"I felt like I had to deliver another book in 18 months."

The TPF Q&A with author and writer Megan Angelo

Megan Angelo wrote one of my favorite books about a possible near-future, Followers. It’s incisive, funny, and terrifying all in 384 very readable pages. Less dystopian and more a vision of what might be to come. Not great, guys! Stop reading this silly intro and go buy Followers.

Now that you’re back, hello again. I met Megan in the olden days when we worked together at Business Insider’s illustrious Media vertical. (RIP The Wire. RIP journalism generally.) She and Glynnis MacNicol understood where the media was going and what it meant in a truly prescient way. I was present most of the time, too.

Megan went on to write for outlets including The New York Times, Glamour, Vogue, and Romper, which has the best name of all of them. She’s currently finishing up her second novel. We talked about why robots can’t report, teaching kids, picking your spots, and the black hole that is book publishing.

Megan at a shiny table.

Three Point Four Media: You pop up randomly in one of my feeds occasionally. I read your writing and think, “Aw, Megan” and then I think “I wish Megan wrote more.” What are you working on now?

Megan Angelo: Mostly the book. It’s gone through a lot of different iterations. It has turned out to be about an Elon Musk character that we know on page one is getting murdered. The rest of the book looks at the people close to him and tries to figure out who kills him. The characters in the book are also into gene editing. It’s a thing we hear about the Silicon Valley guys doing recreationally. Pronatalism is step one, embryo screening is step two, and then actually editing your embryo is step three. Editing your embryo means you could pass on whatever modifications you made. No one in the United States has done that to our knowledge yet. It’s a red line in the scientific community. But I just kept thinking about it in the same way I was thinking about social media when I wrote Followers. Any minute I’m going to open my phone and read that Elon Musk did it. I keep feeling like it’s one of those things that is about to happen, and that’s where I love to live when I’m thinking about fiction.

I’m also teaching at Cedar Crest College, and I am writing for Glamour once in a while. I'm working on a story right now about a woman whose husband was taken by ICE in a pretty dramatic fashion. I pick my spots.

I like that. I pick my spots, too. Many fewer spots than you. But still: spots picked.

I have taken up so much of the internet. It’s someone else’s turn. I am only writing things that I think are actually worth someone’s time to sit down and read.

High volume doesn’t work anymore, either. It’s much better to write one good thing a week or even a month than 10 fine things and hope one of them goes viral.

Twitter is a huge part of that, too. I don’t go on Twitter at all, and that’s where I used to find everything that I was going to read that week. What is everyone reacting to? Let me read this. Let me maybe write about it. There are a lot of breaks in the communication pipeline that used to get us from not reading something to reading it.

You have a Wikipedia page. That’s very fun. Have you looked at your Wikipedia page?

Someone showed it to me. Whoever wrote it made me a year younger than I am. So thank you. That’s the only way I know it’s not my mom. She’s a stickler for accuracy.

There’s a great photo, with a caption: “Angelo in May 2019.” Something about that strikes me as so specific and bizarre.

There should be a protagonist of a cozy mystery who is a little lady making Wikipedia pages.

I really loved Followers, which was smart and ahead of its time. Book publishing is such a mystery to me. Did you have any sense of what constituted success? Was there feedback on the sales or the next book or anything? It’s such a black box.

I thought that as somebody in media, it was going to be easy for me. Not so much the writing part, but the industry part. I thought it would be very adjacent to the kind of publishing and stories you and I had done. I would just get it more than somebody who didn’t have that experience. I did not.

I wrote Followers in a vacuum. I thought the topic was super relevant, but I had no sense of the book industry or what would work.

After Followers, I felt like I had to deliver another book in 18 months. I don’t even know who said that to me, but it was what I set out to do, and I just could not do it.

I'm the person who used to write five articles a day. I really did not think I was going to have a problem writing a second book in 18 months. That’s about how long it took me to write Followers. But I did. I just crashed and burned over and over. I just couldn't do it. I started a couple of books. I was still watching the numbers for Followers. I felt like I had to deliver something like Followers, something that felt of the moment.

It was also Covid. Followers came out in January 2020, so most of my appearances were virtual. The time that I would have been out on the road, hopefully getting more writing done, all changed.

I can’t really tell what influenced the difficulty I had most. Was it Covid? Was it little kids? Was it the expectation? I’ve thought about it a lot, and I still don’t know. I couldn’t really get my head on straight until I started this book, and even that had to go through a lot of different iterations to get there. Now that I’m almost at the end, I’m not sorry that it took this long. I don’t have any formal training or an MFA. I think you just have to do it again and again until you get better. I don’t think I would have wanted what I thought was ready to sell three years ago out there right now.

Did you know in the back of your head that what you were writing wasn’t ready? Or did that realization come later?

I’m very good as a writer at deluding myself when it comes to delivery. I will say to my husband every week, “I’m finishing the draft this week.” I will say to my agent, every week, “I’m going to be at the end of the revision this week.” I told my agent the other day that I wished she could see me in any other sphere of my life, like journalism, PTA, kid’s birthday parties. I am a nailer of deadlines. I don’t understand why I can’t seem to gauge where I’m at in a fiction project at any time. She told me she had seen this 1,000 times with people like me and that writing fiction is just a different alchemy from everything else. You need to take the time you need. There were minor revelations along the way where I knew it, but I still don’t think I know it. I have to learn it every single week. On Friday it’s like, “Okay, I’ll try again next week.”

Are you writing and then scrapping stuff? Or staring at a blank computer screen?

I’m never blocked. I’m cursed with a complete lack of writer’s block. Every day I get up and I write. A typical day for me, genuinely, could be 5,000 words. In earlier jobs, I wrote so much. It’s not hard to move the muscle. But my brain is always behind. I’m really good at writing 60 pages in the wrong direction. That’s kind of my MO.

I heard a story one time about the creator of Euphoria. He rewrites a script from page one whenever he gets notes. The person telling me that story thought it was a crazy way to do things but I was thinking “kindred spirit.” Just the guy I want to be aligned with: the mind behind Euphoria. But I start on page one every time. I have to rewrite, or at least retype, every single word. I can’t copy/paste to save my life. I can’t cut in line to save my life. I’m retyping the whole draft every time. I don’t know why.

I also love plot. I have a lot of plot all the time, and so I make a lot of mistakes in plot. Then I have to go back and change so much, or I have too many plots going and I have to go back and pull some out. I am The Morning Show.

How is teaching? What do the youth think about everything?

I love teaching the youth. This is my first semester teaching a journalism class. It is a tiny women’s college. Nineteen hundred kids. It’s a very working class, middle class student population. It’s a very progressive school, but I didn’t know if they were going to care about journalism. They don’t trust the media at all.

I’m a month in. It’s been incredible. They have a huge appetite for journalism. They have great journalistic instincts. I feel like they’re trolling me with how easily they get everything. They are so good with fast deadlines. They have a huge appetite for the truth. They’re highly attuned to the way every system is not set up to serve them, and it’s time for the systems to break. The only piece that’s missing is they don’t know the path. They don’t know where to go to get a journalism job with a living wage that they can rely upon. I can’t really lie to them on that front.

Nobody does, kids.

We’re muddling through it together. If somebody figures out the true new model to fund journalism, the talent and the appetite is there.

I think the only thing that’s future proof is a beat, something you have a deep knowledge on. In the class, we started with beat reporting that’s adjacent to their existing expertise. There will always be a need in some form for expertise. AI is not beating us at expertise yet.

There will always be value in being able to report. I don’t have a lot of faith in the robots covering a local fire.

Pretty much the whole class has been about Minneapolis so far. We talk about Minneapolis every day. If robots are replacing on-the-ground reporting in Minneapolis, the question isn’t so much about how good the robot is, it’s about who owns the robot. If we already had robots who could report, I don’t think the robots would be telling us the truth.

I’m coming into teaching at a time when everything is about AI and how to handle AI in the classroom. All I can think to do is talk it to death with them, let them talk about it, and let them experiment so that they can see it fail. I don’t want it to be held up as this thing that makes everything easier if the professor would just let us use it. We crash test dummy quite a bit in the journalism class.

This is a little old man yelling at clouds, but you gotta struggle a little bit.

Yes, friction is good. Friction is what college should be in so many ways.