How to Write at the End of the World
Photo by Adam Wilson on Unsplash
It sometimes feels like it’s both the best and worst time alive to be a writer. If you have a computer connection, it has never been easier to publish your thoughts to the semi-public space known as the Internet (though your mileage may vary depending on an array of factors). You hit publish, and the possibility of hundreds, maybe even thousands of viewers, suddenly appears on the horizon.
Simultaneously, we live during a time period where so many looming problems, both within the industry and outside of it, are on the horizon. We not only have to juggle predatory digital platforms, terrible pay, long hours, and waves and waves of spam, but also navigate a planet with a deteriorating climate and political system. It’s difficult to get out of bed some mornings, let alone produce words that are both ethical and profitable.
As the world burns around us, we have to decide how to use our words to make it better. We may not be able to change society in a single keystroke, but we can use them to care for those around us.
Writers are often removed from “the action.” There are, of course, journalists on the ground during tumultuous periods in history, but even they have to set aside hours at a time putting down their words. The act of writing involves hunkering down and being alone with your thoughts (and hopefully research), and that’s a very isolating feeling. Ernest Hemming wrote, perhaps with a bit too much certainty, that “writing, at its best, is a lonely life.”
When there is so much bad happening around us, that disconnect can make it seem like we are removed from the work that really matters. I constantly have this gut impulse to drop everything I am doing to join a nonprofit or couch surf while spending the rest of my life volunteering on political campaigns. Volunteering, of course, does matter. However, since this activity is action-oriented— or at least it is in my head (nonprofit work and volunteering truthfully involve a lot of downtime as well) — I tend to overinflate the importance of this labor and devalue my own work.
The writer Jame Baldwin in his unfinished work Remember This House — which famously was used in Raoul Peck’s documentary I Am Not Your Negro (2016) — talked in length about how he felt removed from the activism of the Civil Rights Movement. He was not involved in the planning or organizing of that era but instead emphasized acting as a witness to them, saying: “…part of my responsibility as a witness was to move as largely and as freely as possible to write the story and get it out.”
This concept of bearing witness to a truth and disseminating it to larger society certainly has been effective in the past. There are works such as Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) and Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1906), which spoke of the pesticide DDT and the meat-packing industry, respectively, that led to profound policy changes in American society. The public’s reaction surrounding Silent Spring is widely cited as the reason DDT was eventually banned. The Jungle led to new federal food safety laws (though it’s important to note that no one action is ever solely responsible for any political change).
Meaningful work also doesn’t have to be about “hard-hitting” subjects either. One of the largest cultural battles of the 2010s was Gamergate, which initially was a harassment campaign against high profile female journalists and designers in the game industry, and quickly morphed into a battle of what types of messages can be in media. As Aja Romano wrote in Vox:
“The hate campaign, we would later learn, was the moment when our ability to repress toxic communities and write them off as just “trolls” began to crumble. Gamergate ultimately gave way to something deeper, more violent, and more uncontrollable.”
A cottage industry of reactionaries and progressives alike sprung up to critique our media's values (most famously Anita Sarkeesian’s Tropes vs. Women in Video Games series), and that debate had direct political consequences for our world. Video game forums became staging grounds for recruitment and featured prominently in the commentary of white supremacists such as Milo Yiannopoulos and Steve Banon.
Source: Wikipedia
Any subject can change our culture for better or worse. In one often repeated example, Martin Lurther King Jr. famously told actress Nichelle Nichols not to quit the show Star Trek because her character Uhura was, in his mind, one of the few instances of equality on American television. There are so many instances of people reading or watching a fictional character, and that character then inspires them to follow a certain profession or path.
The works we consume can profoundly impact how we perceive the world, so it’s naive for me or anyone to claim that some writing doesn’t matter simply because it’s not winning awards or directly shaping policy. The important question is not whether it matters, but rather if we are putting in that work to make the world better.
It’s a difficult thing to know what work will inspire change. Some people spend their entire lives laboring on novels and scripts that, for various reasons, both personal and professional, never see the light of day. We cannot control if we produce the next prolific piece of art that everything one is talking about, and even then, we cannot control how our work will be received. Still, we can try to make it a habit to care about the world around us and infuse that care into our writing.
When we talk about giving back, a lot of the conversation focuses on grand acts of charity. The web hones in on big-name writers such as Nora Roberts, who give millions of dollars annually to charities or writers like Sylvia Day, who actively encourages her fans' input to see what organizations she should contribute to. Charitable giving can seem almost like a publicity stunt as authors such as Shannon M. Parker and Amber Smith donate a part of the proceeds they make from their novels to nonprofits. These writers may be genuine in their philanthropy, but it also acts as good press to up their book sales.
As writers of the Internet, though, such extravagant giving may not always be a possibility. We are constrained by very toxic systems (i.e., social media, poor labor laws, contract law, etc.) that are too numerous to get into here. This has never been a lucrative profession. I understand that often we do not get to focus on everything that we want to write about. Many of us are freelancers with tight deadlines, and sometimes, hell, most of the time, you have to take the contract that focuses on boosting the SEO of a travel resort or a finance website.
However, there are small ways that we can try to add acts of care into what we do. One of my favorite blogs on Instagram is an astrology account called Bitch Rising. In between funny posts about big Libra energy and Capricorn mood boards, they are plugging handles for Native-owned businesses and encouraging people to vote.
Source: Bitch Rising
This signal boosting proves that you do not have to be a James Baldwin to have an impact. We can do thousands of small things with our platforms and our words to make the world slightly better: we can plug the efforts of other businesses or organizations; we can promote policy; we can even uplift the work of other artists.
Another type of care goes back to the act of being a witness. While we may not always have the privilege to publish hard-hitting news or the next great American novel, bearing witness to someone gives them the luxury of feeling seen. There are plenty of people who feel unrepresented by society, and there is a certain power in giving them a vehicle to be heard.
For example, the concept of pride within the LGBTQIA+ movement was so important because mainstream society had made many queer people feel worthless. A lot of effort was placed in building a community of acceptance as a strategy for political power — hence Pride becoming a rallying call for queer people across the US and the world. As one of the original organizers of this movement remarked in an interview with The Allusionist in 2015:
“People did not have power then; even now, we only have some. But anyone can have pride in themselves, and that would make them happier as people, and produce the movement likely to produce change.”
Representation matters a great deal in these instances, and the characters you create don’t have to have a widespread appeal. They really only have to make one person feel less shitty. If your words lessen the anxiety and dread of a single person who feels hurt and gaslit by this broken society, then you are doing something pretty damn special.
And so I ask again, are you doing the work to write things that make the world slightly less shitty?
Are you trying to challenge the power of others?
Are you advancing the material conditions of those around you?
Do you try to uplift voices or make people feel less alone?
It would be unreasonable to ask anyone to grapple with all these questions simultaneously, but it's fair to demand that all of us work on at least one of them.
We are facing unprecedented challenges as a species. If you have somehow managed to capture the eyeballs of thousands, maybe even millions of people, and you use that moment to advance an unhelpful discourse, and maybe even a false one, then you should feel guilty. You are not a helpful writer, and that realization should sting a little.
The job of a writer has always been a complicated one. We feel the weight of being both removed and connected. Our words touch people’s lives, but we rarely understand how far they travel or their full impact on the world. It’s sometimes difficult to assess whether what we are doing matters at all, especially if what we write about seems so far removed from the “big questions” plaguing our society.
It all matters, though, because people do not choose what words impact them. They take in all the content they run across, and that means everything from the grandest essay about human nature to the smallest review on a video game can influence what someone believes. We have to care about what we focus on, but simultaneously we need to recognize that we do not have complete control over our impact.
While the toxic systems we exist within prevent us from having full agency over our lives, and a few of us have far more agency than others, most of us can do something. We might not be able to mitigate the majority of the harm in our work — because many times we have to take a harmful contract or job to eat (that’s life) — but we still should push at the margins to advance work that helps the world. It’s our moral imperative to do so.
Otherwise, we become passive witnesses in the world's destruction, and that’s not an ending worth writing about.