Writing v Content Creation
Mutterings from the coalface
I am struggling with a task today, writing the next customer newsletter email for the place where I used to work, the place that still pays the bills and allows me to have a shot at being a writer. Yup, lucky me.
I haven’t written anything yet because I haven’t had the inspiration.
That has made me think about the difference between writing and content creation, and why pretty much everything on Substack these days is a bit samey, and to be honest, not very good.
Most people who write stuff on Substack are not writing, that seemed to stop a long time ago. These days, they are just filling it with content.
I have been writing these customer emails for years, decades, before the time when they were customer emails, back to the days when they were printed and sent out by post.
That long.
Customers like my newsletters. They actually take the time to reply and say so. These days they are formatted and sent out by the marketing bods who look after the website, people who send out stuff like this for a living, and every time they come back with the stats, and some comment about, just Wow!
This isn’t because I am a brilliant writer. It is partly because I know my customers, and I know what interests them, but more than anything else, I do not write anything unless I have something to write about, something to say that they will want to read.
And this is where Substack fails. People are pressured to write constantly, whether they have something to write or not. It is just content, content, and more content, made by the calendar, typed into keyboards by the hour, and not surprisingly, it is dull, uninteresting, and pretty much the same as the last one they wrote, and the last one somebody else wrote.
Poetry on Substack. Don’t get me started. There used to be some good poets on Substack, and their gems arrived in my inbox once in a while. Thoughtful writing that had been imagined and crafted over a long time, so it could be weeks before the next one arrived. That, of course, is no good for Substack, which demands poems every day, on the dot, churned out to the electronic schedule of metrics and idealised content posting rates. The good poets have gone because posting once every few weeks does not satisfy the machine. The machine wants content, good or bad, it does not care, it just wants lots of content.
One of my treasured things is Model City by Donna Stonecipher. It took four years to write.
Four years.
Think about any of the great poets, ancient or modern. Were they churning out a poem a day, loading them into a spreadsheet, and autofeeding them into Substack? No, they were writing when inspired, then revising, rewriting, often over several months, perhaps longer, until they felt in their bones that it was right.
It is the same with fiction. A novel takes weeks or months to write, then months or years to revise and rewrite until it is ready. The story is written from start to finish, then written again, changed along the way. What the writer pulls together in chapter 28 means changes have to be made to several earlier chapters, so it is back to the beginning, and so it goes on, refining and rewriting.
Think of it as a sculpture being hacked out of marble. We like analogies with sculptures hacked out of marble. The sculptor begins by bringing out the overall shape, then honing it down, closing in on the final work by perfecting one area at a time, going back over the whole structure until the finished form emerges and is polished to perfection. A thing of beauty.
That doesn’t work on Substack. What is needed is content. Ideally, it should be daily content, so just keep writing. The end product doesn’t matter, the machine just wants more writing. Daily prompts - keep them coming. Hack up bits of marble, pile them up, nobody will ever care what the finished sculpture looks like, just hack up marble, do it quickly, rough as you like, and add it to the massive heap of other bits of rough, hacked-up marble.
Amongst the ocean of shite advice for writers, you will find write something every day, no matter what. That is the worst possible advice for some people, not all, but some. Write something when you have something to write, otherwise, find something else to do. Go back over old writing and see how you can make it better, sort out your notes and all the garbage you accumulate while writing, do anything, but do not write until you have words to get out of your head.
So there you go. I just needed to get that off my chest. I will now make myself some sandwiches and take them down to the sea with my writing pads, notebook, and pencil, and that usually does the trick. Just the quiet walk to another place is often all I need to clear my head, and if it doesn’t work, I will wait. I certainly won’t just write something because the office expects something. If I do that, I will just write content, and my customers don’t want to read content, they will stop reading my newsletters, so what would be the point?
If you enjoy my musings about writing and occasional rants, you can subscribe for free. I do not do the money thing on Substack.
Let's face it, the way things are, you are never going to be short of material.
Fully agree - your 'rant' is anything but a rant. Fully textured and well-reasoned.
I have known some real poets. Those that know their craft, have learned its forms, and have taken the time to craft, to sculpt, their words. I have also known a number of people who write poetry that fills a need for them, but is not really very good.
And this is a criticism. Criticism is fair. I play piano, but not well (I can bash out Maple Leaf Rag)...you might be polite about it, but it is not performance worthy. Same holds true for poetry. And a lot of the problem I lay square at the feet of modern teaching, and the ghastly ideology behind it.
These are the teachers that told you to write what you want, it's all poetry as long as you express yourself, blah blah blah. Overheating baked beans on putting on burned toast is technically cooking, but it ain't even the level of a dodgy late night hotdog.
So, this 'poetry' tends to have a structure the writer imagines is poetry...like this:
I am writing a poem,
It is something I wanted to do, even though I am sad,
The rain pours eternal out of doors,
My life is so neurodivergent,
You don't know my pain,
Today.
Bleughhhhh.....
I am reminded that Rik's character in the Young Ones was a grotesque, a parody, not an instructional toolkit.
And similar holds true for writing in general on substack. I have little problem with AI assisted writing, but I do loathe those that claim 'it is all my own work' when it clearly isn't. It's also quite easy to fool some of the basic detectors, but GPTzero is not bad for catching out the outright liars. Of course the defence is 'I am so good at writing, and AI is trained on good writing, that my work comes out as AI'. No, it really doesn't...perhaps for technical or scientific academic work but for most humanities dept writers? No, many are lying. It' quite easy to spot - there are formulaic patterns, and the big giveaway are metaphors that don't quite land (like smoke through glass - hahahah..nonsense).
I am rather disenchanted with substack at the moment. It probably shows.