To be a writer, you have to embrace loneliness. Most of the time, I find that writers are naturally rather lonely people. They tend to gather on the sidelines of social events, go to restaurants alone, sit on benches and people-watch. After all, that time without interaction is often what drives us to the page. The compulsion to share that writing with an audience, whether that’s your mother or the whole world, is at its core, the desire for connection. To be understood by peers.
When I decided to start a Substack, I had only been writing consistently for a couple of years, and that writing was only shared with two people. Part of the sharing was to answer a question: am I good at this? Good enough to really pursue this as more than a private exercise? This story that I’m telling, does it ring true for you?
It was an incredibly vulnerable time, and I think that had either of those people indicated that the writing was objectively bad, or worse, boring, I would have stopped sharing it. The little bits of encouragement from them kept me working and reworking my prose, and I will forever be indebted to those early readers.
Substack was a way for me to grow that feedback and reinforce the practice of writing regularly. I’m embarrassed to say that I really do write for readers. That’s not exactly true. I write plenty of pieces that no one has or will likely ever read, but I’m motivated to write for an audience. I used to deny that fact, tuck it deep, so that no artist would ever be able to see what I viewed as a weakness. That is until I had another writer friend express the reality so simply and beautifully: writing is meant to be read.
At its core, writing is language preserved, a message immortalized. We write for someone to read, just as we speak so that others will listen. Unless it’s a journal entry (and I have to confess before I finish this sentence that after reading The Diary of Anne Frank, I did often fantasize of someone finding my diary and publishing it) you are writing for some audience, real or imagined.
Maybe this occurs down the road: you write a piece with no thought of the person reading it on the other end, but when you revise you start to consider how it sounds to someone else. That’s the reason for taking a step back before a re-read. To see it with fresh eyes.
A friend of mine subscribed to my Substack without any grid for newsletters outside of the news. They were somewhat confused, as many people outside of the Substack community probably are, by the concept of writing fiction or blogging thoughts, and sending it in an email. They asked me why I decided to do it.
I told them I wanted the deadline, a group of readers however small, to be accountable to and put the gun to my head so to speak. And then, on thinking it over, I told them I was also hoping to get some critique, and not just positive. Growing readers would inevitably invite some negativity, and by publishing online I was expecting a lot of it. They asked me if anyone had criticized my work, and I had to admit that no, they hadn’t.
To Substack’s credit, and particularly in the fiction space I inhabit, the readership is overwhelmingly positive. It’s something I did not expect to find here, on the Internet. I left Facebook after 2016, and keep Instagram limited to my close friends and family. I think I have twelve followers on Twitter where I in turn follow horror writers almost exclusively. My point here is that I’m not savvy online, and I’ve found online discourse to be comprised of mostly unthoughtful mud-slinging.
Here, that expectation has been upended. I’ve been delightfully surprised by the enthusiasm and thoughtfulness of individuals on this platform, the way people have reached out and connected here in this space. It’s been relatively personal. Unlike other online forums, I can tell I’m talking to real human beings. I welcome the break in the cynicism, but still, I long for some way to improve my writing.
In my real life, I only have one friend that writes and reads regularly. He is my go-to, the one I talk shop with. I’ve thought of venturing out into the local community, finding a writers group of some kind to meet with regularly, but so far I haven’t found anything consistent. Most people who are like me, adults with full-time jobs that are not writing related, don’t carve out regular time to write, much less meet and go over works in progress.
Earlier this year I started to look into MFA programs. I wasn’t sure how else to go about getting the type of feedback and attention to craft I’m looking for. I talked with my one and only real life writer friend about it, and was pointed to this article written by Erik Hoel, of The Intrinsic Perspective, in which he argues that MFA programs have not served to produce the best writers. Instead, they have produced defensive, brief novels that hardly venture into the daring areas of literary masterpiece.
Before you argue the finer points of his article with me, let me first say that I am totally unequipped to participate. I am the most unqualified writer I know here, and by that I mean I haven’t read enough to argue anything about literature. I have a computer science degree, love trashy novels, and have come to this game late, in my mid-thirties. Truthfully, I don’t know most of the writers that he references. David Foster Wallace I came to know via Mary Karr and her wonderful memoir Lit, but that about sums it up for me.
What I can garner from his analysis, is what I already instinctively feel about the greater culture at large. We are homogenizing as a society, pushing further into boxes and pushing out of them less. Much of this is thanks to big tech, and public conversations being criticized and refined to the point of propaganda. Thinking is happening less, and parroting is happening more. I can imagine how the “workshop writer” could become a shadow of their former self, lose their voice to the criticism of the overly-educated.
But I can also see the lack of editing in the new indie fiction movements. If there is a writer that stands out as a literary great in the making, to my knowledge, we haven’t found it in those spaces yet. I think that’s because the barrier to entry is too low. Not that these writers shouldn’t write or are bad, but that we need more critical eyes on the work before we push it out.
Writer groups have always existed, and some of the more successful examples took place not in classrooms, but amongst passionate peers. In fact most intellectual movements were propelled by the natural and deep curiosity fostered by relationships—discussing politics, philosophy, and craft with friends, colleagues and competitors—rather than English faculty or workshop teachers. The indie fiction movement is not short in enthusiasm, but it lacks that critical eye necessary in any learning.
A month or so ago, I saw a post where a writer on Substack noted the lack of any criticism in the fiction space. It was something I had been thinking about for months. I had written a piece of flash fiction that got a lot of positive attention, but it bothered me. I hit a deadline on a contest and pushed it out before it was ready. There were a few parts I liked, but something about the prose didn’t work.
A couple of months after I posted it (and a slew of “wow, this is so well written!” comments later) I got a snarky reply. I think the reader was wound up because he saw some real issues in the writing and only praise in the comments. At first I was hurt. His tone was a little emphatic for a random story he didn’t have to read after all. But then I read the story again with what he had said in mind. And he was right.
I asked for clarification, which he gave, and read it again. Then I realized that his criticism was something that I do often in my writing, and it’s usually the thing that makes me dislike it. This is part of the problem with being an under-educated writer. I have a sense for something being wrong because I’ve read a lot of stories, but lack the language to identify it and the tools to fix it, especially when it comes to my own writing.
Is it possible to inject what the publishing companies have been for so long? If we as writers are going to venture out on our own, isn’t it imperative that we have some guides along the way? I don’t believe in over-institutionalizing art. I’m suspicious of people who only adhere to or enjoy “classical” anything as a rule, and the West has long overtrained artists and writers to the point of paralysis.
But, if we are writing for readers, which we are, shouldn’t we have some give us feedback at some point in the revision process? Better yet, what if we had a few that were writers themselves, eager craftsmen who had something thoughtful to say about our work?
The Internet is not necessarily a producer of quality, but let’s be honest, that hasn’t really been the point, has it? If we focus our energies on that quality, especially in writing, expect it from ourselves and others, can we foster an environment where an online space like this produces the next generation of thinkers and writers and artists?
I think we can. Crowdsourcing, when directed and honed, can be used to create not just good, but better results than the institution of the few that publishing has come to represent. This was tested and proven in the medical field by Dr. Lisa Sanders, who wrote a column in The New York Times that focused on crowdsourcing diagnoses for medical mysteries.
More directly, in the age where censorship from the top down on any and all sides of the political aisle and social media platforms is a very real threat to individual expression and thought, it may become absolutely necessary. In that spirit, I’ve decided to try to foster an online workshop community for fiction writers on Substack.
I’m totally unqualified, have only passion and a deep love for writers and stories to carry the vision forward, but I think it can work. With a variety of voices, a small enough group of invested readers and writers, and the wildness of online writing communities, there is real possibility for something incredible. It takes us, this community, to make it a reality.
Shaina Read writes the Substack, Kindling.
Thanks for your vulnerability here, Shaina. I do think most of us gravitate to Substack for positive reinforcement and a sense of belonging to a common purpose.
The problem with MFA programs and with publishing more broadly is multi-layered. Typically, the faculty teaching in those MFA programs have accumulated the credentials that they are looking to clone in their students, and often part of this apprenticeship is running the gauntlet of literary magazines. But the landscape for lit mags has changed quite a bit since I was first starting out. In fact, I'm getting less success in those venues now than I was as a relative newbie in creative nonfiction. Hard to explain, but the glut of online submissions has contributed to that, and a changing of the guard at the top of the masthead (and at the bottom, among first readers of the slush pile) has, as well.
There is a lot of nepotism in lit mag publishing. People build relationships with editors through MFA programs and the like, and so they gain back channels to publishing the way industry people do through networking. It's by no means a meritocracy, and very few lit mags use a blind submission process. That doesn't mean you can't get published that way, it just means the odds are stacked against you. And succeeding at it requires a kind of doggedness and some kind of OCD spreadsheet to track all of your multiple submissions. Some people claw their way up to an agent by getting these kinds of pro bono publications, but many don't. Not very many people who are submitting their work over the transom are ending up on the cover of Poets & Writers.
But perhaps this is quite a bit afield of your core subject? Michael Mohr wrote about this recently. Most of us who are writers can't help but drift to the edges of society, like you say. And we need to write like we need to breathe. We will, as Gillian Welch sings, do it anyway even if it doesn't pay. I try to remind myself that the literary marketplace doesn't really owe me anything. But I'm also aware that if I were writing a memoir about growing up in Brooklyn, I'd likely have a lot more in common with the execs at the big publishing houses and with a lot of agents. And so I share your hunger for a broader tent.
Yes, Substack can feel like a mutual affirmation society, but that might be because of its relative newness: maybe the role of feedback hasn’t been worked out yet.
Sometimes I comment on articles I find interesting, but I’m generally not comfortable offering up much criticism, because it feels rude at this point. Again, this might be due to Substack’s newness, where negative criticism can feel like trespassing, stomping all over those “likes.” After all, it’s only an e-mail newsletter, published without editorial oversight, maybe finished the night before.
Instead I usually just don’t comment on articles that are not interesting or seem wrongheaded.
Can Substack and related online initiatives help create the future’s writing? I don’t know (or think) about that, but certainly it’s a place to get started, a place to practice. If you post a thousand or so words weekly, in a year you’ve basically written the equivalent of a novel. Now write a novel.