On Substack

(reflection)

For a writer who believes the traditional publishing world to be failing them — not publishing anything for them to read, let alone what they’ve written — the appeal of Substack is obvious: cut out the middlefolks, tap into the masses, and make a shitload of money writing about whatever you want. That actually existing literary Substack seems to be largely writers writing about how the traditional publishing world is failing them — something already implicit in the fact that they are writing on Substack — may disappoint some readers, although it’s not really any different than what’s been happening in the past however many internetful years. The model of the “little magazine,” one that publishes very curated writing from very curated writers, makes little to no sense in an era when the vast majority of people reading essays, short stories, and the rest of the non-book length writing genres do so online: now, readers can literally follow the authors they like as the authors move from little magazine to little magazine, and without the shame of sunk costs and having something in your house that you spent money on and no longer need, a table of contents can be experienced discretely, with the only loss being the discovery of a writer you don’t already know.

The appeal of being published in a prestigious little magazine for a writer is the same as it is for being published in any publishing outlet — support from a good editor, money, prestige, access to an audience, and the opportunity for more of these things — just in different degrees. Little magazines once had little, but very curated, audiences, as you knew that everyone reading n+1 was the kind of person who would read n+1, namely, the kind of person you’d want to read you. With the rare exception of physical only magazines, however, everyone publishes online now. There is just one publisher, and its various imprints may have different resources to provide you — in terms of capital, labor, and reputation — and some friendly competition between them, but since it’s fairly easy to do everything yourself now, you’re also free to enter the fray lone wolf style. Doing so, you will unfortunately have to deal with all the same algorithmic and logistical challenges you may have happily outsourced to a marketing professional, but that’s fine — someone has to.

The people who complain about the current impossibility of the writing profession are presumptive to glib about why anyone would desire writing to be their profession: most jobs suck, but many of them, particularly those whose skills and sociolects are compatible with being a literary writer, are, for someone with the skills and sociolects required to be a successful literary writer, very stable and very easy, two things which might free you up to have a lot of time to write. If you think you are someone who deserves to be among the few lucky people paid full time to write, presumably because you believe in the worth of the things you are writing or hoping to, you should love yourself enough to trust that you can figure out how to get and efficiently slack off at any other job. In a just world, the art form writing would bear the most resemblance to is dancing: these are both art forms that, even if not at comparable levels to the most skilled professionals, everyone can do more or less wherever they are; bodies, and the brains inside them, may provide specific limitations, something making art always entails, but the material resources required to write are minimal: if you have a library card, you’re set, and unlike dancing, writing is something that our school systems are supposed to teach you how to do across many, many years. I’m pro the activity of writing, even if I am against many of its results, so I have no idea how anyone could ever believe that there are “too many books,” particularly when most of them exist as minuscule assortments of bits that only become real physical books when people click a bunch of buttons signaling they want to buy them, but I guess it’s never been my job to read all of them.

I would like it to be my job to write them, as I love writing and would like to do even more of it, but being paid very little for it has not yet stopped me: I’ve written two novels, and an essay collection where I say more or less what I am saying here, and probably 80% of that writing was stuff I wrote while working salaried office jobs I went out of my way to figure out how to do as efficiently as possible so that I could have more time to write. My experience is my experience, and yours is yours, which is why when it comes to the seemingly endless debate of Traditional Publishing vs. Small Press vs. Self-Publishing, the only thing you need to know is that you should make whatever decisions you need to make to let you write the things you want to write, which are decisions only you can identify and take, things you should do if for no other reason than you can exit the endless debate.

The point of being a writer is to produce the writing. Many liberals seem to believe that where you work is the ultimate determinant of your inner moral essence, a thing I am assured definitely exists for real, although what distinguishes the people doing menial auxiliary work at a large tech company from the literary writers being paid by a traditional publishing house to add a thin veneer of humanist concern for the arts over their workhorse money makers of “slop” type entertainment and memoirs by genocidal ex-presidents and so on, I do not know — something subcultural, maybe? The beauty of being a humanist is that you know that whatever it is you choose to do cannot be divorced from how you choose to do it. Traditional publishing has put out some bangers, a lot of self-publishing is dogshit — who, in the final analysis, gives a fuck?

Something reading and writing a lot will teach you to enjoy is friction. Something the people who use AI to generate writing seem to miss is that a piece of writing is not reducible to the abstract idea it started as, which is why whenever you encounter longform writing produced by an AI, once the novelty of “math made this” wears off, you mostly just wish they had sent the prompt that created it — it’s shorter. Trying to make the idea real yourself will result in many challenges that will refine the idea, an endlessly reciprocal cycle that is its own reward, naturally, but also leads to much better writing. Most of what major tech companies seem to facilitate these days is convenience, a statement I say neutrally, although in almost every concrete instance I can think of — having everything you need or want delivered straight to your house, trying to find love via a glorified resume distribution system, outsourcing the genuine pleasures of the intellectual life to an entity that can’t even make all these copyrighted characters into weed-smoking baddies, and so forth — is pretty bad. It has essentially taken the worst feature of the American suburbs, the lack of public space in which you are forced to interact with people you are not choosing to interact with, and globalized it: with the rare privilege of being someone who has been sexually assaulted on public transit by someone I didn’t choose to interact with, let me be loud about this: this is bad. This is so bad. A life that exists entirely in rooms you need to spend money to be in and a car (mobile room) that takes you between them is bad. Please go apeshit with how metaphorically you read and apply that idea.

Samuel Coleridge has a poem about a title ancient mariner where he says: “Water, water, every where, / Nor any drop to drink,” something I feel almost every time I open an internet browser on my phone or laptop: yahoo, I think, a magic box that will let me access any recorded instance of human intellectual activity that’s been digitized, amazing, can’t wait to resent my peers!