I'm retired now, but I was a content writer for university websites back when websites were something new and mysterious. This was pre-social media era, like Internet 1.0.... You'd think that in an academic setting, writing would be paramount in web creation. The ideas, the organization of ideas, the clear expression of ideas, sharing information for the greater good in an educational setting, etc. But no. The administration thought of websites as technical -- and the people who did the technical coding work & handled the content management systems were handsomely paid and respected. The writers were an absolute afterthought. Gerry McGovern is an Irish website guru who champions content. He advised writers to never admit that they were content people. Doing so would make people think you were just fluff. Play up the technical part of your work...call yourself an information architect. I argued that in a newspaper organization, the workers wear very different hats. The guys who run the printing press aren't the essential employees. They're part of it -- but the role of the writers and editors wasn't just negligible, and it wasn't like you had to play down the fact that you were one of the writing staff (else you wouldn't be taken seriously). I'm so glad to be retired now. I also taught writing at the university level for some years. The position of composition instructors is awful. Low status, long hours correcting papers, low pay. Women's work. Even the academic journals used metaphors like "the housework of the English department" regarding teaching composition. And composition is the "wife" of literature. (Think Lakoff & Johnson's "Metaphors We Live By.") PS: I also love love love Vonnegut and have since I was a young thing. I'm nearing 70 now. I also adore George Saunders, who is a sort of 21st century Vonnegut.
PS, I remember how proud I was of the first website I put together, for a nonprofit I was working at -- I wrote all the content, took photos, figured out the site structure, interviewed people involved, everything. I mentioned it to a man who I knew was in the website business. When I said I'd just written my first website, from scratch, he asked me, "From scratch? Did you write the code?" And I said no, and he just gave me this scathing look. Later, I thought about it and realized nobody asks a book author if they designed the printing press that printed their book. Geez. I wish I'd thought of that at the time & been able to womansplain it to him in the moment.
When I worked at an agency some years ago, almost everybody went with Wordpress, although we did occasionally do one with custom code. It’s not necessary at all in most instances.
I am glad that you are proud of the websites you put together. I worked in Hewlett-Packard with a lot of super smart software developers, and they did a great job. But they did not appreciate how their software was used in real life. When you told them the users wanted to do something in a certain way, they were confused, because it did not fit the perfect mathematically beautiful programme they had designed.
The coder made the programme you could use to design the website. You designed a website to be clearly navigated and content that was appropriate and well written. They require two different skill sets.
The medium is the message? Printed words are more permanent, digital words disappear so easily, maybe considered less "valuable." But yeah, software engineers are probably the people least likely to appreciate the "engineering" of a good piece of writing.
My mother taught for many years at the U. of Minnesota in the English dept. In the 1960s there they called the women who taught Freshman Comp, "The housewife brigade." They were M.A. level whereas the "real" scholars had or were getting PhDs, which my mother eventually did.
As I am reading your article, Slaughter House Five is right next to me on the sofa. It's a signed limited edition copy. It truly creeped me out that my palm was on this book as I was reading your post. But then my life has been full of synchronicities like this. Keep on writing and we all will keep on reading. Thank you for all you do for those who need your compassion and love.❤
interesting point about how anyone can write nowadays. sometimes, I find people who are well known and have giant audiences, but then some people who write really well and I'm surprised their audience isn't bigger. to a degree popularity will get you eyeballs but I'm here for good writing!
I love this piece. It's similar to a story I want to write about yoga teachers. I have been teaching yoga and movement for 20 years. There was a time, just before I had my first child, that I was making very good money teaching. Now, I make less than half of that. Part of it is that online yoga has absolutely altered how yoga classes are perceived and valued, as well as the skill of the teacher offering the classes. Part of it is a bit to do with saturation, but it's a much smaller part. The democratization of the yoga/movement world has impacted it, too -- much like it has for writing.
But also, to your point, we as yoga teachers (and writers) are now responsible for marketing in a way that we didn't need to before.
Writing is something I enjoy and something I almost pursued as a career before shifting to movement, so when I started my teaching career, I also started a newsletter and eventually a personal blog, which has existed since 2007.
It's what helped build my yoga/movement career, as well as stay connected to long time students, even as I move around the country, thanks to being part of a military family.
But as my yoga/movement career has flatlined and I've started shifting more to writing, I feel the same struggle. Making money is harder than ever. Both of my jobs -- teaching and writing -- are not really enough to survive on if something happened to my husband or we divorced.
And honestly, that is scary.
It's frustrating that the internet has made many things more accessible while also wildly devaluing the work of writers, artists, yoga/movement teachers, and so many others, too.
The tech moves the money into the pockets of the people who provide access to others’ work and out of the pockets of the people doing the work. A few people have become fabulously wealthy and powerful — Musk is the scariest example — and the rest of us are working harder than ever but not making as much. We are, in fact, so fucking busy that some of us end up ignoring politics. You know who isn’t ignoring politics? Musk and friends. And the message he and his friends are putting out is that, “Oh, you’re struggling because of Dems and immigrants and socialism. It’s definitely NOT because my friends and I aren’t paying our share and are manipulating politics to let us attain more and more wealth and power.”
My house is full of books and I love reading, and it makes me sad that reading is in decline. But nowadays there are so many other ways to read, or listen, watch and do, that I understand why fewer people read books. If you were one of the Bronte children living in a remote manse in the 19th Century, reading and writing were the only pastimes.
I am very grateful that it is so easy to publish your work, and rejoice that so many people can voice their opinions so easily. I don't think I would ever have had my work published in previous generations - it does not fit into any conventional publishing genre.
Nice article but I know plenty of people who read novels. Lots of them. It’s been a great way to get to know people at my relatively new job, discussing authors and books we like.
Very true, all of it. Having written only one book and self-published, I've been learning all the "other" things a writer is supposed to do these days to market and keep their name out there. It's not at all the same kind of skillset!
You are very good at selling, which is at least as important as writing if not more so. I noticed how aptly you plugged The Trailer Rules right on the cover of Strapped. I applaud that!!
I'm retired now, but I was a content writer for university websites back when websites were something new and mysterious. This was pre-social media era, like Internet 1.0.... You'd think that in an academic setting, writing would be paramount in web creation. The ideas, the organization of ideas, the clear expression of ideas, sharing information for the greater good in an educational setting, etc. But no. The administration thought of websites as technical -- and the people who did the technical coding work & handled the content management systems were handsomely paid and respected. The writers were an absolute afterthought. Gerry McGovern is an Irish website guru who champions content. He advised writers to never admit that they were content people. Doing so would make people think you were just fluff. Play up the technical part of your work...call yourself an information architect. I argued that in a newspaper organization, the workers wear very different hats. The guys who run the printing press aren't the essential employees. They're part of it -- but the role of the writers and editors wasn't just negligible, and it wasn't like you had to play down the fact that you were one of the writing staff (else you wouldn't be taken seriously). I'm so glad to be retired now. I also taught writing at the university level for some years. The position of composition instructors is awful. Low status, long hours correcting papers, low pay. Women's work. Even the academic journals used metaphors like "the housework of the English department" regarding teaching composition. And composition is the "wife" of literature. (Think Lakoff & Johnson's "Metaphors We Live By.") PS: I also love love love Vonnegut and have since I was a young thing. I'm nearing 70 now. I also adore George Saunders, who is a sort of 21st century Vonnegut.
PS, I remember how proud I was of the first website I put together, for a nonprofit I was working at -- I wrote all the content, took photos, figured out the site structure, interviewed people involved, everything. I mentioned it to a man who I knew was in the website business. When I said I'd just written my first website, from scratch, he asked me, "From scratch? Did you write the code?" And I said no, and he just gave me this scathing look. Later, I thought about it and realized nobody asks a book author if they designed the printing press that printed their book. Geez. I wish I'd thought of that at the time & been able to womansplain it to him in the moment.
When I worked at an agency some years ago, almost everybody went with Wordpress, although we did occasionally do one with custom code. It’s not necessary at all in most instances.
I am glad that you are proud of the websites you put together. I worked in Hewlett-Packard with a lot of super smart software developers, and they did a great job. But they did not appreciate how their software was used in real life. When you told them the users wanted to do something in a certain way, they were confused, because it did not fit the perfect mathematically beautiful programme they had designed.
The coder made the programme you could use to design the website. You designed a website to be clearly navigated and content that was appropriate and well written. They require two different skill sets.
The medium is the message? Printed words are more permanent, digital words disappear so easily, maybe considered less "valuable." But yeah, software engineers are probably the people least likely to appreciate the "engineering" of a good piece of writing.
100 percent.
Ugh that’s annoying, hope he got his comeuppance somewhere.
My mother taught for many years at the U. of Minnesota in the English dept. In the 1960s there they called the women who taught Freshman Comp, "The housewife brigade." They were M.A. level whereas the "real" scholars had or were getting PhDs, which my mother eventually did.
Please turn this into a long-form piece!
As I am reading your article, Slaughter House Five is right next to me on the sofa. It's a signed limited edition copy. It truly creeped me out that my palm was on this book as I was reading your post. But then my life has been full of synchronicities like this. Keep on writing and we all will keep on reading. Thank you for all you do for those who need your compassion and love.❤
Thank you for this! Typewriters and music cassettes are coming back, just so you know. Never give up hope.
By the way, when my ship (currently stuck in port) comes in, yours will be one of my FIRST paid subscribes.
Your.... ship is... stuck? In port? How big is she?
(So I'm not the only one who's stuck, was my second thought.)
interesting point about how anyone can write nowadays. sometimes, I find people who are well known and have giant audiences, but then some people who write really well and I'm surprised their audience isn't bigger. to a degree popularity will get you eyeballs but I'm here for good writing!
Good writing is everything to me!
I love this piece. It's similar to a story I want to write about yoga teachers. I have been teaching yoga and movement for 20 years. There was a time, just before I had my first child, that I was making very good money teaching. Now, I make less than half of that. Part of it is that online yoga has absolutely altered how yoga classes are perceived and valued, as well as the skill of the teacher offering the classes. Part of it is a bit to do with saturation, but it's a much smaller part. The democratization of the yoga/movement world has impacted it, too -- much like it has for writing.
But also, to your point, we as yoga teachers (and writers) are now responsible for marketing in a way that we didn't need to before.
Writing is something I enjoy and something I almost pursued as a career before shifting to movement, so when I started my teaching career, I also started a newsletter and eventually a personal blog, which has existed since 2007.
It's what helped build my yoga/movement career, as well as stay connected to long time students, even as I move around the country, thanks to being part of a military family.
But as my yoga/movement career has flatlined and I've started shifting more to writing, I feel the same struggle. Making money is harder than ever. Both of my jobs -- teaching and writing -- are not really enough to survive on if something happened to my husband or we divorced.
And honestly, that is scary.
It's frustrating that the internet has made many things more accessible while also wildly devaluing the work of writers, artists, yoga/movement teachers, and so many others, too.
The tech moves the money into the pockets of the people who provide access to others’ work and out of the pockets of the people doing the work. A few people have become fabulously wealthy and powerful — Musk is the scariest example — and the rest of us are working harder than ever but not making as much. We are, in fact, so fucking busy that some of us end up ignoring politics. You know who isn’t ignoring politics? Musk and friends. And the message he and his friends are putting out is that, “Oh, you’re struggling because of Dems and immigrants and socialism. It’s definitely NOT because my friends and I aren’t paying our share and are manipulating politics to let us attain more and more wealth and power.”
My house is full of books and I love reading, and it makes me sad that reading is in decline. But nowadays there are so many other ways to read, or listen, watch and do, that I understand why fewer people read books. If you were one of the Bronte children living in a remote manse in the 19th Century, reading and writing were the only pastimes.
I am very grateful that it is so easy to publish your work, and rejoice that so many people can voice their opinions so easily. I don't think I would ever have had my work published in previous generations - it does not fit into any conventional publishing genre.
Nice article but I know plenty of people who read novels. Lots of them. It’s been a great way to get to know people at my relatively new job, discussing authors and books we like.
Very true, all of it. Having written only one book and self-published, I've been learning all the "other" things a writer is supposed to do these days to market and keep their name out there. It's not at all the same kind of skillset!
Thank you. Incidentally, are you familiar with Kilgore Trout's nephew Cordwainer Bird?
No, but I googled. Thanks!
You are very good at selling, which is at least as important as writing if not more so. I noticed how aptly you plugged The Trailer Rules right on the cover of Strapped. I applaud that!!
Congratulations on your growing success!
And there were very few of them...