As always, Sam, I think you’re capturing the experience of reading and writing on Substack quite well. Let me add a layer to your excellent point about the abundant writers—Gioia and Alexie—and note that you are a certain “class” of writer as well: someone who, like Gioia and Alexie and some others, avoids getting caught in a narrow niche, and yet writes well and convincingly in a variety of genres and about a variety of subjects. Let’s call you guys “generalists” (though I bet you have a better term). My problem with the prolific generalists is that I can’t possibly keep up with all that they’re writing—it’s just too much, too much of one voice—while I find your level of production to be more congenial to my reading habits. Pardon the flattery, but it seems that you’re hitting a sweet spot, while some of the more prolific writers simply flood the zone.
Flattery is always appreciated Tom! Many thanks! I definitely have the experience where a person hits the same note over and over again - usually because they're trying to develop a 'brand' - and then I just stop reading their emails when I see them in my inbox. I guess what I find myself looking for most is when a person takes a risk of some kind or other. If they seem to be surprising themself in some way with their piece, I'm usually pleasantly surprised as well. I think that actually is a universal trait - the ability to slightly push our comfort zone - and anybody can do it, but for various reasons this isn't as encouraged in the writing realm as it could be. Cheers! Sam
I feel that I'm prolific (bearing in mind that my Substack is all of six weeks old). The reason I'm prolific is that I presume my readers will pick and choose to read the reviews that capture their interest rather than reading everything i've written.
Sam, very nicely done. I am skeptical of or downright disagree with a few points, but I can't help noting that those points are so refreshing optimistic that I'm happy to be wrong. Keep up the good work! And Happy New Year!
My experience chimes. I have never been able to fit my writings into any novelistic form. It always felt like an act of violence against my desire to clearly communicate my emotional ideations. Before substack I have compiled boxes of what would best be described, within our present literary conventions, as scrap book belles lettres. If you are not already aware of The Unfortunates (1969/2008) by B.S.Johnson, you might find it to be a possible pre computer age substack. 🐈⬛
I've heard of B.S. Johnson but haven't read. He's one of these people like Brautigan who seem to have done something truly interesting with form but whom I just haven't gotten around to. I happen to be a partisan of the novel but it's interesting to reflect if it just doesn't really work for our communicative era.
The novel is an extraordinary and nurturing creative format and those individuals who are skilled at writing them will always have my grateful admiration. However, I have finally accepted that am not one of them. As someone who has always communicated to self and others through the medium of writing the social and commercial pressure to conform to the writing formats that confer both status and money, foremost the novel, are difficult to negotiate. They act like a siren song luring those of us writers who are novelistically ‘challenged’ to assured failure and unnecessary self doubt 🐈⬛
I like all of this, a lot...especially this: "...read and read widely, to take it on the chin from people who are better than you are, and then form your own voice on the other side of these brutalizing experiences" and this: "Substack...has no quality control, and this produces a kind of sargasso sea of writing, much of it mediocre..." (those others, hee hee).
Not to be a pedant about it, but my issue with Substack is not about mediocrity or quality, lol. My issue is strictly with how annoying Notes is and how some strains of commentary born there and migrated into posts proper engage in lines of argument I disagree with. That's not a quality control issue.
Really thought-provoking stuff, thanks. Damn, this is a good line: "If you’re interested in writing — and feel anything less than fully secure in your own writing — reading becomes like the life-and-death struggle of some sort of developing nation." I may have to steal it at some point.
"whole eras can be shaped by the materiality of communication" - this is McLuhan's basic insight, still valid and relevant after all these years.
Steal away! Thanks Scott! I've got to read McLuhan - I've started quoting him without having read him, which is a good way to get yourself one day satirized by Woody Allen.
Thanks Sam! BTW a great place to start with McLuhan is (believe it or not) the 1969 Playboy interview. Yes, sometimes Playboy really was worth reading for the articles! You can find it here:
Engaging, as always, and yet I find myself moving in exactly the opposite direction. Screen reading almost never sends me back to my own writing inspired, the way the best books do. I like the long incubation periods that longform work requires and the sustained reading experience of a book, where the author has the floor.
Clearly there's no way to go completely analog without becoming increasingly irrelevant. So a balance seems right. But I find that even comments like this spring from a very different place than my impulse to underline an influential text. Sometimes there are fruitful conversations to be had in the comments. Often it's a dispersal of creative energy that could be better spent on something buoyant rather than objection, as is often my default mode.
We really should do an exchange pro v. con on this. I know I'm turning into a little bit of a parody of a tech futurist. May be good to organize our thoughts in one place on this!
Please see my novel The Guns of Lana’i, beginning in weekly installments on Substack on January 3, 2025…. 1907. Love and war in Hawai’i. terenceclarke.substack.com
This is great. This bit makes so much sense to me:
“If I read somebody who is printed in a book or newspaper, what I am really reading is the editorial selection process behind them — I am upset with the editors if they published a piece that I deem to be not ‘of the quality…”
I’d wager some of my favorite pieces on Substack would have been rejected by editors, but more importantly would never have been written without the format as it is.
Yeah, I think people really forget about this - that in order to get published anywhere you really have to change your writing at pretty close to a molecular level to make it fit into various house styles - or standard received AP style. I dropped out of my college newspaper - and drifted away from newspaper-writing in general because of this (even though I really loved reporting). I just felt like I was being made to wear a straitjacket every time I sat down to write an article for them.
That part about great writers having a crippling effect on new writers reminded me of howT.S. Eliot crippled so many poets. As a teenager, I just couldn't accept that (a) almost all teenage poetry is terrible, so I should just chill; (b) I would never write "The Wasteland".
Thanks Robin! I've been working on a theory that a writer's greatness is somehow related to what they leave 'on the table' for subsequent writers. So Chekhov would be very high on the list because he broke new ground in naturalism in both the play and short story and allowed other writers for a century to rip off what he was doing while still contributing their own originality. A more 'tricks-y' writer like David Foster Wallace wouldn't rank as high because they basically close down imitators - it's basically impossible to write a footnote now without having to like cite it to Wallace. I'm not sure the theory really holds together but working on it! - Sam
Interesting. Maybe there are different kinds of greatness: the opening-up kind and tue bringing-to-fruition kind. For example, I'm music, J.S. Bach was definitely the latter - there wasn't much left to do.with the baroque style after him - while C.P.E
Bach was the former. The irony is that fee people listen to.C.P.E. now, but he opened up.the classical style.for.the likes of Haydn and Mozart.
You say that you do most of your reading on screens nowadays. Does that include reading books, or no? If not, that would sadden me. I still love the book as a form, the novel especially, the physical book in my hand.
Sad but true. It does include reading books. This is mostly for logistical/professional reasons though. When I do research, it's easiest to do on archive.org or Everand, and for new books I read publishers' galleys. This is almost 100% because I'm getting the books for free though. When the situation comes up to have a book in my hands it feels like a rare treat.
Ah, okay--got that sweet sweet galley hookup. Respect!
What kind of 'research' do you do on archive? Old articles? Primary sources? I do the same myself, tho I still find I'm most surprised when I come across something unfamiliar in a physical book
Do you use Substack’s archive feature? Whenever I archive an article to read it later, I rarely return to it because so many new articles already crowd my inbox. In other words, do you experience some kind of FOMO or melancholic regret that undermines the platform-specific „plaisir du texte“ hedonism?
I really haven't used it. I get a real thrill whenever I see somebody liking a post I've put up a long time ago - that shows that at least some people are reading into the 'Substack archive' - but I'm not good about this. To me this is a real limitation about reading online that Substack hasn't overcome. We're all in this floating present with very little memory - and the preservation of memory is one of the core functions (probably THE core function) of written text. Substack has done this really miraculous thing of lengthening attention spans online; it may be possible that it can recover memory as well? - Sam
Partly, I assume, this is inseparably linked to the medium. Power off the server, delete the file, and it’s gone forever. This said, I wonder if it could be (or already is) part of the Notes algorithm to (maybe randomly) re-feed texts from the past into the present feed. Done well, it could resemble the serendipity of finding a beautiful old magazine in a used bookstore.
Thanks, this is worthwhile, and matches some of my of thoughts. As you remark, the endless supply of online reading material induces people to skim and scroll. If something doesn't immediately pique a person's interest, or if they are otherwise averse to it for any other reason, they'll just click on something else. This is also true of the entire Internet, obviously. And when we do that, it rewires our brains. The Digital Age has murdered the ability of many people (especially if they are young) to read a book.
Most people are "literate" in the sense that they can read sentences and paragraphs. But if one doesn't make a habit of reading books and novels, they'll soon find that they can't do so. This isn't just my speculation. Neuroscientists say the same, and I don't know any humanities professors who would disagree. This has been big blow to our cultural and intellectual life, and will surely get worse, even if it's hard to foresee the precise consequences.
The only way to counteract it is to power down, and spend significant time each week reading books. (PS I don't omit myself from this. My attention span was atrophying too, although I'm now I'm trying to more about it.)
Thanks Mick! Yeah, there's been some stuff out recently that's recently shocking - the Rose Horowitch article in The Atlantic; and then Julianne Werlin was saying on the same thing on a podcast she and I did with Daniel Oppenheimer. Basically that college students - at TOP colleges - aren't capable of reading.
I should probably do a post about this but I did actually kind of lose my ability to read long text and then had it come back. There was a period of five or ten years when it was really hard for me to finish a book - this was the 2010s and I was switching over to a click-based attention span along with anybody else - and then really did make a deliberate effort to reintroduce long-form reading into my life. I limited myself to one book at a time, made myself finish everything, put myself on a reading schedule (having the incentive of writing reviews helped a lot), and then when I'd kind of recovered that was able to return to reading in a much looser way. Now, I had about as good of a reading education as it's possible to have, so this ability was in me and I just had to recover it, but what this experience gave me was the sense that literacy in the internet age isn't just an A/B sort of thing, that we really are riding the wave of what the technology gives us, and that we all struggle with making long-form reading fit into our attention spans.
I don’t think it’s this particular platform, which encourages just as much self-branding as any other, but I do like places that allow you to be prolific if you like. I think it was the artist Francis Alys who said something about teaching your audience that you will at times fail (I could have the speaker wrong, or the paraphrase wrong, or all of it wrong—I couldn’t find the quote). I’ve always been attracted to writers/artists who are profligate with their stuff.
I've heard that quote. It's a lovely quote! Yeah, I think being prolific is very much the secret sauce for writing - that, eventually, you just become the activity. I was very struck reading about Paul Klee who in one year made something like a thousand pieces of art. When you get to that kind of productivity, a lot of assumptions about art go out the window - and it becomes not about producing masterpieces or really having any kind of a relationship with an audience, it's much more about a sort of trance state where you just really don't want to do anything else than make stuff. - Sam
That's a lot of things to not agree with lol!
As always, Sam, I think you’re capturing the experience of reading and writing on Substack quite well. Let me add a layer to your excellent point about the abundant writers—Gioia and Alexie—and note that you are a certain “class” of writer as well: someone who, like Gioia and Alexie and some others, avoids getting caught in a narrow niche, and yet writes well and convincingly in a variety of genres and about a variety of subjects. Let’s call you guys “generalists” (though I bet you have a better term). My problem with the prolific generalists is that I can’t possibly keep up with all that they’re writing—it’s just too much, too much of one voice—while I find your level of production to be more congenial to my reading habits. Pardon the flattery, but it seems that you’re hitting a sweet spot, while some of the more prolific writers simply flood the zone.
Flattery is always appreciated Tom! Many thanks! I definitely have the experience where a person hits the same note over and over again - usually because they're trying to develop a 'brand' - and then I just stop reading their emails when I see them in my inbox. I guess what I find myself looking for most is when a person takes a risk of some kind or other. If they seem to be surprising themself in some way with their piece, I'm usually pleasantly surprised as well. I think that actually is a universal trait - the ability to slightly push our comfort zone - and anybody can do it, but for various reasons this isn't as encouraged in the writing realm as it could be. Cheers! Sam
I feel that I'm prolific (bearing in mind that my Substack is all of six weeks old). The reason I'm prolific is that I presume my readers will pick and choose to read the reviews that capture their interest rather than reading everything i've written.
Sam, very nicely done. I am skeptical of or downright disagree with a few points, but I can't help noting that those points are so refreshing optimistic that I'm happy to be wrong. Keep up the good work! And Happy New Year!
Thanks so much David! Happy New Year! (And always happy to hear the points you disagree on.)
My experience chimes. I have never been able to fit my writings into any novelistic form. It always felt like an act of violence against my desire to clearly communicate my emotional ideations. Before substack I have compiled boxes of what would best be described, within our present literary conventions, as scrap book belles lettres. If you are not already aware of The Unfortunates (1969/2008) by B.S.Johnson, you might find it to be a possible pre computer age substack. 🐈⬛
I've heard of B.S. Johnson but haven't read. He's one of these people like Brautigan who seem to have done something truly interesting with form but whom I just haven't gotten around to. I happen to be a partisan of the novel but it's interesting to reflect if it just doesn't really work for our communicative era.
The novel is an extraordinary and nurturing creative format and those individuals who are skilled at writing them will always have my grateful admiration. However, I have finally accepted that am not one of them. As someone who has always communicated to self and others through the medium of writing the social and commercial pressure to conform to the writing formats that confer both status and money, foremost the novel, are difficult to negotiate. They act like a siren song luring those of us writers who are novelistically ‘challenged’ to assured failure and unnecessary self doubt 🐈⬛
I like all of this, a lot...especially this: "...read and read widely, to take it on the chin from people who are better than you are, and then form your own voice on the other side of these brutalizing experiences" and this: "Substack...has no quality control, and this produces a kind of sargasso sea of writing, much of it mediocre..." (those others, hee hee).
Thanks so much Douglas!
Not to be a pedant about it, but my issue with Substack is not about mediocrity or quality, lol. My issue is strictly with how annoying Notes is and how some strains of commentary born there and migrated into posts proper engage in lines of argument I disagree with. That's not a quality control issue.
Fair enough Brandon. Sorry if I misrepresented!
I am thankful for your writing and for Substack that makes it accessible. I found you through recommendations. Thank you for keeping True.
Thank you Cathy! Really appreciate it.
Really thought-provoking stuff, thanks. Damn, this is a good line: "If you’re interested in writing — and feel anything less than fully secure in your own writing — reading becomes like the life-and-death struggle of some sort of developing nation." I may have to steal it at some point.
"whole eras can be shaped by the materiality of communication" - this is McLuhan's basic insight, still valid and relevant after all these years.
Steal away! Thanks Scott! I've got to read McLuhan - I've started quoting him without having read him, which is a good way to get yourself one day satirized by Woody Allen.
Thanks Sam! BTW a great place to start with McLuhan is (believe it or not) the 1969 Playboy interview. Yes, sometimes Playboy really was worth reading for the articles! You can find it here:
https://web.cs.ucdavis.edu/~rogaway/classes/188/spring07/mcluhan.pdf
Engaging, as always, and yet I find myself moving in exactly the opposite direction. Screen reading almost never sends me back to my own writing inspired, the way the best books do. I like the long incubation periods that longform work requires and the sustained reading experience of a book, where the author has the floor.
Clearly there's no way to go completely analog without becoming increasingly irrelevant. So a balance seems right. But I find that even comments like this spring from a very different place than my impulse to underline an influential text. Sometimes there are fruitful conversations to be had in the comments. Often it's a dispersal of creative energy that could be better spent on something buoyant rather than objection, as is often my default mode.
We really should do an exchange pro v. con on this. I know I'm turning into a little bit of a parody of a tech futurist. May be good to organize our thoughts in one place on this!
Please see my novel The Guns of Lana’i, beginning in weekly installments on Substack on January 3, 2025…. 1907. Love and war in Hawai’i. terenceclarke.substack.com
Great! Thank you for sharing!
This is great. This bit makes so much sense to me:
“If I read somebody who is printed in a book or newspaper, what I am really reading is the editorial selection process behind them — I am upset with the editors if they published a piece that I deem to be not ‘of the quality…”
I’d wager some of my favorite pieces on Substack would have been rejected by editors, but more importantly would never have been written without the format as it is.
Yeah, I think people really forget about this - that in order to get published anywhere you really have to change your writing at pretty close to a molecular level to make it fit into various house styles - or standard received AP style. I dropped out of my college newspaper - and drifted away from newspaper-writing in general because of this (even though I really loved reporting). I just felt like I was being made to wear a straitjacket every time I sat down to write an article for them.
That part about great writers having a crippling effect on new writers reminded me of howT.S. Eliot crippled so many poets. As a teenager, I just couldn't accept that (a) almost all teenage poetry is terrible, so I should just chill; (b) I would never write "The Wasteland".
Thanks Robin! I've been working on a theory that a writer's greatness is somehow related to what they leave 'on the table' for subsequent writers. So Chekhov would be very high on the list because he broke new ground in naturalism in both the play and short story and allowed other writers for a century to rip off what he was doing while still contributing their own originality. A more 'tricks-y' writer like David Foster Wallace wouldn't rank as high because they basically close down imitators - it's basically impossible to write a footnote now without having to like cite it to Wallace. I'm not sure the theory really holds together but working on it! - Sam
Interesting. Maybe there are different kinds of greatness: the opening-up kind and tue bringing-to-fruition kind. For example, I'm music, J.S. Bach was definitely the latter - there wasn't much left to do.with the baroque style after him - while C.P.E
Bach was the former. The irony is that fee people listen to.C.P.E. now, but he opened up.the classical style.for.the likes of Haydn and Mozart.
You say that you do most of your reading on screens nowadays. Does that include reading books, or no? If not, that would sadden me. I still love the book as a form, the novel especially, the physical book in my hand.
Sad but true. It does include reading books. This is mostly for logistical/professional reasons though. When I do research, it's easiest to do on archive.org or Everand, and for new books I read publishers' galleys. This is almost 100% because I'm getting the books for free though. When the situation comes up to have a book in my hands it feels like a rare treat.
Ah, okay--got that sweet sweet galley hookup. Respect!
What kind of 'research' do you do on archive? Old articles? Primary sources? I do the same myself, tho I still find I'm most surprised when I come across something unfamiliar in a physical book
Do you use Substack’s archive feature? Whenever I archive an article to read it later, I rarely return to it because so many new articles already crowd my inbox. In other words, do you experience some kind of FOMO or melancholic regret that undermines the platform-specific „plaisir du texte“ hedonism?
I really haven't used it. I get a real thrill whenever I see somebody liking a post I've put up a long time ago - that shows that at least some people are reading into the 'Substack archive' - but I'm not good about this. To me this is a real limitation about reading online that Substack hasn't overcome. We're all in this floating present with very little memory - and the preservation of memory is one of the core functions (probably THE core function) of written text. Substack has done this really miraculous thing of lengthening attention spans online; it may be possible that it can recover memory as well? - Sam
Partly, I assume, this is inseparably linked to the medium. Power off the server, delete the file, and it’s gone forever. This said, I wonder if it could be (or already is) part of the Notes algorithm to (maybe randomly) re-feed texts from the past into the present feed. Done well, it could resemble the serendipity of finding a beautiful old magazine in a used bookstore.
Thanks, this is worthwhile, and matches some of my of thoughts. As you remark, the endless supply of online reading material induces people to skim and scroll. If something doesn't immediately pique a person's interest, or if they are otherwise averse to it for any other reason, they'll just click on something else. This is also true of the entire Internet, obviously. And when we do that, it rewires our brains. The Digital Age has murdered the ability of many people (especially if they are young) to read a book.
Most people are "literate" in the sense that they can read sentences and paragraphs. But if one doesn't make a habit of reading books and novels, they'll soon find that they can't do so. This isn't just my speculation. Neuroscientists say the same, and I don't know any humanities professors who would disagree. This has been big blow to our cultural and intellectual life, and will surely get worse, even if it's hard to foresee the precise consequences.
The only way to counteract it is to power down, and spend significant time each week reading books. (PS I don't omit myself from this. My attention span was atrophying too, although I'm now I'm trying to more about it.)
Thanks Mick! Yeah, there's been some stuff out recently that's recently shocking - the Rose Horowitch article in The Atlantic; and then Julianne Werlin was saying on the same thing on a podcast she and I did with Daniel Oppenheimer. Basically that college students - at TOP colleges - aren't capable of reading.
I should probably do a post about this but I did actually kind of lose my ability to read long text and then had it come back. There was a period of five or ten years when it was really hard for me to finish a book - this was the 2010s and I was switching over to a click-based attention span along with anybody else - and then really did make a deliberate effort to reintroduce long-form reading into my life. I limited myself to one book at a time, made myself finish everything, put myself on a reading schedule (having the incentive of writing reviews helped a lot), and then when I'd kind of recovered that was able to return to reading in a much looser way. Now, I had about as good of a reading education as it's possible to have, so this ability was in me and I just had to recover it, but what this experience gave me was the sense that literacy in the internet age isn't just an A/B sort of thing, that we really are riding the wave of what the technology gives us, and that we all struggle with making long-form reading fit into our attention spans.
- Sam
I recommend this essay I recently came across:
https://thelampmagazine.com/issues/issue-26/the-one-hundred-pages-strategy#:~:text=Almost%20nothing%20I%20have%20written,I%20travel%20and%20when%20I
I don’t think it’s this particular platform, which encourages just as much self-branding as any other, but I do like places that allow you to be prolific if you like. I think it was the artist Francis Alys who said something about teaching your audience that you will at times fail (I could have the speaker wrong, or the paraphrase wrong, or all of it wrong—I couldn’t find the quote). I’ve always been attracted to writers/artists who are profligate with their stuff.
I've heard that quote. It's a lovely quote! Yeah, I think being prolific is very much the secret sauce for writing - that, eventually, you just become the activity. I was very struck reading about Paul Klee who in one year made something like a thousand pieces of art. When you get to that kind of productivity, a lot of assumptions about art go out the window - and it becomes not about producing masterpieces or really having any kind of a relationship with an audience, it's much more about a sort of trance state where you just really don't want to do anything else than make stuff. - Sam