What I've Learned From Editing The Republic of Letters

Writing Life

Dear Friends,

I have a piece in Persuasion on the Democrats’ new media problem. Excitingly, I’m sharing the full manuscript of Henchman — for paid subscribers only — and including all of Megan Gafford’s insanely great illustrations.

Best,

Sam

WHAT I’VE LEARNED FROM EDITING THE REPUBLIC OF LETTERS

As most of you know, I’m editing the Substack publication The Republic of Letters. Honestly, it’s been the best — just so fun to do and with a product (pieces by different writers every single day, all on literary and cultural themes) that I am never not proud of.

Here a few things I’ve learned a few months into this.

1.There are so many good writers out there. I spend a considerable amount of time scrubbing around Substack looking for good writers and end up with these ridiculously long lists of talented people — and then, out of the clear blue sky, people send in pieces and they are very often excellent and then I’ll check out their ‘Stacks and, as often as not, these excellent, professional-quality writers have like five subscribers. This is cause for both celebration and despair. In different professional settings, I’ve gotten used to a mindset of scarcity — of a belief that there are only a handful of people who can do a specialized task. But we’re in a really good era for polemical writing — there seem to be lots and lots of people who can put together a compelling, original argument, and write musically as they do it, and lots of people who can write personal essays, often of blistering honesty. What else is there to do in this allegedly-vapid, print-phobic era, except to celebrate the great writing that’s out there and to put together publications to showcase it?

2.But if the cornucopia of excellent writers is something to get excited about, it’s also somehow very saddening — very few of these writers, just for reasons of supply and demand, will ever be able to make a living from it. And what that’s largely a result of is the fact that the system of literary advancement is totally broken — with ‘system’ even being a generous word. The truth is that I shouldn’t be editing a literary publication. I don’t have any books published; any reputation I have is on this platform alone. There are lots and lots of more ‘qualified’ writers to be doing something like this — and any one of them, really, should have some comparable project going, leveraging their reputation to uplift writers who are lower down on the food chain than they are. There are some famouses who do that in this space — it’s like a rite of passage for writers pouring their work out into the void to suddenly be noticed by Sherman Alexie; and George Saunders, Roxane Gay, Freddie deBoer, Rob Henderson, and I’m sure others are very good about reaching back even as they move forward — but it’s certainly the minority. What I think is going on is that the ‘established writers’ developed in a system where they were encouraged to be solo artists — just to think about their writing and to some extent promoting their own writing while the business side of it would be handled by somebody else. But at some point the professionals stopped really thinking about the writers — I have no idea really what literary agents do at this point, but it seems to be something connected to taking celebrities (or people with large social media followings) and repackaging them as ‘writers.’ And there’s not a lot of help on offer from the publishing houses and there is no reason why there would be — you can’t really expect people suspended over a cliff and hanging on for dear life to lend a helping hand. What can make a crazy situation more sane is for writers to think more like team-players than divas and to operate in confederations providing uplift to one another and rewarding merit wherever they find it. Honestly, Substack corporate should be better about this — trying to build rewarding trajectories for regular joe writers on the platform as opposed to just slipping stream behind the frontrunners — but Substack is like an oasis in the desert and can only be expected to do so much. The larger issue is that writers are trained to think of themselves in highly individualistic terms, and in constant competition with one another, as opposed to being members of a struggling community that is badly in need of organization.

3.The discourse is a raging beast and it’s very difficult to operate around it. I sometimes play a game with myself where, just before a post whether on ROL or here, I guess how many likes the best is going to get — and I’m almost never wrong. (Just to put myself out on a limb I’d guess that this post will get about 45 likes by the end of its shelf-life.) What the popularity of a piece has to do with is very rarely the quality of a piece but whether or not it connects to ‘the discourse.’ The discourse is, I suppose, an ancient feature of human society — it’s the kind of thing that dictates what topics are best covered at an elegant dinner party and which best avoided — but it maps itself onto the internet era with dizzyingly-precise accuracy. The Republic of Letters is, in many ways, set up to capitalize on The Discourse — at least as it applies to the literary scene. Topics like MFAs and gatekeepers are right for the discourse, while, for instance, personal essays about archeological digs or night watchman jobs, never click into the conversation in the same way. The idea that I’ve kind of hit on at ROL and here is to pay unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and unto God what is God’s. We’re all social creatures, we all want to participate in the cocktail party conversation — and, certainly, I want the publication I’m editing to be entertaining and well-liked. But The Discourse does get on one’s nerves — and Notes, unfortunately, is a discourse-machine, much like Twitter was. The conversations in The Discourse are always this weird mix of prurient and pseudo-ethical, and somehow that’s always what’s exciting while what comes out of the soul tends to yield crickets. I am about as optimistic on this as I think it’s possible to be. I think that a platform like Substack helps to get us out of the attenuated attention spans of 2010s social media and that ventures like Substack publications help to lengthen out attention spans further, to create space for engagement with people and ideas that goes beyond their proximity to one of Bret Easton Ellis’ farts or whether they somehow connect to whatever it is that’s supposed to be shiny and new. But it’s not easy. The real enemy here isn’t actually the social media platforms, it’s human softheadedness, and that really is a formidable adversary. This isn’t meant reproachfully — I’m just as softheaded and just as liable to get pulled into these ridiculous controversies as anybody — but I do get impatient with anybody who says to themselves, well, this is just social media and then writes entirely through hot takes or those weird sentence-long paragraphs that are meant to optimize engagement. This is actually a bigger deal than that. The Discourse is a content-devouring beast for reasons that are deep-seated in human psychology, but if we’ve learned nothing else from the social media peak we’ve learned that it’s an agony to live in a world that’s Discourse-only.

4.I once worked on a TV show that was a documentary, not a reality show, ok? — even though the techniques were reality techniques and the producers did, yes, lead the talent to outcomes that would be more entertaining for the show, but one time when a mother of one of the kids on the show said, “my son is on a reality show,” we all got very offended, which proves that it wasn’t a reality show — but, anyway, the showrunner, who was actually a veteran of reality TV and had that glimpse into human nature, mused aloud that the heart of reality TV and of entertainment in general was “women fighting.” And the more time I spend on Substack, and around the literature business, the more I am struck by the wisdom of that aperçu — it seems to explain a lot, actually, about the ‘vanishing male writer’ crisis. At the peak of the old boys’ network of a male-dominated literary scene, Harold Bloom speculated that the very heart of literature was patrilineal transmission — and how many conversations from that time turned on asking who was the ‘heir’ to such and such a tradition. But the energy all seems to have gone out of that, and The Discourse is animated, more than anything else, by women fighting. Think about the staying power of something like the ‘bad art friend’ story. The plagiarism scandal currently roiling Substack is a perfect example of that, by the way — it’s two writers, both of whom happen to be attractive young women, with one accusing the other of plagiarism and everybody else piling on. But this sells in a way that nothing else exactly attracts attention. What this has meant for me is that I can expect controversial articles by women to set off chain reactions that nothing else does — and in some cases trigger really belligerent comments that get to the point of turning scary. And I know that articles by men, even if they’re actually pretty provocative, are going to have a far more muted response. Seeing this from the other side of the looking glass, I think I have a far better sense of what explains the Jacob Savage Phenomenon — why it is that establishment publishing seems to have lost all interest in young men — and the real answer is that young men don’t incite controversy in quite the same way, and controversy, of this very particular Discourse-y kind, is the real coin of the realm. I was very taken by a line in The Republic of Letters piece of Noah Smits’ — an excellent writer with a subscribership of five — in which he describes having many nights in which he drives to a neighboring city with his roommate to just walk around empty streets and let the cold air clear their heads, and this seems to be as perfect illustration as I’ve come across of what the male crisis feels like.

5.I’ve always been pretty anti-editing, so it’s kind of funny now that editing is basically what I do. My objections to editing have been two-fold. One is that it’s basically a power move — editors are in a position of superiority over writers where writers usually have no choice except to accept whatever it is that editors want to do to their manuscripts. And the other is that editors think less like writers and more like tea party hosts thinking about the table settings for their guests. And now that I’m editing a lot, I can confirm that both observations are absolutely accurate. In editing mode, I really spend very little time thinking about the quality of the piece and far more about how it will fit into the publication’s production line — and the kinds of nuances that are so important to writers (and to me when I’m writing) really matter very little to me when I’m thinking about how ‘successful’ a piece is going to be. I find that I am constantly trying to pull myself back to a ‘writer sensibility’ as opposed to thinking like an editor. But there is a joy in editing that I hadn’t really expected and that is kind of connected to the mindset of hosting a tea party. All my life, I’ve never really liked the kinds of conversations going on around me — one-on-one conversation tends to be two people fighting, usually unsuccessfully, the overwhelming urge to talk about themselves; group conversation is all about, on the one hand, the tendency for one person to dominate and then, on the other hand, the tendency for everyone else to conform; public conversation tends to be all about following along with the raging rapids of The Discourse. But editing does give you the opportunity — within the constraints of having the publication be entertaining and so on — of setting a conversation in the way that you would want it to be. For me, that’s aspirational (people trying to move in the direction of their best selves), sincere (people writing with honesty about whatever it is that their lives have shown them), and respectful (nobody dominating the conversation, people leaving room for honest disagreement). Who’s to say whether that comes through with The Republic of Letters, but it’s hard for me to think of anything that I would enjoy doing quite as much as trying to set this kind of a tone.