"i couldn't help but wonder...who gets to be a writer?"
postcard 20: on substack as a walled literary garden, substack as a treasure trove, and substack as an echo chamber
Welcome to postcards by elle! Every week, I send out a weekly postcard, which includes a list of everything I read and watched that week. This is free, so free and paid subscribers will all receive this. To support my work, please consider upgrading your subscription!
prelude
And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.
—The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
This will sort of be a sequel to one of my postcards from earlier this year, so read my postcard on my history of writing online first, because I think that gives my thoughts more of a foundation of where I am coming from.
A few days ago, I read this now-viral Substack post by Emily Sundberg. It already has over two hundred comments and while I am sure there does not need to be another voice added to the already noisy discourse, I have a lot of thoughts about this and wanted to share.
Here is her post for reference! I think it is absolutely worth a read. To sum it up, the post explores the ‘blandification’ of Substack and how she believes it has become more of a ‘trope-y echo chamber’ rather than a place for ‘quality writing’. I put all those phrases in quotation marks because I think those thoughts are deeply subjective.
To preface, my main platform was never Substack and it was more of my ‘side platform’ until I started taking it very seriously last month. My main platform still is, to a degree, my bookstagram (book-instagram), where I recommend and review books. I decided to start a Substack after people on my Instagram and Tiktok encouraged me to (especially after my notes-app tour & weekly article recommendations went viral). Both Instagram and Tiktok are visual-based platforms, and after almost three years of being tormented by the 2200 character limit on Instagram, I wanted somewhere to share longform writing.
This was coming from a place of missing writing essays and analytical pieces from my years as an English Literature major. I wanted to scratch that itch in my brain, so thus began my Substack.
One other thing I think is important to note (that I mention in the linked ‘postcard’ above) is that I spent all of my teenage years writing fiction online on Wattpad. Throughout the eight long years I was active there, I gained around 30,000 followers and a few dozen million reads. For a sixteen-year-old girl who only wrote as an outlet for stress, I was amazed at how many people seemed interested in what I was saying. People began telling me that my writing resonated deeply with them, and isn’t that what all writers want in the end? To leave a mark in someone’s mind, shift the paradigm in which they see the world just a little bit?
This is one of my favorite comments I ever got, and one that made me realize I never wanted to stop writing:
I eventually wrote my college personal statement on my experience and the community I built on Wattpad. And ironically, the site notorious for having bad quality writing and tropey books got me into one of the best literature programs in the US.
I apologize for the very long, slightly tangential preface, but I thought it was important to explain why I (politely) disagree with Sundberg on Substack’s current landscape.
Sundberg writes:
I actually had time to read some newsletters from the people I subscribe to. And then I read some newsletters from the people that they subscribe to. I realized that if you blacked out the names of many of the writers I come across on Substack today, I wouldn’t be able to tell them apart. So then this essay began.
Here is my defense of Substack: I do agree that many essays I read on Substack cover similar or the same topics. But I don’t think that necessarily warrants criticism or a case that Substack is filling up with the same writing. There may be opinions on the same topic, but no ‘same opinion’ exists. The whole point of sharing ideas is that people can react to the same thing (like this post), or inspiration taken from another piece of writing. I’m sure that someone else has already posted thoughts on Sundberg’s Substack post with a Carrie Bradshaw picture.
Quality-wise, I have never seen a platform in which every writer (or every writer that I have encountered so far) puts so much thought and care into each piece of writing. The selling point of Substack for me was a community of people who were really serious about writing. I think it becomes difficult when you view writing from a business perspective, as a product that someone is selling. Of course in an ideal world, every single product should be different. But making writing into a consumable good often dichotomizes what writing actually should be seen as.
The thing is, writing is a deeply, deeply personal thing. It does not matter whether you are writing a Substack post or a fiction book—you are literally translating the thoughts in your head. This is one of the main reasons I love reading and have been an avid reader all my life—because it allows me to get out of my own head for a bit and see how other people view the same world a bit differently from me. I love reading people’s thoughts on the same thing. I love adding opinions to the arsenal of information I already have. I love reading something that changes or corrects the way I think.
At the risk of sounding preach-y: Substack is growing (especially from the start of this summer) and thus inevitably changing. I personally think hoping that a platform does not evolve just because you intend for your newsletter to remain the same is a bit idealistic and putting it on a pedestal. As a platform develops and extends its reach and engagement to different groups of people, so does its content. But this is true for every single platform in existence. You just have to work a little harder to find the niche of writing and information you like.
Perhaps someone will say that I am a part of this growing problem. My Substack includes almost every single thing that Sundberg mentions. I post ‘weekly postcards’ that consist of a prelude (commentaries like this one or some paragraphs from my journal), an interlude (a list of what I read and watched this week, along with 10 article recommendations), and a postlude (an art piece I love along with things I really liked that week). For paid posts, I post longer lists of recommendations for books, films, art, and perfumes. I also began posting longer analytical essays on books and movies I wanted to expound on.
Here is what Kyle Chayka said via Sundberg’s post:
Monetized diary entries is totally right. I cringe when I hit a paywall on some random weekend update newsletter of a writer who I subscribed to because their work was interesting. Like you want me to pay for 5 links you read this week or your fav new novel? […] A lot of paywalled newsletters seem like afterthoughts or not very intentionally structured. Maybe I'm biased as an Aging Millennial but I think editorial products require commitment and should be well-designed.
This made me wince a bit because this is exactly something I am afraid of my paid posts becoming. For reference, here are some of my paid posts:
Most of these are lists (because I started this Substack to largely post things from my notes app, which are…mostly lists). Lists can often feel carelessly or thoughtlessly done, which is something I extremely hard not to do.
Just yesterday, I published a post for paid subscribers that included over 300 short book recommendations. My lists often overflow because I am so terribly cognizant of the fact that my Substack posts, even my free ones, take up space in someone’s personal email. And that is so vastly different than opening an app to check the following feed. I try to make my weekly postcards as thorough as possible because of that reason. And if people pay for my content, I want them to get their money’s worth. In exchange for a paid subscription, I try my best to curate a cohesive amalgamation of media (literature, film, paintings, songs) for people with the same taste as me so they don’t have to spend hours and hours finding things.
My conclusion is this: I am not really an optimistic person, but I do feel pretty good about Substack. I know that what Sundberg is criticizing is the quality of writing, not the topic of writing, and I understand that it is easy to see similar posts as derivative. I am familiar with uninspired writing—I was on Wattpad, where much of the writing was actually just unreadable due to bad formatting and bad grammar.
But here is the thing: even on Wattpad, a site where none of the writing is truly taken seriously, I encountered some incredibly written books that still remain up there with my favorites from traditional publishers. Likewise, many essays on Substack are on par with, if not better, than published articles. While I understand it may be frustrating you’ve occasionally come across a post that repeats an opinion you’ve seen, I think the proliferation of Substack newsletters shouldn’t be seen as negative.
Writing really just comes down to personal preference, and there are not a lot of instances where you can say that something is outwardly ‘bad’ writing. And once you start thinking of this platform as more of a treasure trove than a wasteland, things start looking good again.
interlude: a few of my favorite substack posts
This isn’t a regular postcard (because it’s being posted on Wednesday), but I thought it would be apt to include some of my favorite posts on here. I am still trying to get into the groove of being active and interactive on here instead of just posting and leaving. For Sunday’s postcard, I will post about my favorite Substack newsletters!
These are just a few posts I can think of off the top of my head—I’ll try to post more later in a different post!
- ’s essay on breakup and moving on:
- ’s post on the effects of Booktok on reading and the identity of the reader:
- ’s post on green (her Hue’s Hue column for The Paris Review is my favorite favorite thing ever):
- ’s post on female friendship:
- ’s post on soulmates and relationships:
- ’s review on the Diorissimo perfume:
You were the one who introduced me to Substack and I couldn’t be more thankful! 💕 I see where Emily is coming from, but Substack has become my safe space, you just have to find your people
you've so eloquently put into words how I felt about about emily's essay - expression for the sake of expression feels like justification enough. for what it's worth, I think your substack is extremely thoughtfully created/laid out - of all of the wonderful newsletters I subscribe to, opening yours feels the most like opening a present. <3