it’s not navel-gazing if you find some lint in there

on substack as platform, creativity as self improvement and whatever you signed up for

There’s nothing worse than a writing-about-writing essay — I’m aware of this, but I allow myself one a year, as a treat. This is it. You’ve been warned.

I’ve been running this (inconsistent, undefined, unprofitable and unnecessary) newsletter for a little over a year now and I’m going to attempt to answer the question of what the fuck I’m doing. If you’re not interested in this meta look at the Acme Thought Corp. editorial strategy, tap on out. Something else will come soon.

ALSO I am moving to Brooklyn in January; should have been more explicit about that in the leaving LA essay. If you’re a reader or fellow writer who I have not met irl, I would love to link up. I love friends.

THE BEFORE

The idea for this newsletter came on a bus from Venice, Italy, to Koper, Slovenia. The vibes were, uh, specific — I woke up in a tiny Venetian hotel room that morning, almost passed out in the breakfast lounge due to extreme constipation (whoops), walk-ran through three miles of alleyways while listening to Fountains of Wayne (the layered sound of “Stacy’s Mom” and the Apple Maps voice saying “in 600 feet, go over the bridge” over and over will haunt me forever), caught a train to Mestre, and waved down the Koper bus as it was pulling out of the station. I alluded to this trip in an essay earlier this year; I don’t want to get into the details because they’re embarrassing. I was (1) in a rough spot and (2) attempting to heal myself in classic white girl fashion with a Europe trip and a healthy dose of delulu. 

I was 25, slowly crawling out of a years-long depressive haze, trying to figure my shit out. My shit (unrelated to the constipation above) was mostly of the creative variety. I was blocked. Backed up. In need of a kind of spiritual Metamucil. Maybe something stronger, even. An energetic Miralax. An enema of the soul. This is gross. 

But you know the feeling, right? The itchy dissatisfaction of purpose chronically deferred? Some personal context: I spent most of my life as a performer, with an unbroken streak of plays and comedy projects from ages 8 to 22. In that time, I’d also nurtured a love of writing in obsessive, cracked-spine notebooks and overwrought j-school assignments, but I mostly kept it to myself. When the pandemic hit at the end of undergrad, the two strands of my creative life switched places. Performance was no longer a possibility; writing was. I lucked and/or hustled my way into a full-time content creation job, adjusted to calling myself a “writer” in casual conversation, and got a cute little guild card. But I didn’t feel fulfilled by the professional cosign of a minorly evil tech company or the vague knowledge that millions of people listened to my work. It was satisfying to trade my writing chops for actual money, but the need to ~express myself~ on my own terms simply would not go away. 

As my post-college existence took shape, I had to create something. I half-started approximately 5,000 projects between 2021 and 2023, and allowed them to be eaten alive by doubt, judgment, and laziness. Conversations with loved ones fell into familiar loops: I have an idea, I’m working on the idea, NEVER BRING THAT IDEA UP AGAIN. Two weeks later, sheepishly: I’ve got another one. I joined multiple writing groups, classes and teams, and I quit every single one. For a while, I blamed this cycle on external factors: I was depressed, I was unlucky, I was forced toward other priorities. I indulged in immature fantasies that someone would ask to work with me on a project, act as a sort of creative white knight to release me from the padlocked castle I’d built entirely on my own. These excuses were pathetic, and soon, they wore thin. The spring of 2023 was a breaking point. I was forced to admit two difficult truths: one, my life was not what I wanted it to be. Two, it was contingent on me to change it. 

Around April of that year, I picked up my dusty copy of…eyeroll eyeroll…The Artist’s Way. You’re probably aware of it if you’re neurotic and corny enough to be reading this newsletter, but tl;dr it’s a self-help book that presents a structured program, loosely based on 12-step methodology, to recover creative energy and reboot an artistic practice. Its roots in the AA world bring a healthy dose of woo – the author, Julia Cameron, bluntly equates the creative impulse with a godlike higher power, and there’s a lot of gooey talk about becoming more of a conduit than a craftsman and tending to your inner child. Mileage may vary depending on your religious background. In my undisciplined, West Coast, everything-and-nothing spiritual context, it clicked instantly. I burst into tears when I read Cameron’s description of the “shadow artist” — a person who thrives on creative energy, but is so paralyzed by fear that they sublimate every artistic impulse. She points out that shadow artists often hang out with and/or date other creative types (check), place high value on taking in great artistic works (check), and work in fields adjacent to what they actually want to be doing (she gives the example of aspiring writers forcing themselves into copywriting or reporting…sigh…check). These stopgaps represent a safe, yet ultimately unfulfilling, approach to creative life. They’re the equivalent of chewing that gum from Willy Wonka that tastes like a full meal — tasty, but nutritionally void. She points out, rather hauntingly, that shadow artists’ lives may turn into a “discontented experience, filled with a sense of missed purpose and unfulfilled promise” if they don’t embrace creative practice.

Yikes.

Check. 

Spooked by the prospect of remaining in the shadows forever, I set a goal to write something — anything — on a daily basis. I also committed to Cameron’s signature journaling exercise, “morning pages,” which is three pages of longhand, stream-of-consciousness writing, done in a wide-ruled notebook at the crack of dawn — like, right out of dream state. To be clear: morning pages sucks. It’s time-consuming, painful on the wrists, and deeply annoying to work into an everyday routine. It’s also, unfortunately, life-changing. I’m genuinely superstitious about it at this point because something insane happens every time I get consistent. Three pages of handwriting, day after day after day, makes it really difficult to avoid the hard truths bubbling in the back of one’s head. The Artist’s Way subreddit is littered with stories of people leaving their boyfriends shortly after starting the workbook; this has now happened to me twice. If, in the future, you are my significant other and see a wide-ruled notebook sitting on my desk, TAKE IT AWAY! And pack your bags. 

A lot of bad stuff happened that spring and early summer, but my commitment to aimless daily writing remained intact. I walked myself back from defined projects or deadlines, silencing the journalism-school goblins that lived in the back of my head, wanting to turn every idea into a polished product complete with business plan, style guide and list of dream collaborators. I was focused on the process, not the product. For a time, that felt right. 

By the time I got onto that bus to coastal Slovenia, I was ready to take the next step. Writing in a vacuum could only take me so far, and I needed to create some kind of container for my work. Selfishly, I was tired of laboring in silence. My notebook from that trip has five or six Big Ideas for projects in it: catnip for my perfectionist impulses. Then a simpler thought floated up: what if the concept was…no concept? What if you just committed to putting shit out there on a regular basis? What if you stopped being weird and mean to yourself for one goddamn minute, hmm? What about that?

In my exhausted, travel-drunk, freshly-voided headspace, it felt revelatory. The bus weaved along a precarious coastal road. I scribbled something in my notebook, shoved it into my backpack, and stared at the tight-packed, Speedoed beachgoers laying towels on ancient Roman walls. We passed an Eataly, which felt wrong, and crossed into Slovenia without incident. I put out my first post about a month later. 

THE DURING 

In the 13 months since, I’ve published 14 times, which is not much by the standards of this platform. There’s some good stuff in there, I think, and I’m proud of myself for not abandoning the project. Still, it’s far from prolific. 

My goal for the first year was to establish a sense of consistency in the work itself, rather than the publication. I achieved that. Right now, I put down 500 words or so — usually shitty ones — most weekdays, and have a solid pipeline of drafts and ideas to explore. I’ve figured out how to integrate and prioritize my writing amid other responsibilities, or at least how to start doing that. But now I’m at a new crossroads — at the corner of What Am I Doing Street and Why Am I Doing It Avenue. As the new year and a cross-country move looms, I’m evaluating what this project has given me so far, and figuring out where I want it to go. 

I’ll be so honest, the peak of my experience on Substack this year was in May, when I published a slightly manic, three-part series about Eurovision. The essays were remarkably unpopular (as a set of 5,000 word essays about an international song contest should be). Each got 5 likes, maybe 6, and less than 100 views — most of them from my parents’ friends and Hinge dates I’d unwisely given the signup link to. They were not a success by any metric, and when I reread them, there are obvious edits that I wish I’d made. But the experience of writing them…that was electric. It happened in a frenzy — sitting cross-legged on my porch until 1 or 2 in the morning, thwacking down my laptop at the Astro Diner and abusing its free-refill policy for an entire weekend, pecking out sentences on my phone at the gym. I felt genuinely excited, genuinely connected, to the project. When I started typing, the voice that came through actually sounded like me. I was giddy and spaced-out, like someone newly in love. It was stupid, but it felt so right.

And then I tried to figure out what came next. I started using Substack Notes. Cue the horror-movie string section. 

For those who only use Substack via email (bless you, for you are pure of heart), a little explanation: Notes sucks. It’s basically Substack’s Twitter clone, launched in 2023. The company spent the previous six years strictly focused on email newsletters, but clearly desired platform status. It added podcast and discussion thread support in 2019, then integrated video in 2022. When Notes rolled out (part of the first wave of post-Elon Twitter replacements), it was immediately enveloped in controversy because the company’s CEO refused to kick Nazis off the platform (and he never did; at least 16 white supremacist newsletters were identified by The Atlantic a few months later). Notes slowly grew in the time since, but seemed to really pick up steam in the last 6 months. 

That seemed like a good thing, at first — as more readers entered the ecosystem and the algorithmic discovery functions improved, my essays got a little bit of attention. I started checking the feed more often, learning who the power users were. Inevitably, I compared my output to theirs. I tried to think of better formats or trending topics to jump on. Anxieties about how I was coming across as a person started to creep in – not only am I a good writer and is this subject interesting but also do I seem likable, do I seem cool, will anyone be my friend after they read this. I worried about saying something misinformed, incorrect or impulsive, and that the version of Kylie who showed up on the page was an obviously aspirational one. My prosaic tics — em dashes, unnecessarily sumptuous word choices, lists of three — became obvious and embarrassing. So did my sense of hypocrisy: shortly after publishing a piece about quitting headphones, I bought those gigantic, stupid-looking AirPod Maxes (spoiler alert: I love them). I made it about 4 weeks after an anti-dating app essay before trudging right back to Hinge. No one’s perfect, but the paper trail is humbling. I got scared I wasn’t reading enough to create anything interesting (feel free to replace reading there with watching, experiencing, living, laughing and/or loving — I’ve fallen into those spirals, too).

The pressures of social media slide-tackled my creative practice and pressed the knife of audience growth to my pale emotional underbelly. The Notes feed made me feel like a high schooler trying to find my place in the lunchroom. I hated it; still do. I stepped back from it, muting the people who made me feel particularly insecure, but forced myself to continue to engage, exposure therapy-style. And remaining in the ecosystem did give me a helpful perspective check. It reminded me that creative labor, no matter how joyful, is still subject to market forces. A fruitful, sustainable artistic life is not only built on the work itself, but on the ability to maintain a creative spark within a system that sees it as useless. I’m talking about capitalism here, but I’m also talking about Substack itself. 

Substack hates your art. I’ll say it again. Substack hates you. Let me explain.

Substack is unprofitable. That’s not surprising — most name-brand tech companies are at this stage. In order to make good on its sweet $585M valuation, it needs to either (a) figure out an enterprise play, which seems unlikely, (b) flood itself with platform-mediated advertising, which would cause a riot, or (c) drastically grow its base of paying readers. As a reminder, the company’s main moneymaker is subscription revenue — it skims 10% of every payment. In order to grow the total number of subscriptions (and according to recent press, there are already 4 million+), Substack has a few options: expand the ranks of writers, expand the ranks of readers, or some combination of the two. 

Pulling in more writers — or at least, more writers who can actually build an audience — will be tough. The platform has already saturated the market of newsletter-ready media refugees, academics, and independent creators. So the definition of “writer” needs to expand, too. In order to approach anything close to profitability, Substack must become a home to other types of creators and influencers — those whose audiences don’t come to them for quality writing, but for product recommendations, off-the-cuff musings, or diaristic confessions. It also needs to leave space for the kinds of content that is often hidden behind “free speech” doublespeak.

Do you see where I’m going here? There is a direct, negative correlation between Substack’s growth and the average quality of its content. Emily Sundberg pointed this out in an essay in August; you probably know that already. But I want to take her argument a step further, and put it in the plainest terms possible: in order to reach its business goals, Substack will continue to push new features and create new environments that make your writing worse.

The platform wants less effort and more frequency. It wants the effervescent anxiety of Instagram and the poisoned-pen discourse of Twitter. It wants things to move quickly. It wants comparison and self-judgment. The people who work at Substack won’t say this, and probably don’t consciously believe it, either. But market forces push in one direction. Unfortunately, if creative fulfillment and high-quality written work is the goal, writers themselves need to provide their own friction. To paraphrase Kendrick Lamar, you’ve got to stop putting your life in these weird [platforms’] hands, baby.

me sending a newsletter

THE AFTER

When people ask me about my goals in life, my throat tends to go dry. I know what my goals are — to write for a living, on my own terms, and work with people I love and respect — but I struggle to place them into a five-year-plan or job title. The market for all forms of entertainment has never been less stable; even the jobs that seemed solid in my college years (mid-range TV writer, story editor, copy desk) have disappeared. I’m stupid, but not stupid enough to think I’ll build a lucrative writing career without playing into the content economy. At the same time, I’m deeply skeptical. I’ve seen enough platforms rise and fall to know that they are, essentially, pyramid schemes — using the perceived success of a small slice of creators to convince everyone else to get in on the action. I don’t have a preexisting audience and I’m too silly to fit into the liberal arts cool girl archetype that seems to thrive here. To put it plainly, I’m cooked. And outside of the online ecosystem, the odds are even worse. Books? No one reads any more, and the few that do are into demon erotica or inscrutable lit fic that seems to require an Ivy League diploma and maybe a CIA contract to produce. Magazines? Require the same. The platforms hate writers, as noted above, and the audience might, too. Writing is lonely, stressful, and an absolute minefield for the ego. So why bother? Why keep going?

Well, let’s return to The Artist’s Way. Early in the workbook, Cameron quotes Dylan Thomas, equating her own sense of creativity to an unnamable higher power, comparable only to “the force that through the green fuse drives the flower.” The comparison to electricity feels apt. Creative energy is a buzzing, elemental force that can be channeled for good or ill. It is something that must be directed rather than manufactured. Put in that frame, the artistic anguish that I was feeling in the first half of my 20s wasn’t a character flaw. It was a buildup of static, complete with occasional, painful shocks. My low-stakes projects were a circuit for that electricity to run through. I won’t pretend to know enough about electronics to complete this analogy. Just trust me that at a certain point, a lightbulb did turn on. 

When I’m in a settled, healthy place, I see my work on this newsletter as more of a devotional than a strict exercise in content creation. At the very least, it allows me to remember that I am more than my current circumstances, that I have a well of ideas and interests that can be drawn upon, and that I am committed to improving my ability to express them. My writing practice shoves me into contact with my own values, and forces me to show up as myself and accept the possible rejection and judgment that can follow. It’s made me braver, it’s made me more honest, and it’s kick-started meaningful conversations with dozens of people in my day-to-day life.  

I know I feel correct and purposeful when I’m writing; I know I feel anxious and adrift when I’m not. I hate to say this because it seems ready-made for a Target coffee mug, but creativity might be the truest form of self-care I’ve found. Committing to it has had positive effects across every other facet of my life. While I still maintain fantasies of some larger audience or broader respect, those smaller, more personal wins are worth it on their own.

When I started writing this essay (like 5 weeks ago, yikes), I hoped I’d be able to end with a clear vision — a subject area, format, or voice that I could point to and say yup, that’s what you’re signing up for here. That clarity never emerged. Whatever.

Maybe someday I’ll be struck by creative lightning and figure out the million-dollar idea that will somehow satisfy both platform and personal imperatives. I’m not holding my breath.

Until then, I’ll keep my butt in the chair and my brain on the move, closing the gap between wordless feeling and defined thought over and over. I am going to try to up my output, just a bit — aiming for an every-three-weeks-ish cadence, rather than an every-month-ish one. I’m focusing on connection — to my values, my work, and to other writers — over any form of quantifiable growth. And I won’t write about writing for at least 12 calendar months. Promise.

thank you for reading! I don’t want to shift too hard into apology mode but I know this one was long and rambly — just wanted to get it out there, which I guess is the whole point. hope your thanksgiving was full of rest and joy, and I hope the holiday season treats you well.

all the best, kylie <3