Two years, 5,000 subscribers, one writer who needs a homecoming

In year three, Inner Workings will return to a slower pursuit of beauty

Art by Stephanie Davidson

Wow. Well. The gods of Substack have delivered to me the perfect co-occurrence of of two major events: my two-versary writing here on Substack, and my ascent into the rarified air of five thousand subscribers. When I say that these are MAJOR events, I know this statement will divide readers. Some will say, haha, those aren’t major events, excellent use of sarcasm, Rachel. And some will say, FIVE KAY? THAT’S HUGE! SHOW ME HOW!

This post has something for everyone, so if you are in either camp (or both, like me), please read on.

Reflections on a goal

When I came to Substack two years ago, my goal was to start writing on the internet in order to, quote-un-quote, “build an audience.” Since I was a teenager, I have wanted to be a professional writer, and the straightest path to that these days is to BYOR (bring your own readers).

I was an internet nobody at the time—forty-six followers on a defunct Instagram account—so Substack seemed as good a place as any to start my audience-building project. The plan was simple. I would write on Substack, grow an audience, and then use that as a jumping-off point for further writing pursuits—mainstream articles, a book deal, who knows!

If this sounds coldly calculating to you, it sounds like that to me too. But at the time, I had spent hundreds of hours generating intricate essays for literary magazines, only to wonder if anyone ever read them, and whether I would ever see a dime for anything I wrote. I was looking for a way to wrest control over my writerly destiny. I think that’s what brings a lot of early career writers to Substack, which is why I want to address the topic directly.

So I set out to do on Substack what I do best: write literary personal essays. I aimed to publish one essay a month, a breathtaking pace indeed, but just watch me! I would crank this out!

Soon, however, I discovered that people who grow on Substack do not publish once a month, silly. They publish weekly, daily, three times a day! I started experimenting with faster writing and discovered a different mode of composition, a very Substack mode, what I’ll call “observations about the world around me as a thirty-something ambitious and sometimes ill San Francisco woman with young kids.” These I delivered in a specific smart-and-wry voice that I found I can do pretty well. This type of writing is more quippy, more current, more comment-able, and it requires about one one-hundredth of the effort of literary writing.

And here’s the thing: I found that I generally like this writing. I like being able to produce work more quickly, and I very much like being able to use Substack as a platform for meaningful interaction with all of you. That is my favorite part of this whole journey and the part that most surprised me: that I could have such genuine, nuanced and positive conversations with people I met online about topics close to my heart. I wrote about this at length in my reflections after one year here. I’m proud of a lot of what I have shared in this mode, like these thoughts on being bad at things, the fertility clinic waiting room, and being diminished by men in the workplace.

This type of writing allowed me to actually grow this thing. I was able to publish at least weekly, and I could generate great conversations. The algorithm gods cast favor on this, so my writing was boosted in all kinds of ways that are invisible to me. I grew and I grew. I went from zero to online-somebody. I got a check mark. I sold an article to Vox. I was moving up in the ranks of internet writers.

Back to literary writing

What is literary nonfiction writing anyways? In my writing practice, which focuses on personal creative nonfiction, it’s any piece of writing that tries to discover some truth or answer a question through unconventional means, using personal experiences as a foundation. The resulting works can take many forms; short or long, narrative or lyrical. What’s important is that in this writing process, I’m trying to grasp an idea that is just out of reach or too complex to nail down simply, or I’m trying to express an idea or feeling that is hard to put into words. I aim to marshal every technique in my toolbox, trying to apply the craft of creative nonfiction in the best possible way towards my topic or question. I look to other thinkers and writers to weave in philosophy, history, or literature. In this type of writing, every sentence is considered, every word, and it requires significant time to marinate and shape and perfect.

Perhaps most importantly, this type of writing pursues beauty. In literary efforts, I am trying, in my feeble human way to, as philosopher John O'Donohue beautifully put it, “go to the deeper octave where we can hear whispers of the eternal.” This is an effort that requires time and space. “The great emergence of creativity,” wrote O’Donohue, “is when the sound comes out of the silence.”

Silence—something so hard to experience these days, and yet essential to creative work. As it turns out, whispers of the eternal do not arrive twice weekly on Tuesdays and Thursdays. This writing, by definition, requires inputs that are in short supply on the internet: time, silence.

*

I’ve been thinking about this core tension almost every day since my recent article about growth versus art on Substack. (That one—a “my observations” style piece—resonated with a lot of people, wracking up 114 comments, something that rarely happens with my literary writing). In particular, I got chills of recognition reading the following in a comment on that essay from

Michael Estrin

. I myself could have written this with only the genre changed:

Four years ago, I came to Substack because I had written a very funny mystery novel that nobody knew about. I needed an email list so I could tell people to buy my book. Substack seemed like a solution. Writing funny stories every week seemed like a good way to get people interested in my fiction. And to some extent, that has worked. But along the way, I REALLY lost sight of my goals…Basically, I was "winning" Substack, but I had stopped working on a new novel. WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK?! I came here *for* my fiction, and now I've lost sight of my fiction. That's messed up.

Amen. I came to Substack to further my goals as a literary writer and now, two years and five thousand subscribers in, I barely do any literary writing.

So I have people reading my work now, but I’m not doing the work that I originally wanted people to read. So that’s the rub. Our heroine has reached a crossroads.

Most Generous Interpretation

I recently learned of a parenting concept via the internet parenting celebrity Dr. Becky, called the Most Generous Interpretation (MGI - yes, for real). When using MGI, you try to assume the best about your child, in my case, my toddler. If he’s biting you, you do not think "he’s so aggressive and horrible,” you think instead, “he’s having a hard time and doesn’t have the skills to deal with his emotions.” If only people practiced MGI more on the internet, amiright?

That’s all a very roundabout way to say, it’s easy for me to judge myself for my internet writing strategy to date. I lost sight of the art! I gave in to the man! I’m calculating, competitive, cold-hearted…

But, let’s do an MGI instead, (because I have found that toddler strategies can be effectively applied to myself with frightening regularity.) The MGI is that I’m a writer who wanted to find people who like reading my writing. That makes so much sense. Substack has given me that. Had I been unwilling to experiment with different writing styles and cadence, I likely wouldn’t have been able to reach and meet so many of you in the comments, in my interviews, in Notes. I don’t believe that wanting readers is a bad thing as a writer. I don’t believe it is antithetical to creating art.

But now, two years and five thousand subscribers in, it is time for me to rebalance. I’m not so interested in writing articles about how to succeed on Substack, even though those seem to be consistently the most well-read and well-received here (color me shocked if this very article does not become one of my most popular ever).

So let me tell you about how Inner Workings will look in year 3. I’m so ready for this change, and terrified, and excited.

A home for my best writing

I am reorienting my personal goal for this newsletter in its third year. Rather than “a place to grow my audience,” I will treat it as “a place to share my best writing.” What this means is that I am going to try my darndest this year to think not at all about growth, and instead think only about quality. I now have people to read my work—YOU!—and it’s time for me to return to what I came here to do.

This is very scary to say out loud. It is easier to grow than to be excellent. Whispers of the eternal? Is that what I’m promising here? Jeesh. High bar. Scary.

I also fear that without weekly publishing deadlines, my perfectionism could get in the way of sharing work. But one of my core beliefs these days is that the world would benefit from less focus on speed and more focus on quality, (an opinion heavily informed by my time in speed-obsessed Silicon Valley), and I’d like to be a part of that project in my tiny way.

So here’s what you can expect going forward:

• I will publish literary personal essays as they are ready. These can come quickly or take a long time to produce, so I will not promise a publishing cadence. Rather than writing a certain number of pieces per week, I will instead write for a certain number of hours per week. I will deliver high quality work to you when it is ready.

• I will continue publishing Lady’s Illness Library audio interviews. This is a long, slow project (yay!), and my vision is to eventually have hundreds of examples of illness journeys in this library. I may slow down or speed up or take breaks, but I aim to keep plodding along with this.(Side note: if you would like to be a guest in this series, you can fill out an interest form here!)

• When I have something interesting to say, I may also send some “observations about the world” newsletters. This won’t be my focus in the near term.

• Protip: I know different people are here for different reasons—if you want to ONLY receive essays or ONLY the Lady’s Illness Library, you can click on your face in the upper right corner right now, click “manage subscription,”scroll to “notifications” and uncheck the sections you don’t want to see!

• Finally, I am explicitly making my paid subscription option a donation to keep Inner Workings free and accessible to all. By supporting this work, you are making slow writing possible, supporting the pursuit of beauty, and also making the Lady’s Illness Library available to everyone who may benefit from these stories. I so deeply appreciate the people who have supported the newsletter financially so far, and I hope you will consider continuing your support. 

Thank you for going on this journey for me, and I’m looking forward to our next year together! I’m feeling so much love for all of you right now!

—Rachel