Every time I scroll Substack for the last week or two, it seems like everyone is writing about living, but not in the good way?
Like, everybody wants to write recipes but nobody wants to write a food review. Everybody wants to write about story craft but nobody wants to write great stories. Everybody is writing about how to live a great life or how great their life is but nobody is writing about how they’re living their life right now.
I frankly think this is more of a me and my algo problem than a Substack problem, but I suspect one contributing cause is all the people I see suffer from an acute disease unnamed but endemic to social media, where everything shared needs to be packaged with a takeaway—the problem is that awareness infects their thinking upstream, so they are writing around preconceived takeaways rather than writing their way to them. Does this make sense?
Funny enough, I agree with the recent incendiary essay that said too many people are cashing in on low effort bullshit instead of aiming to write quality stuff. I agree so much that I scrapped several projects I had planned to focus on higher quality things.
However I think that something doesn’t need to have a sanitized, neatly packaged thesis and takeaway to be high quality. It’s an unfortunate side effect of internet writing that everyone thinks every piece of writing must have some crystal clear lesson for every reader with an 8the grade reading level.
Some of the best pieces of writing ever will profoundly change you, but you have to interrogate how over a long time and possible multiple readings. I’m also not saying that there shouldn’t be a clean takeaway if it’s organic.
I think the issue is that too early in the draft people get some simple idea, and great essays or fiction or memoir just doesn’t seem to translate well to the platonic “expandable tweet thread” that a lot of people seem to be aiming for with their writing.
(Pictured is my breakfast, apropos of nothing, for you to consider. I have a sneaking suspicion more people read long notes with pictures.)
