Photo by Lorenzo Herrera on Unsplash
This post was not written using AI.
This past Friday, I dashed off a quick Note and then deleted the Notes app from my phone for the weekend. When I came back, the Note had gone viral, and I had doubled my subscriber count.
First of all, welcome and thank you to my new subscribers! It’s not the main focus of my Substack, but I do in fact have a lot to say about writing and creativity. I started writing before I could actually physically write: my journal entries begin when I was two, the recipes and songs and Important Thoughts I dictated to my mother.
Writing has been my main source of income now for the last five years. I have experimented with every type of paid writing gig: ghost-writing, marketing, e-books, communications, curriculum writing, corporate, religious, etc. My Substack has always been a back-burner project, because it does not pay the bills, and one can only write so many words in a day. I have friends who regularly churn out 5k + words in a day—5k good words—but I am not one of those people. I am one of those people who sees the big picture and all the tiny details all together, and feel that I have not said anything worth reading unless I have somehow captured all of it. Discipline for me means admitting that I can’t possibly ever capture the big picture, but maybe, if I get my words right, I can zoom in on this one tiny detail and describe it well. So productivity for me means always walking through a fair amount of overwhelm.
The thing that cracks me up about a handful of responses to the Note above is that some people seemed to hear me saying that we should make inconsistent publishing the new standard for everyone. They thought I was setting myself up as being on “team unscheduled” and they were on “team scheduled.” They felt counter-shamed for, apparently, just being too darned consistent. This is all very silly and I don’t feel the need to respond to it at length but I do want to make a couple points.
My Note was not taking aim at any person’s writing habits or personal standards. It’s obvious that many, many people have a consistent writing and publishing schedule, and that works for them. I have no beef with that! What I do have a beef with is the sort of digital collective unconscious we all now swim in online—the buy-my-course egregore that wants to standardize human intelligence and creativity so that it can track and sell it. Why did my very simple plea for irregularity hit such a nerve? I think it is because now whenever we try to create, we can feel the cold, robotic breath of the Machine. We are all already stretched on a digital Procrustean bed. We are promised that, at the very low cost of our natural human expression and movement, we are guaranteed to become millionaires! To find our 1000 true fans! To turn our hobby into a successful side gig!
What we are never told is that the cost is our minds.
Discipline is a good thing. But discipline can’t be reduced to “regular publishing” if our goal is to write something worth reading. If writing were simply plugging in various inputs or uploading mental data into spreadsheets, then maybe discipline would be all we need. Or maybe a good writing bot. But writing something worth reading demands other things from us: attention, deep thought, rest, meaningful relationships, a sense of humor, stewardship of our bodies. In other words, writing requires that we have a body and a soul, and so writing discipline is very much like discipline in every other area of our life.
We might track our steps or our macros, but it is unhealthy to track everything. We might set a morning alarm, but it is unhealthy to follow such a regimented schedule that we can’t deal with normal life interruptions or be open to spontaneity. Writing is no different. I have often found deadlines helpful in forcing me to just sit down and write the thing. In fact, I write pretty well under pressure as a rule. But my worst writing has always been when I have begun habitually writing what I think I’m “supposed” to write—when I’m thinking about what the algorithm wants or what some abstract, hypothetical, future writer version of me would write.
I understand that we are all working with the algorithm, that we are all figuring out how to do good work and be seen. I don’t think I particularly have that figured out yet. But to me it’s a human dignity issue, it is a matter of preserving my self-hood, my soul even, not to subvert my mind and attention to the demands of the Machine. I know how to work under pressure, meet deadlines, write when I’m uninspired, and all the rest of it. What I’m arguing for is not that we cultivate a sort of entitled artiste diva-class of Substack creators who demand applause for their three posts a year. What I do want is for us to build a culture where we honor each others’ humanity and remember that the Machine is just a tool. All I am asking is that we all remember that we are human.
Thank you for sharing and how lucky for you to have had this tool your whole life.💙🧘🏽♀️🙏🏽
Yes. I only want to read what other humans have written. I recently began writing daily and feel compelled to write so only humans can see all the subtly in the work.
I wrote a poem yesterday that only humans can read.
https://substack.com/@yogigaruda8/note/c-128961107?r=2dt3p8
I didn’t see the original note, but somehow stumbled into this post and am glad I did. Excellent thoughts here. I too feel as if discipline is not about a publishing schedule, though there is something to writing on a deadline. I’ve been thinking a lot about how writing craft is improved and for me it mostly involves more reading and not necessarily more writing or more posts going out.