Reddit isn’t the future of creativity, but it is a vital part of it
From Boing Boing. The site has emerged as an important creative platform, but getting—and keeping—an audience there is a tricky thing.
By James Erwin.
[excerpt]
One day a few years ago, I was on my lunch break and I decided to go on Reddit. I found an interesting thread, and I started punching out a story. The story got away from me. Before I knew it, it was a few pages long and it was time to get back to work. I posted part of it on Reddit.
I still don’t understand what happened next.
At the time, not many people were posting huge stories on Reddit and not many more were reading them. To a lot of Reddit users, and to a lot of other people, it felt like something entirely new. It wasn’t the greatest writing ever, not even my best writing. But something about it struck a chord, something caught fire. A quarter-million people read the story that afternoon; one of them named it “Rome Sweet Rome” and the title stuck. By the time I left work at 5, I had several publication offers. That weekend, I started working with a manager in Hollywood. A week after that, Warner Brothers came sniffing around. Two months later, on the basis of that half-baked first draft of a story’s first act, Variety announced I had a screenplay deal.
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James Erwin is author of Acadia, available now for pre-order at Amazon.