One very obvious component of the writing practice that I’ve taken up in these “Creating Through the Crisis” posts is the need to come up with something to write about each week. My basic approach to doing that is to think about what has been on my mind lately, and then choose one of those things and write about it. Which sounds simple enough. But I’m well aware that my experience of on-my-mindness is not separate from the act of observing it. The very fact that I’m deliberately harvesting topics from the flow of my attention and reflection itself shapes that flow. I pay attention a little differently and I reflect on things a little differently when I know that I’m going to be writing about at least some of it.
On one level, this is a conscious and deliberate part of the point for me – in the decades that I’ve been a writer, I have gone for long stretches in which my everyday work has been pretty insulated from the immediate flow of my attention and interest, and one of the many things that I want out of “Creating Through the Crisis” is to strengthen in a lasting way my capacity to tap into that flow as a resource to inspire, inform, and shape the things I make.
Even so, though, opting into that pressure to come up with something to write about every week is also something that I’m wary of. As someone who has been involved in various aspects of grassroots media-making for quite awhile now, and someone who pays attention to what gets made, what gets circulated, and what gets engagement, I am very aware that this is a factor in the depressing prevalence of hot-takeism. Individual social media users, professional content creators, and media outlets of various stripes tend to publish lots of hot takes and other forms of high-octane pontificating, and part of why they do that is because our social media environment – including the algorithms that govern these platforms, but also including the social norms that have grown up around them – demands that we publish regularly. You need to get content out the door, and slapping together a half-baked but spicy opinion on some topic you know very little about but that people are currently interested in is one easy way to do that.
The need to churn out content on a regular basis is not the only pressure towards hot-takeism, of course. Related to it but not identical are the omnipresent hunt for clicks and the question of expense. A quickly published piece of pontificating on the topic of the moment, preferably by a familiar name, will almost always get more engagement than a slow, reported, thoughtful piece about something currently in the doldrums of the attention economy written by an unknown. The former is also quicker, easier, and cheaper to produce. And if that pontificating contains an idea or two that sparks controversy, all the better – outrage equals engagement.
I kind of hate all of that, but I’m not immune to it. I have been known to tweet out unnecessary snark on the issue of the day, and I’m no stranger to reading political rage-bait and angry, ungrounded opining. But I try not to do too much of those things, and honestly I don’t find them very satisfying most of the time, so I don’t find it all that difficult to partake in moderation.
I’ve been quite clear from the beginning that I don’t want “Creating Through the Crisis” to be an exercise in hot-takeism. I mean, as I’ve said on multiple occasions, for the moment I’m not even posting these to my personal social media accounts – this is a writing practice, not some sort of political intervention or exercise in audience-building. I may start to do some small things to circulate these posts at some point, but that’s months away if it happens at all. So I’m already insulated from the pressure to chase clicks, likes, and shares via social media. But, still, my commitment to publishing these posts once a week, every week, while doing all of the other things that fill my work time means that I’m still subject to the pressure that comes from the need to regularly produce content, which even on its own creates an incentive to seize on something easy and obvious and just write it.
So, for instance, in pondering what I should write this week, it has occurred to me to talk about the annexationist rhetoric coming out of powerful figures in the United States and being directed towards Canada, as well as the knee-jerk liberal- and left-nationalism in response by some folks up here. It has also occurred to me to write about the resignation of Justin Trudeau, which has already occasioned so much inane and stupid posting from across the electoral spectrum. Commenting on current events isn’t a central purpose of the “Creating Through the Crisis” series, but I’m not agin doing so if that’s genuinely what I’ve been thinking about.
If I’m not going to completely rule out weighing in on such topics in these posts, what would it look like to write about them in a way that refuses the logic of hot-takeism? I’m especially keen to figure that out for that still-far-away day when I might start being a bit more active in circulating these posts, thereby opening this practice a bit more to the pressures of social media.
I can think of two things that can help me refuse to be drawn into that kind of writing.
One is to just not take up these kinds of topics very often. It’s fine to do it once in awhile, but it’s just not going to be at the centre of what I write about here.
The other, though, is maybe a bit more interesting. I think that along with incentivizing hot-takeism in a broad sense, the pressures to publish regularly and to chase engagement also favour writing that is closed, simple, and definite. So not only are you encouraged to have an opinion, and ideally one that at least some people will react to in vigorous ways, but you are also encouraged to pretend to more knowledge and more certainty than you might actually have, and you are encouraged to produce a piece of writing that has a shape along the lines of a simple (even simplistic) problem-solution or outrage-response arc. And, let’s be honest here, it isn’t only today’s social media environment that favours that kind of writing – it’s a version of the norms of good writing that we’re taught in school or that would often show up in newspapers long before the internet existed. We’re told to be clear, to keep it simple, to have a beginning and a middle and an end, to state our thesis and then prove it, and so on. And, yes, in some contexts there is a lot greater emphasis on sound reasoning and solid evidence than in the culture of today’s internet. But there’s still something similar in the shape of the resulting piece.
So I think maybe what I need to do, even when I take up topics that scream “hot take,” is to deliberately refuse to write about them in that way. And, I mean, there’s nothing revolutionary in writing that is more complex, more honest about its uncertainties, more open to not-knowing and to further exploration and discovery, more clear about its evidentiary grounding – lots of writing, from the terrible to the great, does some or all of those things, and lots of people do it in a whole range of different ways. But I’m not publishing a book, here, or a 10,000 word writerly essay. I am, most weeks, writing a fairly quick, fairly short post. So it’s a matter of developing ways of work within that context of weekly online output that still manage to deliberately refuse the attendant pressures, even if that means publishing things that feel superficially less satisfying because of their shape and messiness, and that are even less likely than the existing “pretty damn unlikely” to be of interest to anyone but me.
Working this through on the page/screen may, I guess, have a side benefit – it’s not particularly something I’m looking to do through “Creating Through the Crisis,” but one of the things that I have wanted to do since I ended Talking Radical Radio but that I feel like I have made little or no progress on is developing my capacity to do new-to-me kinds of more-than-a-post, less-than-a-book writing. So who knows, maybe this will eventually feed into that goal as well.