Hi, I'm Rachel Hills.
I'm a London-based (via Sydney, Australia) writer, researcher and contributor to publications including the Sydney Morning Herald, Cosmopolitan, Glamour, Marie Claire, The Atlantic, Girlfriend and more. I'm also writing a book about Gen Y, sex and identity. This is my blog.
I'd love to hear from you. Submit a question to my Ask Rachel column here, send me an email here, connect with me on Twitter here or find out more about my paid work at www.rachelhills.net.
I'm a London-based (via Sydney, Australia) writer, researcher and contributor to publications including the Sydney Morning Herald, Cosmopolitan, Glamour, Marie Claire, The Atlantic, Girlfriend and more. I'm also writing a book about Gen Y, sex and identity. This is my blog.
I'd love to hear from you. Submit a question to my Ask Rachel column here, send me an email here, connect with me on Twitter here or find out more about my paid work at www.rachelhills.net.
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Posts tagged "creativity"
retronova Asks:
Hey Rachel, any books that have influenced your thinking and philosophy? I'd love to do some summer reading.
rachelhills Said:
Great question. The funny thing about non-fiction writing (and any writing really, and possibly even anything) is that the more you do of it, the more critical you become of other people’s attempts. So while something like, say, Naomi Wolf’s The Beauty Myth inspired me to want to write a mainstream feminist book, when I returned to it after writing most of said book, all I could think was, “Naomi, your analysis of power is all wrong.”
Anyway, books that have shaped my thinking in writing my own include (listed in order of most to least accessible) Leonore Tiefer’s Sex Is Not a Natural Act (very readable), Gail Hawkes’sA Sociology of Sex and Sexuality (a bit dense and academic), and Michel Foucault’s The History of Sexuality, which took me three attempts over as many years to understand, but when I finally did, I was like, “Awesome. So you’re basically arguing the same things I am.” I also liked Annie Pott’s The Science/Fiction of Sex which, while a bit academic and from a different perspective to my own, is a fun and smart read.
For non-sex related books, Brigid Delaney’s This Restless Life felt like life wrapped up in a(n admittedly complicated) bow to me when I first read it, and I have recommended it to countless people since. It is smart and ambitious, but very readable and not at all academic. Paul Gilding’s The Great Disruption makes climate change so compelling and easy to understand that I texted my friends in excitement as I read it. Hazel Rowley’s biography of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre is an inspiration, and while I wouldn’t say it has particularly influenced my philosophy per se, Catherine Mayer’s Amortality is an excellent piece of non-fiction work.
Finally, on the fiction side of the fence, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Lionel Shriver’s We Need To Talk About Kevin (much better than the film, IMO), and Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach are all outstanding. If you haven’t yet read them, you are very lucky, because it means you still have the chance to enjoy them for the first time!
I’ve spent the last couple of weeks tearing my hair out over my manuscript as I prepared to send it to my editor this week, picking apart the holes and despairing over how I would ever fill them.
But last night, as I moved all the chapters out of their separate files and into one big one, I experienced a moment of awe.
I did it! I wrote a book! Sure, it’s not perfect and there are about a hundred things I’d like to change about it. But there are 70,000 words on the page, and they are mostly smart and interesting. And just as importantly, they reflect the vision I had when I began working on this project five years ago.
And in that moment at 3am that seemed pretty amazing. Hell, even now, 20 minutes after I sent it off, it seems pretty amazing.
One step closer.
Now for the months of edits and revisions.
I’ve got a story in UK Cosmopolitan this month, a reprint of an article I wrote last year for the Australian edition.
Not the first time one of my stories has been syndicated, but the first time one has been syndicated to a country where I can actually purchase the magazine. So yay.
Page 95, ‘The Rise of the iNarcissist.’ Here’s a taster:
The problem goes to the root of the way our brains are wired, says Dr Larry Rosen, author of iDisorder: Understanding Our Obsession With Technology and Overcoming Its Hold On Us. Those Facebook “likes”, blog comments, and Twitter follows? All give us a shot of a little chemical named dopamine, which is associated with happiness.“I love the rush when someone ‘likes’ a status or a photo,” says Ruby, 22. Amelia, 30, describes a “feeling of success” whenever someone responds to her on social media.
But the net can also make us anxious. What if no one comments on your blog post, or your Twitter crew all go out for drinks without you, or the girl you worked with after school in year 10 deletes you on Facebook? “Narcissism is an interesting combination of pleasure and anxiety,” says Rosen. “You get pleasure, obviously, out of people responding to you or telling you how great you are, but there’s also a lot of anxiety that they won’t respond, or that they’ll respond differently from how you might like.”
The internet allows us to control the way the rest of the world sees us like never before: you can be a model, an up-and-coming author, or a celebrity fashionista with a few strategically angled photographs and a well-written Twitter bio. But the ability to control our image comes with a price of increased self-consciousness. We don’t just play at being “celebrities” on the internet; our lifestyles increasingly resemble theirs, whether we like it or not, as anyone who has ever been tagged in an unflattering Facebook photo can vouch.
iNarcissism is not the same thing as Narcissistic Personality Disorder, the term psychologists use to describe people who have a pathological self-preoccupation. Where a person with NPD will manipulate others for affection, lie about their achievements, and lash out at those who don’t support their inflated self-image, a garden variety iNarcissist will upload a few too many photos of themselves, keep you abreast of their every thought and movement, and overuse the “like” button on Facebook and Twitter in order to attract your attention, says Rosen. Annoying, sure, but not exactly the kind of person you’d cross the street to avoid…
Related: “Schtick.”
Ask Rachel: Why do you write for women’s magazines?
- Her: "You should have a slide saying 'The Sex Myth is bullshit.'"
- Me: "Well, I'm already using the word 'bullshit' in my talk, so that could work."
- Having weekends again.
- Meeting new people and exploring new neighbourhoods of London.
- Reading other people’s books.
- Getting started on new projects.
- My hair no longer (literally) turning grey from stress.
- Actually, you know, HAVING WRITTEN A BOOK.
Hi, we reach 13 million readers but we can’t afford to pay you freelance types for your work. Can we have 1,200 words for free?
Meanwhile, Marco Arment’s The Magazine has just 25,000 subscribers who pay $1.99 a month, allowing him to pay writers $800 per article.
(via chartier)
The second this-makes-the-Atlantic-look-really-bad thing to happen this year.
(via shortformblog)
Is it telling that my first response to this post was, “$125,000 for six articles? Sign me up for that gig!”
I hadn’t realised they paid quite that well.
For the record, as someone who contributes to TheAtlantic.com, they pay me more than $100 per article. They also pay me a less than anyone else I write for, and if I lived on TheAtlantic.com stories alone, I would not be a full-time writer. I would be a hobbyist.
It is also true that they provide great “exposure,” in the sense that their audience responds to my articles better than most other audiences I write for, and I get loads of interesting people following me on Twitter whenever I have a story published with them. I like their audience, and I feel at home there stylistically.
But ultimately, for a professional writer, the purpose of “exposure” is to get bigger and better paying gigs. Basically, I write for them in the hope that in a few years I’ll be one of those people on a retainer (if not a $125,000 one, but that would be nice) to write smart, well-researched articles, whether for The Atlantic or someone else.
More than the decline of the media industry (those sweet gigs still exist, after all), Nate’s post highlights for me the huge gap between the senior and contributing editors at the top of any given publication, and the masses trying to break in at the bottom: many of them sans higher paying gigs to pay their bills.
(via mariavontraphouse)
