How Substack Changed My Reading

Writing Life

Nicholson Baker has a nice line where he talks about how young, ambitious people read. “They can be really predatory,” he writes.

And this, for a long time, was how I read. It’s maybe not a pleasant image, but it’s very defensible. 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. Any external influence runs the very real risk of colonizing your mind — and the stronger the writing, the greater the risk. American writing was ruined for about fifty years by the influence of Hemingway, by another twenty or so by Pynchon. People like Joyce, Foster Wallace, Bartheleme, can be lethal for young writers. Even the classics are highly dangerous — and run the risk of stultifying everybody — and the classics are nothing in comparison to the massive anxiety attack of opening anything written by anyone who is alive, let alone anyone in your age cohort. On the other hand, it does no good to be some sort of North Korea and block out everything — you do need to 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.

If I read anything, that’s really what’s going on, but it’s not the happiest psychic landscape, and I’ve been getting a lot better about this — in a word, taking a chill pill — and Substack, much more than I would have expected, has changed my reading habits (which has, in turn, changed some of my beliefs about writing).

Here’s some of what I’ve found myself focusing on through Substack:

• Volume. In the posterity death-match, the idea is that you write something that’s so wonderful that it outlasts you and outlasts all of your contemporaries. As a character puts it in Clare Barron’s Dance Nation, “and my words are going to be the greatest fucking words that you’ve ever heard.” The tendency becomes for writers to hoard, writers to dedicate their lives to building towards that one masterpiece, maybe even towards that one line. But the more you think about it the more you realize that that’s a very stupid way to be — and very joyless. For one thing, you need volume to get better — there’s no other way — and then, once you’re good, there’s no particular reason to hold back (unless you’re trying for some kind of artificial scarcity of yourself for market reasons). The people I enjoy the most on Substack — Ted Gioia, Sherman Alexie, etc — seem to just be writing all the time. Not all of it is equally great, but there is no reason why it should be. They are exploring different sides of themselves. If they let themselves go, it turns out that they have almost infinite things to say. And if not all of it is brilliant, and if it’s impossible for readers to read all of it, that’s really no problem — readers can just pick up with the next post. The ability to write fluently and ceaselessly seems to be about as good a way to live as anything I can think of. The question is why anybody would cut themselves off.

• Generosity. Substack, in counterpart to ‘established’ publications, has no quality control, and this produces a kind of sargasso sea of writing, much of it mediocre. To the Substack detractors — Becca Rothfeld, Brandon Taylor, Teddy Brown, etc — this is the primary point of complaint: that you just find yourself awash in a lot of junk. But, in my Substack fervency, I’ve found myself not being bothered by this — and have found my reading habits changing. For the most part on Substack, I’m not reading enviously or even critically — I’m just curious what people have to say. A lot of the people I read aren’t professional writers and have no desire to be. They’ve had interesting lives, or are just testing out their voices, and I find myself reading them sort of the way a parent might — excited for them when they say something surprising or interesting, just sort of skimming forward whenever the piece gets a little muddy. The difference seems to be about medium. 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’ and aggrieved on behalf of everybody else who, implicitly, is denied those column inches or that print run. But, on the internet, where storage space is infinite, it’s silly to be upset — if I don’t like something, I just scroll on to the next piece.

• Medium. What all of this has made me much more aware of is how whole eras can be shaped by the materiality of communication. The societies of the axial age — call it 1000 BCE to 1500 AD — were shaped by the extreme rarity of printed material. Anything printed had to be of a high value — and the tendency was towards reserving precious print space for texts that were sacred. The societies of industrialized eras had fairly easy access to paper but limited access to modes of mass distribution — as in A. J. Liebling’s quip that freedom of the press is reserved for anyone who owns a printing press — and discourse becomes an endless caviling about what does or doesn’t deserve to be printed. The dynamics of our own era are entirely different — and we really are only just discovering them. The capacity to write as well as the capacity to distribute have become infinite. The politics turns on ‘channels of distribution’ — which ‘streams’ have more eyeballs — but that’s really only a kind of entry-level consideration in the technological revolution that we are experiencing. Within Substack alone, we are dealing with a whole variety of forms — the post, the note, the comment, the serial, the blog, the audio recording, the image, etc — any one of which a Substacker can adopt on a whim. What that seems to do is it opens people up to being their full multitudinous selves — to shift away from the ‘branding’ that this current iteration of the internet drives us towards — and to express aspects of themselves that they may not even have known existed. That seems to me the real potential of the Internet 3.0 — and is the reason why I am so bullish on Substack in particular — that there is no real reason why people cannot be their entire expressive selves.

• Comments. One small piece of this is that the ‘comments’ seem to come into play as aspects of expression. I notice if there’s a point I haven’t found room for in a piece I often will leave it out and expect it to emerge in discussion in the comments. The tendency is for pieces to become open vessels, taking in the inputs of different commenters and also extending through links and references to different parts of the internet — which is very different from the ‘closed texts’ of printed books or articles. With a form like Substack, what writers are doing is — not to sound too much like some sort of Frenchy semiotician about this — creating a discourse rather than a text, which may make the purists unhappy but is ultimately a more democratic and loose-limbed way of being.

  

  A Frenchy semiotician

• The novel. As I’ve gotten more and more enthusiastic about Substack, I’ve been feeling increasingly bad for traditional forms of media. This is certainly true for the literary magazine, which seems just totally pointless; for the newspaper, which is facing a real crunch; and, sad to say it, for the book. For myself, I’ve transitioned almost totally to reading on screens and am happier for it — and, in that process, I’ve started to notice just how much padding and bad faith goes into so much of the book market. That’s egregiously true for political science and polemical writing, which almost always is an article stretched out to book-length. It’s not so bad for history, which tends to be complicated, inchoate material pushed down to book-length but may ultimately be happier in some archipelagoized online format where historians do not feel they need to impose overarching narratives. And that leaves the novel, which is really caught in the crosshairs. I’ve been going through a period of despair about the quality of mainstream published novels — in short, the publishers just aren’t even really trying — but literature on the internet hasn’t caught up (and this is in part because the short attention spans people have reading online don’t translate well to the immersion needed for reading fiction). What I suspect is that different kinds of serialized fiction online will begin making a dent in the hegemony of the traditional novel and short story — and, ultimately, this will be all to the good. Serialization will put readers closer to the process of creation and create more open-ended narratives — and the pressure will be on the traditional novel to keep up.