How are you writing the story of your life?

Charlie Becker, The Machine in the Garden, and navel-gazing on Substack

Old typewriters at a second-hand store, Vila Nova i la Geltrú

This note by

Charlie D. Becker

kicked off a mini existential crisis in my writing:

Every time I scroll Substack for the last week or two, it seems like everyone is writing about living, but not in the good way?

…Everybody wants to write about story craft but nobody wants to write great stories. Everybody is writing about how to live a great life or how great their life is but nobody is writing about how they’re living their life right now.

This is always a danger: to slip into the how rather than the what. To let your audience growth numbers get to you, the gross annualized revenue, the likes, the shares. Before long, you’re no longer sharing your own life, but telling others how to live theirs.

“I’m providing value,” we say, or we use any number of euphemisms to describe the process of becoming a guru, an influencer, a dispenser of life advice.

But every time I do this, it feels just a bit off. Unnatural.

When I’m on my game, I’m writing about life right now. Like how it was to take down the walls of the old stone townhome I bought in Spain. What it was like to watch the best climbers in the world tackle their projects in Siurana. Or recently, how it felt to fail the driving test in Barcelona.

In contrast, when I’m off my game, it’s usually because I’m caught imitating.

And I’m not alone. On Substack, we are in the midst of what one meme called “Substack Summer,” characterized by writers writing about Substack, how to grow on Substack, or how to succeed at Substack. It’s writers writing about the meta points of life, rather than life itself, writers navel-gazing at themselves.

A new generation trying to be Carrie Bradshaw, just on a new platform.

Others have complained about the formulaic, LinkedIn-ification of certain writing on Substack: a personal anecdote, followed by a generalization, packaged with a clear “takeaway.”

I’ve been guilty of all of this. This writing you are reading now is itself guilty.

I sometimes write about writing because, well, I think a lot about the craft of writing and its place in my life. And I think the medium in which we tell our stories matters for the stories themselves.

If you are on Instagram or YouTube, then the particular constraints of those platforms shape how you tell your story. The particular rhythm, style, and cadence of the platforms has a profound impact not just on the stories we tell, but on how we live our lives while telling them

I like writing a newsletter because I don’t like to contemporaneously tell the story of my life while I’m busy living it. The last thing I want is to be present in the moment of some beautiful experience and then to have a thought suddenly intrude: should I Instagram this? Do I whip out a camera and film?

Some of my favorite storytellers online are YouTubers, but with respect to my friends who have suggested I start a YouTube channel about the renovation project in Spain, I just don’t want to have a camera pointed at me at all times. I simply do not want to film my life while I’m busy living it.

The newsletter allows me to live, digest, and then block time out of my life to specifically write, create, and share. This for me is preferable to a visual medium, where I’m much more tempted to share as I’m living.

Still, Becker’s complaint about writers who write about how to live a good life rather than how they are living right now struck a chord. There is a constant pull in this medium, in this Substack community, with the tools that Substack is developing, to imitate what others are doing. And what others are doing appears to be not dissimilar to what creators do on other platforms. Which is to say, make themselves into some sort of guru dispensing advice.

As songwriter

olivia rafferty

wrote, in response to the note above from Becker:

i think the issue with a lot of the internet we’ve made nowadays is that people want to know how to do things, and how to improve themselves and bla bla bla… in short: many people don’t want the art as much as they want the tools to help them feel like they have the capacity to make the art.

This kind of how-to, clear take-away writing is nakedly transparent when I see it on LinkedIn. I’ve really come to despise the kind of formula you see there from LinkedIn “influencers”—a work anecdote followed by a meta point about work (even if I’ve occasionally wondered how I might imitate said influencers, to support my consulting business and make more money).

But the rabbit hole I’ve been down recently—including the excellent

Emily Sundberg

essay The Machine in the Garden—made me realize that Substack also has a lot of this formula.

Sundberg writes:

Creating content with the goal of making money off of it is different than creating content with the goal of getting likes, is different than creating content with the goal of being creative and connecting with other people. Seems to me, the obvious attraction of being able to monetize your taste—over putting out a probably-more-interesting letter about your actual life—is leading to a lot of very, very similar Substacks.

Yes, the profit motive leads writers to write certain kinds of writing above others, and there’s really no escaping this other than to remove the profit motive altogether.

Obviously.

Nevertheless, I will resist this pull (I nearly wrote, “You must resist this pull,” but that would be succumbing to what Becker called The Sin of the Second Person Sermon, wherein you start using the second person as a step toward universalizing one’s own perspective into a clear lesson for others—like I said, mini existential crisis).

I resolve to write about life as I’m living it. To resist obsessive self-analysis, to avoid excessive comment on meaning. Rather, to let the meaning speak for itself.

Becker again:

It’s an unfortunate side effect of internet writing that everyone thinks every piece of writing must have some crystal clear lesson for every reader with an 8th grade reading level.

One thing I admire about Martin Djoolard, the YouTuber renovating two old stone cabins in the Italian Alps, is just how little comment there is. Djoolard films his life, but the end product has a kind of purity—Djoolard never gives advice or analysis, and rarely waxes philosophical. Nearly everything is just: this is what I’m doing.

It is left for us viewers to mull and wax poetic about the meaning.

I want more of that in my own creative work and life. Here I am, this is what I’m doing, this is how I’m living, these are my choices.

And that’s it.

Antoni Gaudi, the Catalan architect responsible for the Sagrada Familia, who transformed architecture, whose legacy on Barcelona is incontrovertible, said and wrote almost nothing about his own life. He rarely gave interviews, did not keep a journal, did not publish a memoir, and certainly did not have a YouTube channel.

The story of Gaudi’s life can only be told through his works—so said a biography I read of him while living in Barcelona. And though the adoring public may have wished for greater explanation (can you imagine Gaudi “giving value” to other aspiring architects?), we are left only with the works.

Rafferty writes:

sometimes it feels like you’re on this providing-value train and the people you’re serving want the value, you get successful providing the value, the how-to’s, the heres-what-to-dos and the handy listicles… but the value is always on the outside of the art, and isn’t the art itself.

Here is to letting the art be the thing itself.

Here is to letting the works speak on their own.

Ok—enough navel-gazing.

Back to life.