. Self-taught, content-driven, painfully attentive to praise. It’s part of why this topic is so fascinating to me, and why it matters so much that I wrap my head around it. The irony of this very essay is not lost on me. In trying to figure out what to write next for my Substack, I’ve thought about dredging up mental health crises, family conflicts, high school stalkers, you name it. Sure, these are things I have also written about privately, and there’s a real impulse to chronicle them that has nothing to do with sharing them publicly. But alongside my urge to write through the emotions and implications of these experiences is the knowledge that certain topics ‘perform’ well and that certain kinds of essays lend themselves to interaction and validation. This realization leaves me conflicted; is there any way to write about my life that does not feel dishonest? And is this sense of social intrusion into the creative process really a new phenomenon?
In his essay Why I Write, George Orwell says of the writer,
His [or her…] subject matter will be determined by the age he lives in — at least this is true in tumultuous, revolutionary ages like our own — but before he ever begins to write he will have acquired an emotional attitude from which he will never really escape.3
He goes on to describe this emotional attitude as something of an intrinsic motivation for writing — the essence of the writer — of which he argues there are four:
Writing for the ego/praise
“Desire to seem clever, to be talked about, to be remembered after death…”
Aesthetic Values
“Perception of beauty in the external world”
Writing for historical purposes
“Desire to see things as they are”
Writing with a political agenda, driven by a political belief
“Desire to push the world in a certain direction”
It’s tempting to amend this list to include some more specific motivation, something more becoming of my own drives. But in the end, everything seems to fall into one of these categories. For instance, Joan Didion’s reasons could be categorized as historical and political. I’d venture that most creative people have some degree of the underlying egotistical drive. Orwell himself describes his initial pursuits as falling under the first three categories, but after incubating his political identity, the fourth came to be his central motivation. He concludes the essay by saying that without a political purpose, he feels his writing lacks merit.
The essay, which was published in 1946, suggests that writing for ego validation has always been a principal factor for writers. Perhaps what is different about the writing culture of today is that shrinking gap between the viewer and artist: the ease with which the artist takes on the role of some external person perceiving their work. I might say I write for myself, but what I mean is the self that perceives me from the outside. The person I glimpse occasionally when I forget to identify her as me. In brief instances, I become a pleasing and astonishing stranger. I can almost be jealous of myself: an emotion usually reserved for torment transforms into pride under the correct conditions. There is no better way to categorize this than writing for the ego. In defense of this impulse, there is also something social, even historical, about an ongoing autobiography. An autobiography captures a very public and evolving version of the self, one that, under the right conditions, could become a valuable relic. A humbling receipt of incubation preserved as a reference point for growth.
Mclamb’s essay on homogenized writing begins with a rhetorical conversation on the paucity of topics, and the corresponding excess of perspectives dissecting them:
Have you read that essay about the year of the girl? No not that one, the other one. The one that talks about commodifying our image in the new social media landscape. The one where they talk about bows and Barbie. No, I’m talking about the other one where the female writer shares a story from her own girlhood and connects it to Taylor Swift. Have you read that before? Have you read it a million times? Are you a man watching a woman watching that quote pop up on Pinterest and Twitter and Substack over and over again?
This introductory paragraph lands as critique, but by the end of the essay, McLamb has circled around to defend the fledgling writer who recapitulates these well-worn topics. Perhaps this is because she — like me — identifies with them. Girlhood girlhood girlhood. I can resonate with this defense: the justifiable impulse to offer your slant on a cultural phenomenon. We’d all like to toss our hat in the ring in the hopes it will land somewhere untread. What’s so wrong with that? Still, I can’t help but think of Orwell’s four motivations and how they take shape in our contemporary landscape. When you share your writing on a platform that also functions as social media, the impulse to think is subsumed by the impulse to perform. Are we following a historical urge to document, or an egoistic urge to be perceived as the kind of person who makes insightful observations? Do you want to be the next Joan Didion, or do you just want your peers to think you are the next Joan Didion?
The end of McLamb’s first paragraph references a certain well-worn Margaret Atwood quote:
“You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman. You are your own voyeur.”
Writing in the age of the internet seems to exacerbate this effect. You are a writer with a consumer inside, watching a writer. What would you like to consume?
If there’s one conclusion I keep coming back to, it’s that my own creativity is complicated by social validation. In some ways, social validation has nothing to do with writing (or the quality of that writing) at all. The validation depends on how successfully the writer taps into the correct cultural currents, inhabits a tangible identity, and writes in cohesion with that identity. The writer-as-influencer. This presents a problem when writers find themselves outside of the echo chamber they’ve created, asked to evaluate their writing against a standard other than social performance. This is the part where this essay scratches itself on the head and ponders its own right to exist. Is there anything new here? Maybe I’m just jealous, and not of myself. Maybe I should go for a long drive and think about what I’m doing here. All I can do is hope my historical and political impulses someday surpass my ego, and that I will learn to write beyond the self in the corner of the screen. ☞
I’ll start by committing a cardinal sin and begin this piece with a quote from Joan Didion.
Her argument also describes how the loss of institutions has affected the ways we learn to write and think, which consequently affects the quality of the work we produce. A lot of writers are learning their craft from the internet, and adopting a style that is interwoven with the algorithmic structures that encourage it.
From “A Collection of Essays”, page 311.
i am always thinking about why am i writing, for who, for what purpose. social validation definitely complicates my creativity (to put it lightly). i feel differently about it every few months. yes social media often functions as a stage that tilts towards egoism and encourages reactive behaviors that reduce our capacity to engage with art critically. i think it's a terrible cultural loss. but that is why it's so important that people continue to envision new ways of being in community and finding meaning and making things anyway, knowing that it's not gonna be groundbreaking every time but with the understanding that we are working together in service of a larger conversation. the harder i think about striving for authenticity the more mystifying that goal becomes
Very astute piece. It certainly is a struggle of sorts to weigh one's desire for social validation with that for artistic expression. Often when the former bleeds into the latter, it suffers. So it's always something to be aware of, lest one's art becomes pandering or inauthentic.