Dear Friends,
It’s my one-year anniversary on Substack — and I also just hit a nice subscriber milestone. I wanted to profoundly thank everyone who is subscribing and reading. I’m truly very grateful.
I really felt like I was waiting for Substack for a long time. Writing had been an almost unimaginably lonely activity. It was something that I had a compulsion to do, but what it seemed to mean in practice was lots of files on my laptop that I had no idea what to do with, e-mailed attachments to friends that were read (if read) out of politeness, some published articles and essays — but, as often as not, the articles were so edited to fit some ‘house style’ that I almost couldn’t look at them when they came out.
When I started my Substack, I vowed to myself to write exactly in the way that I wanted to write. That meant sharing personal anxieties, meant taking political stances that might feel uncomfortable but that I believed were warranted, meant sharing disparate parts of my personality and resisting the impulse to create a unified ‘brand.’ And, for a long time, it was….very lonely. It was relatives and a few Facebook friends reading. And then, little by little, the ‘New Free Subscriber!’ e-mails started trickling in. I really had no idea how people were finding the Substack and who the people finding it were, but even more gratifying than that were what started to be very thoughtful exchanges in the comments. For a year, I’ve been actively in touch with people with no idea where in the world they are, often with no idea of what they look like, but really appreciating their thoughts and enjoying being led to their writing as well. Really, I couldn’t have imagined a better, healthier exchange.
There were a few different ideas that I wanted — gently — to promote with this Substack.
One is that writing is really not that different from thought. In our culture there tends to be an emphasis on craft, on finished products. That’s not what I’m drawn to in what I read and not wanted I write. I wanted to learn as I was writing — in a book review, I wanted to stick very close to my experience while reading the book as opposed to offering some authoritative up/down verdict; in political writing, I wanted to absorb different accounts from different sources of what was going on without ever feeling like I didn’t have ‘the right’ or didn’t have ‘the credentials’ to weigh in on something or other; and, in personal writing, I really wanted to document, and reflect upon, my life pretty much as I was living it. I’ve experienced what it’s like to feel paralysis in writing — which comes from the idea that you need to store up your energies or wait around to produce some great thing — and I didn’t want to feel that again. I really wanted my energy to be going out rather than in; wanted to just say what felt right to me to say without thinking all that much about how it would be received. One thing that that has led to — and I do have compunctions about this — is long pieces, frequent pieces, an overload of everybody’s inbox; and, again, I really appreciate how indulgent you have all been.
Another is that writing is truly individual, truly sits in a place outside of any power structure, any system of authority. This is, more than anything, what drew me to writing in the first place. I remember, early on, having a mantra that “writing is different from everything else.” What that meant for me is that everything else in the world is socially-determined, everything else participates one way or another in a battle for survival and for resources. Writing represents a sort of free space; the blank page a chapel in which all are equal who come before it. Out in the world, there are all sorts of tricks for undermining the essential autonomy and equality of writing — the whole edifice of publishing most of all. This is particularly the case in journalism, where ‘access’ is often tightly controlled, where emphasis is placed on ‘credibility’ and ‘authority.’ These things are, to a great extent, a trick of the mind. As my Substack friend
put it to me, “I’ve crossed over. I prefer reading individuals now because I know that they’re speaking for themselves.” If you’ve noticed, the legacy publications are moving in the same direction — their journalists and op-ed writers producing separate ‘newsletters,’ which is Substack but with the imprimatur of some legacy publication. And I feel the same. What I am interested in when I read is access to authentic emotion and to inner freedom of thought. Those are the criteria of good writing. Access to a prestige publication is not. I find that professional writers are well aware of this — that publishing both for fiction and for essayistic writing is so hierarchical, bottlenecked, and artificially constrained that all real writers feel the need for some other, looser model — but the reading public as a whole still has a superstitious enchantment with the format of publishing, whether in books or newspapers. I’d like to see a shift out of the old model and towards something new and I’d like to be part of that shift.Another is that writing can be a continuous output of energy. I wanted to emphasize speed; I wanted to emphasize learning-as-I-wrote; I wanted to emphasize the two-way-street of writing and reading and engaging with other writers. Basically, I felt that it was possible to write all the time — or, to put it a little more precisely, to live in such a way that a person could be constantly doing what they liked to do. For me, this involved a mental adjustment from the way we usually think about things, that a person does labor in exchange for some designated reward and then spends the rest of their time engaged in ‘leisure.’ I’ve never been exactly satisfied with that concept and always wanted something a bit different. It’s very much a work in progress figuring out exactly what that looks like, but this Substack has been my gesture in that direction — instead of writing with ‘the best of myself,’ writing with ‘all of myself’ (if that distinction makes sense) and trying to reach, as much as possible, an external manifestation of an internal world.
***
I am deeply grateful to Substack as a company. I feel like I’ve been waiting for it for about 15 years — the freedom of the blogosphere combined with the connectivity resources of the Web 2.0. As far as I’m concerned, it really represents the best of the internet — and what the internet obviously should be. I wouldn’t say that everything about it is perfect. There’s not enough promotion of the Substack ‘workhorses’ — of people who are building their Substacks from scratch, as opposed to people who have come to Substack with established followings. Money is an issue. Most readers aren’t good-hearted enough (or have the disposable income) to pay for content — and there’s so much out there that it really is very difficult to choose. My feeling from the beginning has been that it’s unrealistic for just abut anyone to imagine making a living strictly from Substack but that it is an ideal creative base — and, in my case, it’s already led to some unexpected opportunities elsewhere. And I keep fantasizing about Substack being more of a robust community for fiction-writing. I think that Substack’s DNA, like the internet’s in general, is more in polemic and that readers (myself included) get a little sleepy when faced with a piece of fiction on the web. Still, a forum like this offers the best opportunity in about three hundred years for reconceiving the format of fiction and offering a far looser interplay between writers and readers. I hope to see that side of Substack continue to evolve.
I’m writing this just feeling very thankful that Substack and the community of people on it has come into my life. There are so many people I’ve been engaging with over the last year —
and many others — whom I didn’t know before and in all but a few cases have never met in person but have come to think of as friends. Thinking abut all of these people, and the sense of community that comes with exchanging ideas and thoughts with them, it’s easy to forget how lonely writing can be.Best,
Sam
Congrats on your milestone, Sam! I’m grateful to be part of your community.
Keep up the type of writing you're doing here. It's some of the most intriguing work I've come across on Substack.