"Process"

I now have over twenty subscribers to my Substack, and it's a bit of a mystery to me, because I believe all of my Substack posts combined have less than twenty likes. I suppose it's not like I've written any Pulitzer Prize worthy stuff, but I do wonder why the subscribers are there. What exactly are they subscribing for?

I thought I would talk about my writing process, because I think it's a little unusual, and that may be a big part of why my writing in general isn't better. Sometimes (I don't think it's happened since I joined Substack) I turn out something really extraordinarily good. When I was in college, I took a creative writing course, and the instructor told me my final piece was the only one out of the class that she thought was suitable for publishing. I was surprised, both because I didn't think it was that great, and because there were works by other students that I thought were quite extraordinary.

But this is the thing--well, two things--about that story. It was a story about caffeine addiction, and it was mostly autobiographical, which is to say, I didn't make much of it up. Secondly, my method of writing it was to drink four large cups of coffee and let myself loose on a ream of notepaper. The story just came out of me like I couldn't contain it.

That's not completely atypical of my writing process for most things I write, except for the caffeine. I don't plan it out, write an outline, make a rough draft, edit and revise. When I know what I intend to write about, it just comes out on paper, then I double check for typos. The advantage of this odd, very personal process is that my writing has a certain rawness to it that I like, and it's very cohesive, because it was something that I could hold in my head all at once. The drawback of this process is that I've never developed the discipline for the longer process of rough drafting and revising that would work for writing that could potentially be greater than what I could hold in my head all at once.

Like most writers, I'd love to write a book, but I could certainly never produce a novel, because I don't believe that I have the creativity to craft a plot of a story longer than twenty pages maximum. I could write a collection of essays, but it seems proper that they would be cohesive to a central topic, and really (obvious to anyone who has read much of my writing) my mind tends to be all over the place.

And then there's blogging and Substack. I don't know what, among the many things that I write about, really interests people. I get few likes and even less feedback, even though one of the main reasons I write is the hope that it will spark dialogue. It's not that I'm really writing for a target audience anyway, as I mostly just use it as an outlet to put what's in my head out there to see what others think. A lot of the time, what I'm about is not giving answers to what is going on in the world, but coming up with questions that I think need to be asked.

Is that really sufficiently good writing? Twenty-odd people may think so, or maybe people on Substack freely subscribe the way some people on Facebook make "friends" with 600 people. I don't know, I just keep writing. Give me feedback sometimes, though?