Digging For Gold

Reflections on six months of Substacking

Its been six months now since I started this new discipline of writing a Substack post weekly, so I thought now would be a good time to reflect on the experience so far. I want to say straight off of the bat that there has been no big transformative change. The internet is filled with quick quick fix plans for your life or your creative practice - ‘Start Bullet Journaling today and Your Productivity Will Skyrocket’. A new you is just around the corner when you get out of bed at 6:00am to follow a YouTube video called ‘Do These 5 Stretches DAILY For INSANE mobility and STRENGTH.’ Its easy to be sold on the idea we can always fix ourselves with the internet’s advise. But life is in fact soupy and disorientating, especially when we spend several hours a day online. I don’t want to add to any feelings of failure you might already be experiencing about not managing some of these life changing ‘Atomic Habits’. Please, remember you’re a human being not a Silicon Valley android. That said there has been some interesting positives that I want to reflect on here as well take a look at my process as a writer.

The biggest and most obvious of those positives is that I’ve forced myself to publish my writing weekly. About 80% of the time I’ve felt like these pieces were shit before I hit the intimidating ‘Send to Everyone Now’ button. But because I imposed this rule on myself from the start that I would send one out weekly I have to push through the perfectionism and just live with what I’ve produced. Writing is rough, it feels horrible a large amount of the time, but so does any creative act where you’re actually stretching yourself. A bit of pain is a good sign. In the previous incarnation of this mailing list, when they went out monthly at best, I would start pieces and then never finish them. Good ideas and interesting insights were lost to the drafts because I didn’t have enough pressure to solve that awkward last sentence or come up with a conclusion to make my publishing deadline. Decent and published is better than amazing but unseen by anyone else.

Managing that self-imposed pressure is key. Its unsustainable to spend the end of every week spiralling into a panic because I can’t escape a quagmire in my concluding paragraph. It’s helped in those moments to remind myself that nothing is really on the line here, Its just a bit of content. These aren’t book chapters or university essays. I’m not going to get marked down if my paragraphs doesn’t link succinctly. Its just Substack, who knows what kind of cruel and slow death this platform will suffer at the hands of the billionaire who buys it in a few year’s time.

Subject matter on what to write about each week has been off the cuff. Over the weekend or at the start of the week I’ll have a vague idea of maybe a couple of different ideas and I just let whichever one bubbles up to the surface happen. That wasn’t my plan going into this new discipline of weekly writing. I wanted to give myself a handful of different styles of pieces that I could rotate around. A strategy to avoid the frightening feeling that each week’s piece could be about anything. So one week would be a TV or film or book review, next week I could be recalling a story from my career, then more of a broader think piece and so on. Maybe I should still try, it might make life more straight forward than this free jazz approach. Instead its ended up being much more diaristic than I imagined but that’s also meant its been a more cathartic process for me which I’ll elaborate on below.

The time when I choose to write could also change. I’m doing these pieces in hour or so chunks first thing in the morning, with my coffee, sat at the kitchen table on my macbook. Sounds nice enough, classic even, very ‘8 Habits of Ultra Productive Writers’. But I don’t think there’s anything in those routines that includes having a three-year old relentlessly nagging them to put Twirly-Woos on the TV and then tipping their cereal bowl over their head in protest when they don’t get their way.

I shouldn’t be mixing difficult creative work like writing the first draft of a new piece with parenting. In general I’ve found working while parenting just means you’re doing both things badly - splitting your presence is never good. And it also means I end up putting more pressure on my partner to parent while I mentally depart to engage with my muse. That’s an often unspoken habit of these ‘Ultra Productive Writers’ from history: men putting the importance of their work above their domestic responsibilities and their relationships. Its not a good look and its not the kind of Dad I want to be. For some reason writing the first draft in my studio hours feels wrong. I only ever do final edits and add images there before sending it out. That needs to change now, the studio needs to become a space for writing as well so I can stop muddying the domestic waters.

An interesting development of this weekly practice has been to start seeing the writing as equal in importance to the visually creative work I do in the studio. At the start of the year there was a clear hierarchy in my mind with drawing and painting things was on top and writing on the bottom. But as these weeks have gone on I’ve started to respect the power of writing to elicit the same powerful feelings that a painting can for both for me and my audience. Just like a painting I create these pieces of writing for myself first, for the continued exploration of my interior world, for the development of that elusive artistic “voice”. That catharsis I mentioned previously can be shared when you strike gold in that exploration and land on something that connects with people.

A gold mine is a good analogy for the creative process in general. There’s a lot of digging involved before you get to the good stuff. A lot of labour, sweat and discomfort. Rocks that seem exciting but actually turn out to just be rocks. Then you finally strike gold. Everyone loves it, look how shiny it is! It has a collective value bigger than you. You might even get really lucky and hit a rich seam, for a while the nuggets keep on coming. Hit after hit. Then that seam gets exhausted, no more gold. Back to rocks. Back to digging in the hope of one day finding some more of that sweet sweet gold. Lots of artists sustain whole careers off of finding a single rich seam: one killer aesthetic, or book or song can make your name. It can be easy to dismiss these artists as one dimensional, but they still had to dig to find it. If you don’t dig you don’t find gold.

The biggest nugget I’ve found so far in this weekly writing discipline has been the piece on my daughter Polly and the discovery of her nascent neurodivergence. That was a piece that was very much in the 80% bracket of “I think this is shit but I need to publish it anyway”. Turns out that it meant something to a lot of people. I received a flood of replies, DMs and emails from strangers who felt that shared catharsis of something being articulated that chimed with their own experience. I also think it helped people very close to us, friends and family, to see what our journey had been like. You never really get the time and space in a social situation to coherently explain something that complex. Someone always has to chime in with a joke to lighten the mood or an anecdote of their own that vaguely relates to what you’ve said or just some lazy and uncalled for advice. This writing practice gave me the platform to solve that issue. I can’t see how I would have created the same feeling with a visual artwork or an instagram post.

Speaking of Instagram it would be remiss of me not to compare the experience of posting on Substack to that of churning out reels and stories. Part of my plan in developing this Substack is that I’m building a life raft that I can use to sail away from the sinking ship that is Instagram. They are very different mediums though and using them as a creator is a distinct experience.

Instagram is much quicker, more fluid and natural to my visually minded way of seeing the world. I’ve been posting my style of long stories on there for over five years now. In that time I’ve gotten my technique and posting method down to a fine art. But Instagram never lets you get comfortable. The algorithm keeps you guessing constantly, its very difficult for it not let it affect the style of how you choose to post, to stay natural and let that elusive voice flow out. I’ve taken long breaks from Instagram this year and they’ve helped a lot. I’ve been off it for the last three weeks and currently have very little desire to go back. Every time I do I’m disappointed, bored and frustrated by seeing another post I spent time and effort crafting drift off into the night having been shown to less than 5% of my supposed 55k followers. You can never escape the numbers game on there, or the memory of how the numbers used to so much better, it’s so suffocating.

Substack by contrast feels like a clean break. When an article gets two likes I’m gassed. And after spending time and effort crafting a post I feel like I’ve learnt something about myself; sitting down to write and formalise my ideas leads to links, discoveries and ways of articulating things to myself that were only vague thoughts before. The process of creating these posts is much more painful than just selecting a few images for a carousel and adding some snappy little caption, but in that discomfort I’m learning and growing. The same cannot be said for posting on Instagram. All you learn there is what you imagine the algorithm wants now. When it goes well it just triggers a high for you to chase and fail to replicate with any subsequent posts.

My big worry going into this new practice was disrupting the mailing list I had spent years slowly building up on Mailchimp. That was the original life raft I had started constructing back when Zuck first bought out Instagram. It took four years and a lot of discount codes to get fifteen hundred people or so to sign up for this more direct form of contact. Would sending them an email weekly with a personal diatribe rather than just clear commercial information once a month lead to hundreds of unsubscribes and my precious raft falling apart? Thankfully the answer was no. The list has grown, not by anything dramatic but it has grown. And from an art sales perspective I’ve had a really good year so far. I think being more honest and direct about how your support keeps me afloat has helped. On Instagram the front of relentless success that the algorithm pushes doesn’t really allow for that kind of honesty.

This difference between my experiences of Instagram and Substack is in part just innocence vs experience. If I were to start Instagram from scratch tomorrow it would feel exciting, like exploring a new world, with each new like, comment or follower a thrill. I’m sure Substack will become less enjoyable in time, especially when the that Billionaire buyout inevitably happens. I’m already finding things to be annoyed about with it. But thats not the point. Its about writing more and what committing to that process can do for me and my voice over next few years if I can keep it up. As long as I’m managing to turn up every week with my pick axe and a Ploughman’s to go down the mine and dig then I’m winning. If I strike gold that’s great, but if its just rocks again then that’s still good. Its the act of digging that counts.