Saved for Later

Ads on social media involving shopping have never personally captured my attention. Usually, when I shop for something, I hear about a book, a movie, or a CD unavailable on streaming services and search for it on Amazon. I don't remember a single ad for a product that I've seen on social media, and I've certainly never bought a novelty item through one of those ads. Before a couple of weeks ago, the ads I usually clicked on weren't shopping ads. They were ads promoting an upcoming album or single from an artist. The strange part to all of this: I usually didn't click on them to listen to the song.

I have a compulsion when it comes to saving things I might be interested in looking up or buying. I have taken literally thousands of screenshots on my phone over the years to keep a log of books, movies, shows, podcasts, and music that I might want to check out at some point. When I downloaded Instagram, this compulsion spread to the music that was advertised on the platform. I started taking screenshots of those ads, and when their captions didn't have the name of the artist or song in them, I would click on the ad to get that information. This has led to the recommendation of literally thousands of songs from the social media service. Yes, thousands; in order to save space in my Google account, I started deleting some of these screenshots after adding the songs to a Spotify playlist. This playlist has now grown to almost 7,000 songs, and it's not even completely up to date.

These ads took up a large part of my interaction with Instagram for almost two years, but recently, different ads have been popping up as recommended sponsored ads. These ads, instead of recommending music, recommend writing opportunities, potential classes to take involving acting and writing, newsletters about writing more frequently, and more. I even found Vocal through an Instagram ad -- in fact, clicking on a Vocal ad might have started the stream of writing opportunity recommendations. In some way or another, these ads always capture my attention, whether they cause me to think about taking a particular writing class or inspire me to want to take a screen or play-writing challenge.

"Now you're writing about ads for writing? Are you out of inspiration or something?"

"Jacob, I told you to stop looking over my shoulder!"

"Curiosity gets the best of me, what can I say?"

"Look, can you just go back to doing your schoolwork or something? I've got a story to write."

"Don't you usually write scripts?"

"I like to, but I can write short stories, too."

"I've never once heard you say you had any interest in short stories."

"I've shown you a short story of mine before!"

"No, you haven't."

"You don't remember?! The one about the woman who moves to a small town and is forced to confront her past?"

"That was supposed to be a short story? I just thought it was a rough outline for the structure of a future script, it prioritized dialogue so much."

"You can't be serious."

"You never clarified it was anything else!"

"Fine, maybe I struggle writing things without exchanges of dialogue, but that doesn't mean I can't do it. I just have to find the right topic and the right amount of focus."

"Judging by how quickly you shift through projects, I'm guessing the right amount of focus still eludes you."

"Alright, dude, just let me write in peace, okay? I don't want to end up writing dialogue on autopilot."

"Why don't you just find a way to sneak a dialogue exchange into the story?"

"Because short stories can't contain exchanges of dialogue like a script."

"Sure they can, just write the dialogue and format it like a short story. Simple."

"What, so I should write a dialogue exchange between me and some other random fictional person just for the heck of it? How would that make sense in the middle of a story about social media advertisements?"

"I mean... it could serve to communicate just how passionate you are about writing scripts."

"You know, for once, maybe it's time for me to learn how to write something without dialogue, so just give me some space to practice doing just that."

"Okay, man, I'm out. Call me if you need any more of your roommate's trademark invaluable support."

"Invaluable for most things? Fine, I'll agree. Invaluable for writing? Not even close."

"I'll take that as a compliment."

As someone whose passion for writing has significantly increased over the past two years, finding as many opportunities to get recognized for my work as possible has become increasingly important to me. Whenever I see an ad or announcement pop up for some miscellaneous guidebook or contest for writing, I can't help but check it out and see what it has to offer. If I decide I'm not interested in it now, maybe I'll keep it somewhere and check it out sometime in the future.

"Knowing how much other stuff you save as well, that's not gonna happen."

"Jacob, I swear to God--"