On January 7, I published a story about Wordle in the Slate culture section. It's about 1,200 words long and took a morning to write. I'm not sure if I even proofread it before filing, because when you're a freelancer, you learn to pick your battles carefully. And yet, thanks to a masterstroke of SEO chicanery, the piece managed to lodge itself into the algorithm's spincycle. By lunchtime it had gobbled up oodles of clicks and summoned a tide of mystified normies to my mentions tab, as my take morphed into a shorthand annotation for anyone confused by the checkered grids that dominated the timeline in those wonderful early days of the Great Wordle Experiment. Somehow I found myself on the forefront of the word game beat, which is to say that two more editors were now asking me for Wordle stories. The feeding frenzy was on.
Thank you for articulating how exhausting and creativity-dulling it is to be constantly on the prowl for the thread of an idea I can spin into a story that everyone will forget about in a matter of weeks. Bleh. Still very much feel that I'm in that stage of writing for an audience of no one, but after experiencing a vitriolic twitter backlash to an essay I wrote last spring, I also feel terrified that the algorithm will pluck a piece I'm less than proud of for the world to tear apart. It's a precarious line to walk!
Hope your next Big Feature is closer than eons away.
Thank you for articulating how exhausting and creativity-dulling it is to be constantly on the prowl for the thread of an idea I can spin into a story that everyone will forget about in a matter of weeks. Bleh. Still very much feel that I'm in that stage of writing for an audience of no one, but after experiencing a vitriolic twitter backlash to an essay I wrote last spring, I also feel terrified that the algorithm will pluck a piece I'm less than proud of for the world to tear apart. It's a precarious line to walk!
Hope your next Big Feature is closer than eons away.