Well I thought I wasn’t going to do this, but now here I am, getting out another semi-regular essay on Substack. I’d thought I was going to take the weekend off and just read, partly for the sheer pleasure of it, partly in service to a larger writing project that may one day see the light of day.
But then that reading derailed me, pushing me to get my own hasty words out on another site’s e-paper. At first, I thought that informal foray, over at that the blog that I’ve been maintaining off and on for years now, was enough—but no dice. Instead, here I am at it again, trying to figure out this time whether it makes a difference where I write, and to what end/s. Whether there’s anything truly different about the newsletter form that is Substack and the more diaristic venue that I’ve let Wordpress become. Whether I really am feeling straitjacketed in some way by the pressure to produce something coherent for the former, and to slap my name on it, before dropping it into people’s inboxes—as opposed to just letting my thoughts more or less go where they may in more anonymous fashion, and letting whoever wants to find or read them do so, with no further attempt to dangle them in front of a regular audience’s face.
Admittedly, there’s the option on Wordpress to have a blogger’s entries emailed to you every time something’s published. But I’ve never messed with that function, and the fact that you can just hit “publish” there and know your site will be updated is somehow different than having Substack tell you it’s going to notify your subscribers that you’ve vomited more thoughts out into the world. The difference I’ve found, or created, between the two may be between writing just to write (sort of in line with what I was talking about last week) and writing in order to achieve some sort of successful outcome with and outside of said writing, whatever that outcome may be.
The bit of reading I mentioned that threw me into this round of writing was book six of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle—specifically, his discussion about what qualifies as or lies at the heart of literature. In his opinion, it’s “the inimitable tone of the particular,” the identifiably unique way a writer has of telling their tale.1 Don’t worry: this is no revival of Romantic grasping at individual genius, and it’s not in any way a celebration of US-style individualism that tries to eliminate any thought of interconnection, social solidarity, and so forth.2 But it does make me wonder how amenable any given outlet or platform is to the development of that individual voice and practice—to its allowing a writer to shape and give full voice to that inimitable tone.
Again, you can pretty much do anything you want on Substack or Wordpress or any other self-publishing medium, so in some sense, my question goes nowhere, where those channels are concerned. But then you get into other, more formal venues, such as journals or book publishers, or even a developmental editing course I took, in which the instructor insisted upon every chapter of a book being the same length. The more gatekeeping involved, of course, the more difficult it will be to feel comfortable exploring your own style or approach, even if the area being guarded is meant to be a so-called safe space for that process to unfold. The situation is obviously complicated, and not because the fusty powers-that-be are holding us back from celebrating our unconstrained selves or letting our genius have free and rampant rein. But rather, as Knausgaard says, any “I,” as he calls the writer in this case, is clearly part of and formed by the community of writers and thinkers who’ve come before, and within which said writer has to communicate, using language and mores that are identifiable and acceptable enough to allow for that communication to happen.
Is it just a matter, then, of finding your niche, your people, even your platform? And if so, how might you know you’ve found it? I don’t think “success” is necessarily the telling criterion here, whether you mean by that triumph a reader’s positive comment or big-time sales of a book you’ve managed to publish. It may instead be a level of comfort that does not mean you think anything you write goes because it’s the product of your own unique brain (where we’re right back in the thick of Romanticism, or simple adolescent knowing-all), but where you feel comfortable enough to keep exploring and working and believing the whole undertaking is worthwhile. And where if you’re lucky, you can build a community of others in search of or at least in support of the same thing, since “the very nature of the I… is an appeal…and in that appeal there is always another, and thereby a we.”3 Finding that we, then, may be what we’re really talking about—and whatever tool/s you use to get there may not in the end matter, if you land right in its midst.
Karl Ove Knausgaard, My Struggle book 6, translated by Don Bartlett and Martin Aitken (Brooklyn: Archipelago, 2018), 236.
Check out pages 232 through at least 246, where I left off for the night.
Knausgaard, 242.