What is alt lit?

When you’re in high school and all your friends are talking about what they’re going to do with their lives, college majors are usually a key topic. What you study at the college level generally has a pretty significant role in dictating your career options, right? Right.

My two best friends from high school are both psychology majors, as are a majority of the people I graduated with back in 2010. I am one of a handful of English majors to come out of the loving arms of Redmond High School. And now that I’m a junior, I’m at the point where I’m asking myself, “What the hell was I thinking? What do I do with this degree?”

In all honesty, I want to be a professor of some sort. That life seems pretty interesting, plus once I’ve achieved tenure I can do things like get my throat tattooed, and I’m really looking forward to that future. But what other options or lives are there for English majors, or those prone to writing?

A few months ago, I was thrown into the bowels of this little Internet movement called “alt lit.” If it sounds familiar, you probably saw the article that Vice magazine recently published about it (and basically called everyone who writes under the guise of alt lit a narcissist) or you’re an avid Tumblr user.

Alt lit mainly consists of young—and by young I mean mid-20s/post-undergraduate young—people who write in earnest about their sex lives, failed relationships and drug use, the usual fodder that takes up people’s Tumblr, Twitter and Blogspot accounts. Everything in alt lit exists on the Internet, putting the aforementioned blogospheres to good use.

Alt lit is, for the most part, very minimal in its execution. Big names include Tao Lin, Crispin Best, Steven Roggenbuck (who makes really great, poetic videos; look him up on YouTube) and pretty much any writer who’s been published on Thought Catalog or Shabby Doll House.

If you search an “alt lit” tag on any blogging platform you’ll come up with myriad results ranging from poems and prose to videos and images. A trending thing within the community is taking a screenshot of a poem or piece of writing while it’s still in a word processing program, then Photoshopping the screenshot onto a photo of flowers or the ocean or whatever the writer wants.

Vice made a big mistake when it called out alt lit writers and labeled them narcissists. These writers and young people are using the technology of their age in a new and innovative form.

Using Gchat, Twitter posts and Facebook status updates is fun and interesting. Plus, these people are fun to talk to on the Internet because, apart from the fact that many of them have garnered success through self-publishing their work online and throwing themselves under buses through their own writing, they’re people. Real, living, breathing people. Not to say that writers like J.K. Rowling and Jeffrey Eugenides (most underrated mainstream author ever) aren’t “real people,” but I imagine they’re much harder to approach in real life than someone whose career you’ve followed via the Internet.

Alt lit is changing how its audience thinks about words and writing, which is exactly what being an English major should make you do, right? So if you fear that post-grad stress of, “Cool, I have a degree that says I can write well,” then fear not—the alt lit community may be, at the very least, a place to garner some inspiration.

You don’t have to write the next Eeeee Eee Eeee, but you can certainly take alt lit for what it is: creative, raw and very, very weird.