SEO friendly regrets, I've had a few

But then again, to few to mention

Recently I saw a callout online from an editor at a prestigious publication. The editor was asking for personal essays that centre on regret, i.e., what’s the one thing you did that you regret most in your life?

To the average person it’s an insane request. To the freelance writer it’s a writing prompt.

Ooh, let me see if I have an 800-word regret that conforms to your outlet’s tone and demographics, thinks the journeywoman freelance writer.

But that primitive ping response may belong to another era of freelance writing too, i.e., the decades prior when writers – youngish women mostly – could make a decent living off tapping the personal vein. Where you might just get a book deal or a column from it. (The economic factors behind certain writing trends –behind entire genres of writing – could be an academic course. It probably is somewhere.)

But those days are over. The industry has shrunk like a cashmere sweater in the washing machine and we’re all gasping to wiggle our way in or out. Opportunities are scarce and ideas at most mainstream publications must be SEO-friendly, and packaged with headlines that prioritize online reaction rather than reader reflection. 

The freelance writer of today must ask herself if she wants her deepest darkest regret to be SEO-d to shit or manhandled by an overworked editor tasked with executing the workload of three editors.

And that’s if the pitch is accepted. Having your deepest darkest regret rejected is a whole other category of humiliation.

To be a freelance writer now is something like how I imagine it feels to be an orange at the Tropicana factory. A thing to be squeezed till empty and then tossed into a pile of damp carcasses who also thought they were catching a break when they were plucked off the tree on that brisk December afternoon.

Later, I saw another writer retweet the editor’s pitch callout with a caveat. I can’t find it and am too lazy to search for it and I would almost feel obligated to reach out and ask if I could use it, but it was something along the lines of ‘Writers beware. Don’t be baited by a byline. Really be sure it’s worth the risk of online exposure.’

It went on to talk about how clickbait-y these kinds of essays can be and how damaging that kind of disclosure can be to the essayist, which can often be the case.

I love a good caveat and this one is particularly savoury to me because it underlines vulnerability. I believe every adult should understand their unique vulnerabilities and when you’re a writer your main vulnerability is your desire to be read, a desire that can get you into trouble.

What will you do to fulfill that need? What won’t you do?

I also like to imagine the editor who made the callout finding their inbox filled with pitches that run along the lines of My Greatest Regret Was Making My Greatest Regret An SEO-friendly essay for $350.

That is a timely authentic essay that I would read. It’s one I would write. It’s an essay that could become a prestige limited series starring Keri Russell as The Writer.

The pitch callout, the caveat retweet, and my own personal feelings about writing – I can’t do anything else even as the opportunities pop like bubbles around me– had me thinking about the traps of writing about personal things and how that can lead to regret.

One of the things the personal essay genre rarely takes account of is how often the writer, i.e., me, may have written something personal and managed to get themselves and their actions completely wrong in that moment in time. You don’t have to be a writer to know how your understanding of yourself and your life alters as you get older and wiser and more self-savvy. In fact, it’s very much a part of getting older to realize how little you understood about yourself at the precise moment when you thought you had it all figured out and made the decision to commit that error in judgment to print.

This is where writing – when you’re not able to expand and indulge but kept within the confines of SEO or tone and demographics – may not be worth the risk.

But then again, maybe it is? This is part of the writer’s dilemma too.

That dynamic between self-knowledge and regret, understanding and ignorance keeps me writing and thinking, thinking, and writing. I like to remember how often I’m getting it wrong in practice and how often I’m driven to keeping going in that practice in the desperate hope that every so often I’ll get it right.

But what do I know? I’m just writing and thinking, hauling my carcass around in hopes of a timely squeeze.