Mostly I just want people to look at my art and read my stories and think they are nifty. Which is what the interweb is for.

Take a gander at the show “Total Drama Island”, an animated spin-off of “Survivor”, and its theme song, lyrics basically consisting of “I wanna be famous” to a very catchy tune that I’ve caught my 3 year-old singing. UGH!

Now I’d rather be moderately notorious. I’m hoping that, should I have any luck with future manuscripts, I get some good reviews and a niche audience. Would totally love awards and best sellers, but I think it would be TERRIFYING to be a writer on par with, say, Stephenie Meyer or J.K. Rowling.

I think wanting to be famous just a stage some of us go through while we’re figuring ourselves out. The idea that any teen should HAVE to know what they want to do with their lives is pretty goofy, I think. I had a customer the other day looking for a book to help her daughter pick a major in college….and the daughter was only a sophomore in high school. Now I think it’s way healthier to want to be famous than to pigeonhole ourselves before we’ve had so many crucial life experiences (not that teens don’t experience a ton, but there’s SO MUCH out there).

I’d like to be massively rich and completely anonymous no matter what I managed to accomplish.

More fun that way.

The one that most people love to ask is: “What are you hoping for?” I always smiled sweetly and said “a golden retriever”.

I don’t think it has anything to do with fame — it’s a quality of having a known body of work in a field where the person you want to work with has a need for someone with a known body of work in that field.

I agree with you that fame can be a guarantee of a good paycheck, in the sense that if you are famous, people will pay you for who you are, rather than what you do, because your fame will be sure to generate money. That’s why you have movie stars and celebrities writing books, or opening restaurants, or hawking face soap and cell phone minutes. But you can also guarantee yourself a good paycheck by being good at what you do, and I don’t equate fame with having a good reputation within your industry. That’s why, even in acting, which is such a fame-driven industry, you have the “hey it’s that guy” well known character players.

What that means to me:
(a) I can get access to working with certain people who are already famous. As a nonentity, you are simply not allowed even near those people. There are definitely folks who intrigue me and I’d love to work with (mmm, Joss Whedon), but as a nobody, I can’t even speak to them. If I got real lucky, I could get an autograph (too bad I don’t care about autographs).

(b) I can get access to working on certain projects. I would get more job offers, period. If people have heard of you, it’s a lot better for your job prospects, especially if you are in an artistic field where you are always having to look for the next paycheck.

(c) Famous, to some degree, is a guarantee of a good paycheck.

I don’t give a damn about wanting the attention. I don’t want tabloids sorting through my trash. Not interested in being a fame whore. If I wanted to be a fame whore, I could have done it on the Internet by now, but Internet fame is no guarantee of access and money. I do, however, want certain things that I just plain can’t get access to without being well known.

You may be asking why I haven’t really done shit with regards to TRYING to get famous. Answer is, I am conflicted as to how to get the “right” amount of fame to get me the money/access without ending up with tabloids. (I am also female, “fat” (i.e. not anorexic), and not cute, so that is a factor against me on getting fame. If I was a dude, nobody would care.) Once you go that far, it’s hard to turn that tide back, and even now and then we still hear about what Vanilla Ice is up to.

To some degree you can only manage the fame so far. The only thing I can think of to “manage” it is to stay the hell off television and maybe do like David Sedaris- mainly stick to text and radio.

Back when I was in 5th grade, I loved Madonna, Michael Jackson, and Eddie Murphy and actively tried to figure out what it was about them that made them immensely successful/famous. But for me, the fame was always tied to the accomplishments.

I think the world is different now than it was then, though.

That said, I’ve always wanted to be famous…but the more I see the realities of people’s lives who are semi-semi-famous, the less I like. Maybe I’d like to be a famously reclusive hermit.

I mind the idea of “famous” less than “instant” though. I’ve noticed that lot of people want fame or money without having to work for it, or worse, wait for it. They get bored and go one to the next big thing that will get them what they want.

Sigh.

I wonder if the reason it’s a popular statement for teens is because it maps pretty perfectly into the “popularity” paradigm that many teens are faced with in school. the idea that what they say and do does not matter unless they are popular. They look out at the world, at magazines and such that seem to only care what you wear/eat/pray to/think about politics if you’re famous, and wonder if that’s the real-world equivalent. Is saying they want to be famous like saying they want to be popular?

And I think you’re right about not having any idea about professions when you’re in school. I knew I liked reading and writing, and I thought my options were publisher, editor or writer. I had no idea that you could be a literary events coordinator, or a reviewer, or run a literary award, or manage a website about books and reading (all jobs I have had).