Secret Weapon Volume 13

Where grunge meets academics

Welcome back to The Writer’s Secret Weapon, the weekly newsletter of writing advice that isn’t your typical writing advice. I’m John, it’s my job and passion to help you write better (it’s in the name of the business for a reason).

The Writer’s Secret Weapon is entirely supported by your subscriptions and whatever money I can find in my pockets when I do the laundry. If you’d like more advice like this, or you’d like to see more in-depth and specific stuff that’s only available to subscribers, please consider subscribing.

Have you ever looked around to see what Substack has to offer? There are a ton of people here: journalists, screenwriters, published authors, scientists, academics, a lot of bakers, lawyers, cartoonists, creatives, sports analysts, economists, bullshit alarmist centrists, oodles of boomers, satirists, and political theorists.

Substack is packed. And I feel like I’m the kid on the first day of school who just moved over the summer and I don’t know which way is up. I’ve been doing this for a couple weeks, and I’d like to tell you what I’ve seen because I think you’ll find it parallels with a lot of what you’re experiencing as a writer in the sea of writers.

They tell you to be yourself, but encourage you to fit in

Here’s the biggie. Not only will you get told a thousand ways from Sunday that you’re free to express yourself and say whatever you want about whatever to whatever degree, there will be plenty of tools to facilitate making that happen. It’ll feel fun at first to click this thing or that to see what happens, and you’ll put out loads of stuff you’re excited about as you try and figure out what works from what doesn’t. And from within the little space you call your own, you’ll feel great about - everything coming up Milhouse.

And then you’ll leave your space and go see what else is out there. You’ll check out Substack Notes and see there’s a ton of people all doing their own thing. That’s when you’ll see it. It’ll smack you in the face.

There’s a ton of people who all sound and come across like they’ve been doing this since springing out of the womb. They’ll be polished. They’ll be erudite. They’ll be captivating. They’ll be slinging words together in ways you didn’t think language could do and they’ll paint pictures in your brain or actually show you pictures of things you didn’t even know where possible.

And they’ll do this with such seeming ease that you’ll maybe question if they’re living on some alternate Earth where the days are longer and everyone leaves elementary school with a double major in philology and literature.

That’s the bar. That’s the majority impression. Not a lot of dick jokes, nobody talking about how Don Callis’s heel turn was great, nobody mentioning how great butts or nachos are. Whenever you start thinking that you can be the court jester to all these nobles, you feel that pressure creep up that maybe this isn’t the space for you to talk about you think the clothing in Andor is rad as hell because you didn’t do the apparently assigned reading on Allen v Milligan and you didn’t know you needed a full 10-page paper on J Harrison Ghee.

Nobody’s going to tell you that you can’t sit here, that you don’t belong here, that you need to be X amount of cool to walk through the door, but they won’t have to - they’ll just ignore you the way adults ignore kids at parties. (I’ve always been the guy who would much rather go play trucks or Lego with the kids than listen to yet another story about an office job) All they need to do is be themselves and by sheer force of will, pressure you into either elevating yourself to whatever orthological vibe they’re on or leave you feeling completely shut out.

The solution: As far as I can tell, just like in publishing, this is where you take a healthy dose of stubbornness and just stick with what you’re doing. The whole world doesn’t need to love you or like you or even know you’re out there in order for you to achieve your creative dreams. Focus on the work, there are other (maybe better) ways to grow an audience.

There’s without and within

Social media has fractured into way more platforms of specific reach or intent than being just a few monoliths as it was even 5 years ago. As the idiot billionaires extended their reach and gutted social media in favor of pay-for-features or pay-for-privilege, the “social” in social media went to ground, finding formerly niche platforms and spaces that weren’t yet touched or tainted by a business-first lemonade stand model.

All of a sudden discoverability became paramount. You no longer had the big giant single audience in one place, you had smaller chunks of audiences in many places. And if you wanted any part of anything to grow you needed to figure out how to both stand out and broadcast that you’re worth someone’s time. To think of this as repeating what you did before only in a new space is to misunderstand that the new spaces, like Substack, aren’t clones of the older bigger monoliths. This isn’t the same house with new paint on it, this is a whole new building with all the doors in different spots.

Whereas before you could drive people to one social media platform as a hub and then direct them to specifically what you were doing from that one account, it’s different now. With all the smaller platforms you need to understand without and within when it comes to audiences.

Without-within refers to the boundaries of whatever platform we’re talking about, and it doesn’t matter if that’s Substack or Mastodon or counter.social or the next new hot thing the kids are all on. The audience within is the audience that finds you from whatever you’re doing on the platform. The platform’s algorithms recommended you, they saw your posts, they checked out a conversation you were in, whatever - the audience within didn’t have to leave the site or come from somewhere else to find you. That’s not the case for the audience without, the people who you brought to the platform from somewhere else either because of a pre-existing relationship or some compelling reason elsewhere (like tweeting about launching a newsletter).

Substack is great for within, if you’re willing to deal with the occasional bouts of feeling like you’re playing checkers and everyone else is doing brain surgery or the sense of invisibility despite other people’s almost excessive visibility (more on that in a second). Substack though is better without, where you drive people to a newsletter and hopefully they stick around for more than just what you’re putting out.

The solution: Bring people to the newsletter. Keep putting out your best possible work.

Figure out what you’re doing

I have become somebody easily distractable. I wasn’t always, I remember plenty of times where I would tunnel-vision so intensely for hours that I’d lose all track of time. Now the polar opposite is true. I’ll lose my focus in the middle of writing a sentence, I’ll stare at a screen and four things I need to do and check out will pop into my head. I’ll go hunting for the origin of some random house sound.

While I honestly want to say this is a long-Covid issue, some kind of health-based brain thing where there’s some legitimate reason it’s happening, I don’t know. It’s annoying, because my focus was a thing I used to pride myself on, and I certainly don’t remember agreeing to become someone who hopscotches from thing to thing and is rarely focused at length anymore, but no matter the cause, this is my reality.

There isn’t really some tremendous upside, this is not a new mutant power, though it has shown me how important it is to know what to do. If I’m going to ping-pong my way through a half-dozen things, the more organized I can be about each one, the easier it becomes to deal with each one as my ability to do it waxes and wanes.

In part this also means finding clarity on specifics. Okay, I’m going to write a newsletter, what am I going to say, what are the points I want to make, how can keep track of them so that when it suddenly pops in my head to check the weather then my bank account then think about dinner and if it needs 5 or 6 hours so I better check the recipe, I can come back to writing at some point.

Like this.

only about writing or recording or cleaning or wishing about 90% of my life were radically different. Even as I wrote this section I started reading about plumbing (?) then shoe repair (??) then the 1970s US science budget (???) before remembering I had this tab open and I should get back on track.

This makes it pretty difficult to feel like you belong in a space where everyone usually seems to not only have all their shit together but has that shit together at such a polished level that you might start thinking even their sneezes are mature and serious.

I don’t know if you’re going through something similar, if I’m late to the party and everyone’s been like this forever and I’m just catching up or if I’m the only person in the world going through this, but I’m hoping I’ve articulated this well enough that you can see how a lack of clarity can put you in a space where you’re wondering not only how you’ll get anything done, but also if you’ll get them done and they’ll sound okay, either coherent or erudite.

The solution: Leave yourself plenty of notes, but keep doing what you’re doing. Eventually yes, you too will finish what you’re writing.

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That’s all for this week’s Secret Weapon. I’m taking a week off and will be back with Volume 14 on the 28th of June.

Love you. Talk soon.