Recently Ross Barkan wrote a post about a group of critics who make a practice of writing long, obsessive articles about authors or cultural phenomenon.
Thanks for writing this. I am in the position of having both been a very popular blogger (at one point had a regularly viral pseudonym), and also written for legacy publications (currently working on a piece for NYmag). I think a lot about the differences in form.
I think part of what’s happening here is that the differences in style actually cut against each other, which you alluded to when you mentioned that sometimes magazine writers come here and try to do magazine-style writing and don’t succeed and get annoyed. It’s true across social platforms too. If you simply repurpose your instagram posts for Twitter/X without rewriting them, you generally won’t succeed (there are exceptions).
I'm not American and had never heard of NBA YoungBoy.
Daniel Falatko's essay was obsessive and dazzling. I'm awed by the effort, the research, the delicate fairness, the pitch perfect prose.
I think my comment on the essay was akin to 'nice work'. I was too speechless to know what to say about an essay on a topic and person of no interest to me, yet kept me spellbound, and which, weeks later, I'm still thinking about. What can a reader possibly say that isn't asinine.
Anyway, to anyone who got through this essay, and got to this comment - read the Daniel Falatko essay linked by Naomi, because it's so fooking good. And yes, it's also deeply interesting and disturbing and the melody lingers.
Yeah I've had the same feeling reading The Metropolitan Review and The Republic of Letters. Some writers will find real depth in something I would never even consider. It's very humbling, and a reminder of how bad mainstream media has become. Writing like this used to get you a column in a major newspaper.
Lots to think about here -- thank you! I'm a formerly successful magazine writer and editor who now publishes extremely non-literary posts (I write about branding and advertising ffs!) but I'm always curious about how literary nonfiction happens.
One note: W. David Marx's book -- which I'm reading right now -- is "Blank Space," not "Blank Slate." He writes in his introduction: "Where society once encouraged and provided an abundance of cultural invention, there is now a _blank space_."
My god, thanks for this. You've given me muchhhhhhh food for thought. I've been battling the "what is my substack really for" for quite a while now, trying to strike that balance between people who know me for a certain kind of writing (op-eds) and people who may want to know me for my more fun stuff (the latter is certainly more enjoyable and easier for me to write). I love people's effort-posts generally speaking, but for myself, I'd only have the time, and interest, to maybe do 1-2/yr given I'm also doing so much other kinds of writing, and living. Just...great, great, great job on this piece and thank you so much.
Thanks for this service-effort hybrid post. It’s true about obsession writing, obsession is genuine and builds trust. I could read a true obsessive on their obsession for miles, too engrossed even to be annoyed by lack of editing.
Very nice, thoughtful piece. The heartbreak of your 'breakout' novel's failure. Ugh.
I kept notes.
"What’s the worst that can happen? Your post gets ignored. So what? We are all used to being ignored."
Yay, Naomi! I think you are on the verge of breaking out. In a couple of years, with luck, you will look back to the moment you got the New Yorker feature, and say, that was IT.
With best wishes, Pete Tillman
--
"The happiest part of a man's life is what he passes lying awake
Thanks for writing this. I’ll have a longer comment later (probably next week, when my kids are back in school) but for now I’ll just say that this does help me better understand what’s going on here.
This is really interesting. For longer pieces I develop, I always assume their best placement is external. My Substack readership is low, and I've been trained on the conventional wisdom that Substack, as a social media platform, is not where thoughtful, longish pieces find traction. Smaller bites go down easier here. Obviously there are counterexamples (you list many!), but I had internalized that successful longform work on Substack requires audience authority first. For instance, Naomi Kanakia is known to be thoughtful and a good writer, so people are willing to invest their time in a 5,000-word Kanakia piece on Substack. I don't know enough of, say, Begler to know which came first: authority or length. To be honest, I'm still a little skeptical -- hard to drop my old priors. You ask what the cost is of publishing a long piece here. I'd say the cost, for unknowns like myself, is the opportunity: you might land that piece with an external pub that already has built-in readers. This was true for me with criticism I published in Electric Literature, and a long piece on modes of creativity that's being published in The Philosopher. But maybe as an experiment I should reserve a long piece for my Substack.
First time I have heard "effort-post," but in "What is an effort-post," I can't fine a definition of the term. (I haven't googled it yet.) Is an "effort-post" one that has taken a lot of effort to write? Is the evidence of that effort mainly the *length* of the post? Is it an "effort-post" because it was/is an "effort" to reach for a large audience, and/or to get printed in a "legacy" publication? Is it one that requires as much effort to read as to write? All of the above?
Seems pretty clear to me: Longer than a typical magazine article, obsessively researched in a way a professional writer would expect to be paid for, not pegged to a timely hook though a magazine article about the same topic would/could be, at times personal or discursive and also about the act of writing the thing, e.g. the five examples provided.
Let me note, however, that you are wrong in one key respect: link aggregation is actually really, really hard. And draining! Hence why so many prolific roundup writers use the phrase "I CONSUME the BORING/BAD THING so you don't have to" ; the "service" is having your time wasted going through the slush pile. I have a relatively "fun" beat (daily newspaper crosswords), and I still dread writing my roundups; imagine if I had to trawl through the Financial Times for trivia nuggets like Lynn Yu, or (shudder!) rightoid Twitter like Cartoons Hate Her.
Service-posting only works as a path to popularity on this site if you can stick with it, and you are not going to want to stick with it unless you are a sicko wonk. Effort-posting is much, much more enjoyable, and only slightly less lucrative.
Side note: I've never made a nickel in decades of writing reviews. We used to get paper copies (and still do, occasionally). That was nice. I've had a few magazine/journal 'sales', that paid in prestige and author copies. The only cash I can recall earning was $150 from the Las Vegas Review-Journal, for a spite piece about a former employer. I made my living as a mining geologist. Long-retired.
Thanks for writing this. I am in the position of having both been a very popular blogger (at one point had a regularly viral pseudonym), and also written for legacy publications (currently working on a piece for NYmag). I think a lot about the differences in form.
I think part of what’s happening here is that the differences in style actually cut against each other, which you alluded to when you mentioned that sometimes magazine writers come here and try to do magazine-style writing and don’t succeed and get annoyed. It’s true across social platforms too. If you simply repurpose your instagram posts for Twitter/X without rewriting them, you generally won’t succeed (there are exceptions).
I'm not American and had never heard of NBA YoungBoy.
Daniel Falatko's essay was obsessive and dazzling. I'm awed by the effort, the research, the delicate fairness, the pitch perfect prose.
I think my comment on the essay was akin to 'nice work'. I was too speechless to know what to say about an essay on a topic and person of no interest to me, yet kept me spellbound, and which, weeks later, I'm still thinking about. What can a reader possibly say that isn't asinine.
Anyway, to anyone who got through this essay, and got to this comment - read the Daniel Falatko essay linked by Naomi, because it's so fooking good. And yes, it's also deeply interesting and disturbing and the melody lingers.
Yeah I've had the same feeling reading The Metropolitan Review and The Republic of Letters. Some writers will find real depth in something I would never even consider. It's very humbling, and a reminder of how bad mainstream media has become. Writing like this used to get you a column in a major newspaper.
Lots to think about here -- thank you! I'm a formerly successful magazine writer and editor who now publishes extremely non-literary posts (I write about branding and advertising ffs!) but I'm always curious about how literary nonfiction happens.
One note: W. David Marx's book -- which I'm reading right now -- is "Blank Space," not "Blank Slate." He writes in his introduction: "Where society once encouraged and provided an abundance of cultural invention, there is now a _blank space_."
My god, thanks for this. You've given me muchhhhhhh food for thought. I've been battling the "what is my substack really for" for quite a while now, trying to strike that balance between people who know me for a certain kind of writing (op-eds) and people who may want to know me for my more fun stuff (the latter is certainly more enjoyable and easier for me to write). I love people's effort-posts generally speaking, but for myself, I'd only have the time, and interest, to maybe do 1-2/yr given I'm also doing so much other kinds of writing, and living. Just...great, great, great job on this piece and thank you so much.
Nice service piece with a discourse hook. So I guess I do have to finish my effortful exploration of Joy Williams’ work and reputation…
Thanks for this service-effort hybrid post. It’s true about obsession writing, obsession is genuine and builds trust. I could read a true obsessive on their obsession for miles, too engrossed even to be annoyed by lack of editing.
Very nice, thoughtful piece. The heartbreak of your 'breakout' novel's failure. Ugh.
I kept notes.
"What’s the worst that can happen? Your post gets ignored. So what? We are all used to being ignored."
Yay, Naomi! I think you are on the verge of breaking out. In a couple of years, with luck, you will look back to the moment you got the New Yorker feature, and say, that was IT.
With best wishes, Pete Tillman
--
"The happiest part of a man's life is what he passes lying awake
in bed in the morning." -- Dr. Johnson
Thanks for writing this. I’ll have a longer comment later (probably next week, when my kids are back in school) but for now I’ll just say that this does help me better understand what’s going on here.
This is really interesting. For longer pieces I develop, I always assume their best placement is external. My Substack readership is low, and I've been trained on the conventional wisdom that Substack, as a social media platform, is not where thoughtful, longish pieces find traction. Smaller bites go down easier here. Obviously there are counterexamples (you list many!), but I had internalized that successful longform work on Substack requires audience authority first. For instance, Naomi Kanakia is known to be thoughtful and a good writer, so people are willing to invest their time in a 5,000-word Kanakia piece on Substack. I don't know enough of, say, Begler to know which came first: authority or length. To be honest, I'm still a little skeptical -- hard to drop my old priors. You ask what the cost is of publishing a long piece here. I'd say the cost, for unknowns like myself, is the opportunity: you might land that piece with an external pub that already has built-in readers. This was true for me with criticism I published in Electric Literature, and a long piece on modes of creativity that's being published in The Philosopher. But maybe as an experiment I should reserve a long piece for my Substack.
First time I have heard "effort-post," but in "What is an effort-post," I can't fine a definition of the term. (I haven't googled it yet.) Is an "effort-post" one that has taken a lot of effort to write? Is the evidence of that effort mainly the *length* of the post? Is it an "effort-post" because it was/is an "effort" to reach for a large audience, and/or to get printed in a "legacy" publication? Is it one that requires as much effort to read as to write? All of the above?
Seems pretty clear to me: Longer than a typical magazine article, obsessively researched in a way a professional writer would expect to be paid for, not pegged to a timely hook though a magazine article about the same topic would/could be, at times personal or discursive and also about the act of writing the thing, e.g. the five examples provided.
Thanks for that. Still, I don't think the label/name "effort-post" handles all of that
Thank you for the shout-out :'D
Let me note, however, that you are wrong in one key respect: link aggregation is actually really, really hard. And draining! Hence why so many prolific roundup writers use the phrase "I CONSUME the BORING/BAD THING so you don't have to" ; the "service" is having your time wasted going through the slush pile. I have a relatively "fun" beat (daily newspaper crosswords), and I still dread writing my roundups; imagine if I had to trawl through the Financial Times for trivia nuggets like Lynn Yu, or (shudder!) rightoid Twitter like Cartoons Hate Her.
Service-posting only works as a path to popularity on this site if you can stick with it, and you are not going to want to stick with it unless you are a sicko wonk. Effort-posting is much, much more enjoyable, and only slightly less lucrative.
But we are saying the same thing no? Service posting sucks (for the writer)
We're both saying service-posting sucks (for the writer), but I think it sucks on axes beyond "boring" and "doesn't funnel to your non-service work."
Huh. My public writing these days is almost all book reviews and related stuff at Goodreads. I'm pretty good at it (kof, kof): http://www.goodreads.com/user/show/8101737-peter-tillman
My service-posting there is usually giving back-story to well-known books, like this one on Farley Mowat's "Never Cry Wolf":
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1459277096
I enjoyed doing that one (and others).
Side note: I've never made a nickel in decades of writing reviews. We used to get paper copies (and still do, occasionally). That was nice. I've had a few magazine/journal 'sales', that paid in prestige and author copies. The only cash I can recall earning was $150 from the Las Vegas Review-Journal, for a spite piece about a former employer. I made my living as a mining geologist. Long-retired.