Find Yourself in History

How the history of science helped me rein in my magical thinking

Note: A shorter, less frenetic, footnote-free version of this essay originally appeared as a guest post on Jane Friedman’s blog. Jane is a guru on all aspects of the publishing industry.

So this is embarrassing. Here I am, this rational, scholarly historian, this steadfast proponent of the power of logic and evidence to help us interpret the past. But sometimes I catch myself believing in 24-karat Gandalfian magic.

It happens when I think about building my platform. I suspect I’m not alone here.¹A quick search for the term platform on Jane Friedman’s website confirms just how much this topic does confuse many would-be authors.

Platform-building contains many genuine mysteries, and mystery and magic go hand-in-hand. What’s my ‘brand’ and how do I refine it most efficiently? Which flavors of social media do I use to find new readers? How do I put together a newsletter? How do I get people to notice all my hard work on my blog? What media are willing to accept pitches from new writers? Why does my profile photo look like I’m mid-sneeze?

Many of these questions do not have obvious answers. And when we humans lack knowledge, we tend to conjure up mystical explanations. We abandon data and reason, and instead we plunge our putty knives into the great tub of supernatural spackle to fill in the gaps.

In my case, it’s not only that I lack experience in cultivating a public presence—which I do. I also feel like the platform comes with a genuine paradox: You need a large audience of readers to get your work published, but you’ve got to get your work published in order to attract a large audience. In other words, building a writer’s platform feels a lot like conjuring something out of nothing. It’s like how people used to believe that living animals could just spawn themselves out of lifeless muck.Trying to make sense of it all, I did what any reasonable, professional history guy would do: I began investigating how past thinkers and scientists debunked the concept of spontaneous generation of life.²This is one of the least-appreciated perks of being a historian: I get to look up obscure-sounding stuff from the past and call it part of my job. I once spent most of a workday trying to figure out how and why White Castle and Krystal decided to make tiny little hamburgers. Do that in most jobs and you get fired for wasting company time. But I knew I’d eventually be able to bring what I learned into my classroom and beyond. In fact, the story of sliders is actually pretty cool and connects to some big historical ideas, both during the Progressive Era (1880s–1920s) and to the Great Depression (1929–39). Let me know if you’re interested in this question and I’ll blog and/or make a podcast episode on the topic.

I found it comforting to learn that most clever people throughout most of history also believed that things could just spontaneously come to life—just zap into being. Ancient thinkers embraced the concept, as did the greatest minds of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Most of the people in this smarty-pantsed crew^3[1] That statement’s a bit imprecise; most of these people didn’t wear pants at all. They were smarty-robed, smarty–chitoned, –peplosed, –himationed, –chlamysed, –toga’d, and so on. See, e.g., this essay from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, “Ancient Greek Dress” at https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/grdr/hd_grdr.htm .were convinced that maggots magically wriggled into existence every time meat started to go funky.⁴Apologies if you’re reading this while eating lunch.

It wasn’t until 1668 during the Scientific Revolution that Francesco Redi got thinkers to question the concept of spontaneous generation. He demonstrated through experimentation that if you could properly isolate a glob of decaying roadkill⁵That’s Uccisione stradale in Italian from any actual flies, the carrion would fail to produce any of the little buzzers all on its own. Yes, your pound of putrefying pork would still be disgusting, but not maggoty disgusting.

So mystery solved, right? Nope: Redi’s experiments didn’t actually end the debate at all. Long after he’d passed away and his laboratory’s doors shut forever,⁶For the sake of the custodial staff, I hope he and his grad students cleaned up all the dead stuff before closing shop. belief in spontaneous generation continued. Other thinkers during Redi’s time rejected his findings outright. The idea persisted during the Enlightenment of the 18^th century, and it remained a mainstream idea even throughout the vast majority of the 19^th century.

Redi’s story is actually pretty similar to what’s happening to me when reflect on the process of cultivating readers. Just like with Redi, I’ve got a bad case of bet-hedging when I consider what it means to pump one’s platform full of life-juice. Redi’s contradictions emerged from how difficult it was to understand all of the variables when it came to the sheer numbers and varieties of parasites out there. In my case I get overwhelmed by a similarly bewildering quantity of variables in play when it comes to building an online reputation as a writer. That confusion can draw me into realms of fantasy at times. Sure, I understand that a mob of readers won’t just materialize overnight after I sing my heart’s sincerest wish by a moonlit window like a Disney freaking princess. Even so, I still catch myself foolishly buying into myths about regular people’s content suddenly going viral. Those stories are everywhere. Someone’s blog or YouTube channel suddenly becomes the talk of the town, all because of the quality of their content. I know it’s all a fairy tale; but it’s a seductive one even so. It’s alluring because overnight celebrity really does sometimes materialize spontaneously into existence; it’s just that you’ve got less than a four-legged ant’s chance in the aardvark house of it actually happening to you.⁷ A single aardvark can chomp down 50,000 ants in a single evening according to the (awesome) Cincinnati Zoo. https://cincinnatizoo.org/animals-archive/215443/ , accessed 4 Aug., 2024. Speaking of things going viral, can we each convince a couple thousand friends and your buddies at the OED to help make “a four-legged ant’s chance in the aardvark house” into a new cliché? Thanks in advance.Most platforms don’t just lightning-bolt to life just because a writer is good. There are plenty of talented people out there who can write exceptionally well, and literary agents’ inboxes are so flooded that they have to periodically refrain from accepting queries at all. At that point, I start to feel like the whole thing is just a matter of good luck—which is to say, it feels a lot like magic.

Our story is pretty typical so far for the history of science; old ways of thinking don’t just disappear overnight. What fascinates me, though, is that Francesco Redi himself also didn’t entirely abandon the idea of spontaneous generation. That’s right: Even the guy famous for refuting spontaneous generation still believed in it when things seemed too complicated.Redi’s on-the-fly research is one of the reasons he’s known as the “The Father of Modern Parasitology.” But he—like most other famous Parents of Various Historical Things—was a whole lot more complicated than any multiple-choice test can convey.⁸ Redi actually hedged his bets on the fly-o-genesis⁸Not, technically speaking, a word. question. Despite those famous experiments, he still had to fill in the mysterious spaces—those gaps in his knowledge.

He hypothesized, for instance, that natural forces at work in plants and animals could automatically spawn parasitic worms—even when there hadn’t been any other worms around. After looking under the hoods of a lot of plants, he surmised that all those squirming invertebrates must emerge directly from fruits and flowers through some kind of life-giving mojo. He speculated there must be some “soul or virtue” in at least some plants that created the beasties. Not just plants either; animals also contained similar preternatural powers within them. Intestines were factories for roundworms, tapeworms and other similar nightmare-fare. Other nasty critters came into being the same way in Redi’s view. You’d just be minding your own business and then Bam! You’re lousy with lice. They’d just show up without any parents—no other louse in the house.⁹See Paula Gottdenker, “Francesco Redi and the Fly Experiments.” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 53:4 (1979), 579. http://www.jstor.org/stable/44450950. In fact, based on that version of spontaneous generation, you’d be the lice’s parents.¹⁰I’d bring you a congratulatory casserole, but I’m waiting until the lice are gone.

To make Redi’s story even messier, he later retracted some—but not all—of these theories. He wrote in 1693 that his earlier reference to “plant souls” had been impulsive: “I let this line escape from my pen almost by force…”¹¹Gottdenker, “Francesco Redi,” translation from French in footnote 10. He comes very close here to claiming that his ideas about spontaneous generation came into existence through spontaneous generation.

To be fair to Redi, many of the parasites he studied turn out to be less like houseflies and more like space monsters from the Triangulum II dwarf galaxy.¹²That’s a real galaxy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triangulum_II . Considerably less is known about the space monsters.There are at least a couple hundred different species of worms alone that can infect humans, and hundreds of thousands of total species that affect nonhuman animals, plants and fungi. Most are able to produce barely visible eggs in quantities that are difficult to fathom unless you’ve got access to one heck of a microscope. For example, one of the most common wormy parasites in humans that Redi would have known about is the Old World hookworm, Ancylostoma duodenale. They can produce lots of eggs. As in 30,000. Per day. More confusing still to someone accustomed to working with houseflies is the fact that many intestinal worms are hermaphrodites and/or can reproduce asexually; neither of those phenomena were well understood in Redi’s age. Even some species of lice can reproduce solo, meaning that even a swinging single louse lady can still generate plenty of nits to pick—all by herself.¹³It’s a process called parthenogenesis which allows unfertilized eggs to produce young.

In fact, so many smart folks—Redi included—believed in spontaneous generation that it’s our lack of belief in it that distinguishes us present-day people from our ancestors. It illustrates just how weird we are to have settled this question once and for all.¹⁴Scientists today still are still pretty convinced that billions of years ago life did originate from non-living stuff. See, e.g., https://evolution.berkeley.edu/from-soup-to-cells-the-origin-of-life/how-did-life-originate/. It took us literal centuries of scientific research, debate and technological advancements just to learn that only mommy and daddy flies can create baby flies.¹⁵I’m talking houseflies here. Mayflies and some other kinds of fly girls can reproduce without males sometimes. I also learned about a group of scientists in 2023 who managed to manipulate fruit fly genes so that they could reproduce asexually: See, e.g., https://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/scientists-discover-secret-of-virgin-birth-and-switch-on-the-ability-in-female-flies . Yet despite those scientists’ deliberate, conspiratorial efforts to mess up my essay, “virgin birth” is definitely still not the same thing as spontaneous generation since it still requires at least one parent-fly.

And that’s the fascinating—possibly somewhat disgusting—tale of Francesco Redi and the Parasites From Nowhere.¹⁶“Francesco Redi and the Parasites from Nowhere” would be a great band name.Even he did not settle the issue of spontaneous generation during his own distinguished career. To be fair, it wasn’t his fault. Settling the question required centuries of additional scientific research, debate, and technological advancements. Only in the 19^th century did Louis Pasteur’s work with bacteria finally prove that life doesn’t just hocus-pocus out of thin air.

Luckily, there are some modern-day Francesco Redis working out the nonmagical origins of getting lucky—the Rated-G version. Data scientists have demonstrated that luck in building your rep—in the platform sense—requires lots of reps—in the workout sense. Much of that insight is intuitive; we have to keep writing and grinding away until the right folks notice us. But we also now understand that simply grinding doesn’t necessarily work. Data scientist Seth Stephens-Davidowitz’s 2022 book about big data, Don’t Trust Your Gut, describes what he calls “Springsteen’s Rule” for creative artists: The most effective self-promoters are those who have a bad case of wanderlust. Stevens-Davidowitz contends that Bruce Springsteen might have ended up just a minor celebrity if he’d have stayed exclusively in his home state—hiding on the backstreets, stuck in the mud somewhere in the swamps of Jersey. Instead, Bruce was born to run. He moved his hungry heart out of his hometown and thundered down the road, sharing his tunes as far and wide as he could manage. The record company eventually gave him a big advance, and he achieved his stone desire.Stephens-Davidowitz cites Springsteen’s strategy as an example of “hacking” one’s luck. In so doing, he highlights the work of fellow number cruncher Samuel Fraiberger and his analysis on the variables that predict artists’ success. Fraiberger’s study showed that the most successful artists were not simply persistent in getting their work out to the public. The ones who flourished the most also took their art shows on the road, going to many different galleries of many different kinds—as far and wide as possible.¹⁷Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, Don’t Trust Your Gut: Using DATA To Get What You Really Want in Life ( New York: Dey Street, 2022), Ch. 6. So yes, luck matters—but creative types can also make it work more effectively.

Moreover, successful authors seem to do much more than simply hack their luck. They also find the right message, and get it to the right people at the right time in the right way. And that’s when we need to do something that’s remarkably rational: Get some advice from people with actual, real-world experience in building these kinds of readerships. There are some incredibly helpful resources out there. Jane Friedman’s blog, where a shorter version of this essay first appeared, is one of them. And I recently took Allison K. Williams‘ and Jane Friedman’s enlightening “Zero-To-Platform Bootcamp” webinar¹⁸This was one of Jane’s online classes. See https://janefriedman.com/online-classes/ for future offerings.which also helped me gain some much-needed perspective. I learned that successful platforms take persistence, patience, and probably a couple of years to build—and that’s okay. The process is about knowing yourself, what you have to offer, and understanding who will benefit from having your words in their lives. It’s about communicating with your specific readership, and finding ways to engage meaningfully with them. It requires knowing what kinds of books have been written already, where there are opportunities to find an appropriate niche for you in the marketplace. And a lot more.In the big picture, Francesco Redi’s story taught me that grasping truth out of complex, interconnected variables requires experimentation. On this front, I’ve found the advice from literary agent Max Sinsheimer especially useful when he urges authors to understand that the entire publishing process itself is a kind of research project. “And,” he adds, “it never really stops.”¹⁹Max Sinsheimer and Reedsy, “How to Query Nonfiction: An Agent Explains | Reedsy Live” at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qOKEoIjc6aM , accessed 15 Jan., 2024.

All of which is to say that building a rep is at least as complicated as the most hard-to-fathom lifecycles of the creepiest and crawliest creepy-crawlies out there. After all, we humans are even more unpredictable than lice, maggots, and hookworms combined.²⁰All together now: Ewwwww. For all these reasons, I’m trying to cut myself some slack when I start feeling like the whole thing’s just a bunch of sorcery. I just try to get back on track as soon as I can. If understanding the complexity of platform-building is ongoing, maybe the real trick is to treat it like a journey that never really stops and do our best to enjoy the ride.

• 1
  A quick search for the term platform on Jane Friedman’s website confirms just how much this topic does confuse many would-be authors.
• 2
  This is one of the least-appreciated perks of being a historian: I get to look up obscure-sounding stuff from the past and call it part of my job. I once spent most of a workday trying to figure out how and why White Castle and Krystal decided to make tiny little hamburgers. Do that in most jobs and you get fired for wasting company time. But I knew I’d eventually be able to bring what I learned into my classroom and beyond. In fact, the story of sliders is actually pretty cool and connects to some big historical ideas, both during the Progressive Era (1880s–1920s) and to the Great Depression (1929–39). Let me know if you’re interested in this question and I’ll blog and/or make a podcast episode on the topic.
• 3
  ^[1] That statement’s a bit imprecise; most of these people didn’t wear pants at all. They were smarty-robed, smarty–chitoned, –peplosed, –himationed, –chlamysed, –toga’d, and so on. See, e.g., this essay from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, “Ancient Greek Dress” at https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/grdr/hd_grdr.htm .
• 4
  Apologies if you’re reading this while eating lunch.
• 5
  That’s Uccisione stradale in Italian
• 6
  For the sake of the custodial staff, I hope he and his grad students cleaned up all the dead stuff before closing shop.
• 7
  A single aardvark can chomp down 50,000 ants in a single evening according to the (awesome) Cincinnati Zoo. https://cincinnatizoo.org/animals-archive/215443/ , accessed 4 Aug., 2024. Speaking of things going viral, can we each convince a couple thousand friends and your buddies at the OED to help make “a four-legged ant’s chance in the aardvark house” into a new cliché? Thanks in advance.
• 8
  Redi actually hedged his bets on the fly-o-genesis⁸Not, technically speaking, a word.
• 9
  See Paula Gottdenker, “Francesco Redi and the Fly Experiments.” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 53:4 (1979), 579. http://www.jstor.org/stable/44450950.
• 10
  I’d bring you a congratulatory casserole, but I’m waiting until the lice are gone.
• 11
  Gottdenker, “Francesco Redi,” translation from French in footnote 10.
• 12
  That’s a real galaxy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triangulum_II . Considerably less is known about the space monsters.
• 13
  It’s a process called parthenogenesis which allows unfertilized eggs to produce young.
• 14
  Scientists today still are still pretty convinced that billions of years ago life did originate from non-living stuff. See, e.g., https://evolution.berkeley.edu/from-soup-to-cells-the-origin-of-life/how-did-life-originate/.
• 15
  I’m talking houseflies here. Mayflies and some other kinds of fly girls can reproduce without males sometimes. I also learned about a group of scientists in 2023 who managed to manipulate fruit fly genes so that they could reproduce asexually: See, e.g., https://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/scientists-discover-secret-of-virgin-birth-and-switch-on-the-ability-in-female-flies . Yet despite those scientists’ deliberate, conspiratorial efforts to mess up my essay, “virgin birth” is definitely still not the same thing as spontaneous generation since it still requires at least one parent-fly.
• 16
  “Francesco Redi and the Parasites from Nowhere” would be a great band name.
• 17
  Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, Don’t Trust Your Gut: Using DATA To Get What You Really Want in Life ( New York: Dey Street, 2022), Ch. 6.
• 18
  This was one of Jane’s online classes. See https://janefriedman.com/online-classes/ for future offerings.
• 19
  Max Sinsheimer and Reedsy, “How to Query Nonfiction: An Agent Explains | Reedsy Live” at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qOKEoIjc6aM , accessed 15 Jan., 2024.
• 20
  All together now: Ewwwww.