The Benefit of Writing an Essay That Goes Viral for All the Wrong Reasons

When Taylor Swift announced her engagement, my wheels started turning. Not because I wasn't happy for her—I'm a curmudgeon, but not a total thief of joy. I am an essayist—my ideas for an essay on the topic of her pending nuptials began percolating because I knew, intuitively, that Swift's fame and fortune would do nothing to shield her from the realities that marriage is hard on its best day. And like Nora Ephron famously said, “Everything is copy.”

(My Writer Success Story Began With Getting Over Myself.)

Perhaps I’m naïve, but I had no idea how divisive the topic of marriage would be when I wrote about it. As I discussed in my most recent op-ed for MSNBC, "I hope the women in Swift’s circle are having honest discussions with her about what marriage is, and what it isn’t. What it can be, and what it can’t be. What it gives to a person, but also what it takes away." (To say nothing of the fact that research continues to highlight how single, childfree women are simply happier than their married counterparts.)

Swift is not a child—and I most certainly wasn’t when I married at 39 years old. Still, my only goal was to openly hope for Swift that which I never received from my close circle when I decided to tie the knot: Some real and practical talk about how marriage was about to change my life. The good, the bad, and the impossibly ugly.

Well. It wasn’t the first time an article I’d written for adult audiences had gone viral. And while this was not my first rodeo in which I was targeted for my views, I am always shocked when my essays and op-eds capture the attention of large audiences. And I was especially surprised when Megyn Kelly, of Fox News notoriety, took 10 minutes out of her show to highlight my thoughts on marriage (she also wrote an entire response to my essay, which she published on her website). 

Sure, the once-divorced Kelly patronized me, even calling me a "nitwit" and referring to me as “Poor Christina” throughout her segment. And all because I dared to suggest that marriage is rarely rainbow and unicorns—a fact with which Kelly should be well acquainted, given her record.

In the aftermath of Kelly’s attention and personal attacks, many of my friends and colleagues openly admitted that they would have buckled under the scrutiny. I understand their concerns. It’s unsettling to walk around with a bullseye on your back, even if only virtually. But as a writer, I invite this level of attention every time. And I don’t just invite it; I revel in it. Come at me, bro (as the kids like to say).

I’ve been publishing essays for the media for over 10 years, with one of them even landing me an invitation to Tucker Carlson’s former Fox News program (as I mention elsewhere, I politely declined that battle of the wits with the unarmed).

More recently, I wrote an op-ed for MSNBC daring to argue that teachers are educated professionals and should be treated as such. The piece made it onto a Fox News segment because of course it did—where else is hatred for our nation’s teachers more unbridled? And then of course came Twitter, where my name trended for two days. When a long-time friend got wind of my article’s notoriety, they even “unfriended” me on Facebook in the midst of it (because I guess we’re all 13 years old at heart).

When the Twitter masses came for me, I remember discovering that several of the accounts were impossibly high-profile, consisting mostly of older white men who lead major organizations, or who had the kind of following that an obscure writer like me only dreams about. Unsurprisingly, these keyboard warriors used their platforms to tell their millions of followers to have a go at me.

Still, I was undeterred. Rather than lockdown my account, I used muckrack.com, a media analysis website, to show my new virtual bullies exactly the boost my article received as a result of their rabid attention. When someone who identifies as a journalist or media professional shares the link to your article on Twitter, Muckrack lists their name and number of followers, as well as your article’s “journalist reach.” (According to Muckrack, “journalist reach” combines the total number of people following the journalist or media professional who shared your article on Twitter.)

The metrics are not perfect and the site often makes mistakes (such as occasionally attributing an article to a person who did not actually write the piece). Muckrack also cannot account for the full scope of social media engagement of a given link. But the data was a good enough tool for my purposes.

And my purpose was to show these high-profile trolls something fabulous: A few Muckrack screenshots detailing my article’s tremendous success, thanks to their internet pile-on. According to Muckrack, within one or two days of my article going live, it had amassed a “journalist reach” of nearly 10 million people. I had never had a piece go so viral.

I was sad to see some of those high-traffic accounts delete my article from their feed once they saw how helpful their engagement was to my exposure. Muckrack’s metrics responded to this change and automatically reduced my article’s “journalist reach.” Le sigh.

Here’s the thing about me: I am mildly diabolical. Thanks to growing up in a volatile and high-conflict home, I’ve never really encountered an argument that I wasn’t more than thrilled to take on. Going toe-to-toe with antagonists is in my blood. Perhaps that’s my own issue, but I firmly believe that it’s hard to build a career as a professional writer if the goal is to write only for people who agree with us. We can save that for pleasant emails and holiday cards.

I think one of my literary idols would support these sentiments. As I’ve discussed elsewhere, Susan Shapiro practices what she preaches to her students. She writes vulnerable, raw, and relatable essays and memoirs about her life experiences ranging from love to addiction, but she is also abundantly clear about what such successful work requires of writers. Shapiro has shared stories with me about how she even received phone calls at home from people who don’t like what she’s written (okay, that’s creepy). One of the main pieces of advice she offers in Byline Bible: Get Published In 5 Weeks, her popular writing guide and book off of which her classes are based, deals with concerns about rocking the boat: “If you don’t want to offend anyone, try writing a cookbook,” she famously says.

The fact is, people who disagree with us are also reading our work, and reading our work is the entire point. And when those people are high profile with huge followings? Even better. More readers equal more exposure. The scrutiny has been a boon for my writing career, and I recommend that every aspiring book author write essays and op-eds for national news outlets for this very reason. 

Here's the other piece: I am also a writer for children. The truth is, my essays—the articles I write for adults—are, in part, what have made my children's books so successful. The circulation of my essays has boosted my writing career as a whole. Whenever I write an article for a high-traffic news outlet, and if that article happens to go viral, there is an observable spike in my Amazon best seller rankings. Sure, those metrics are also imperfect and cannot provide the full picture, and I have no way of knowing whether or how my viral essays have translated into book sales. Still, it doesn’t matter. What matters is that more people know of our work.

I still don’t understand why anyone as high-profile as Megyn Kelly would give a rat’s ass about my thoughts on marriage and Taylor Swift, but here we are. And that’s how writing essays and op-eds for national outlets works. You never know which of your ideas are going to hit a nerve—the point is to grab your metal bat and swing it as hard as you can. Your other essays and books—your career as a writer—might thank you for the added exposure.