It's really hard to not sell out

Naomi Alderman, Subotnick and the future

Sometimes you need reminding of which way is up.

10 January: I get a sudden flurry of paid subscribers. I don’t know where they came from, or why so many people have decided to be supportive. I catch a glimpse of a future in which my writing pays at least some of the bills, rather than being something I squeeze in around the margins of the day job.

It’s not a future I ever thought would be within reach.

To get there, though, is the real trick. The destination is appealing, but what of the journey? Doubling-down on the most successful and popular newsletters. Growth at all costs. Less about writing and more about content: that word that is anathema to me.

Content. The ultimate dissolution of human creativity into a capitalist, maximalist, factory-generated goop of nothingness.

On the one hand it’s just semantics, and language evolves over time. On the other, no, you’re not making content. You’re making music, or novels, or essays, or paintings, or plays, or films, or games, or comics.

People pay for content, though. Content is where it’s at.

Hey guys. Got some amazing new content on the channel today.

23 February: I go to a screening of SUBOTNICK, a documentary about electronic music pioneer Morton Subotnick. I didn’t know anything about him or his work beforehand and found the whole thing fascinating:

Of particular interest was his ongoing struggle to be true to what mattered to him, to balance commercial concerns and the need to support his family with the artistic need to not sell out. Subotnick’s style of music perfectly suited the sensibilities of TV ads in the 70s, but did he really want to be the guy who provided the soundscape for whipped cream?

I’ve never had to think about this kind of thing. When I used to publish on Wattpad, it was clearly not something I had any control over. I’d write, and sometimes the algorithm would be merciful. That uncertainty meant I focused on the writing and didn’t consider strategy. There couldn’t be a strategy beyond ‘write good stories’.

Writing this newsletter requires greater consideration. I’m in charge, which means I can decide what it is. Who it is for. Which raises the question of how I should value my work. If I undervalue my writing, if I give it all away for free, am I also making it harder for other writers?

The questions keep piling up.

4 March: I put together a new video to help writers new to Substack, explaining how to do a decent About page. I paywall some of it. It feels weird, but I do it anyway, because it’s a useful video and has clear value. I do include a caveat that anyone who can’t afford it can just email me for access, but even that feels like an apology rather than an offer.

5 March: I go to an event up at the university with Naomi Alderman, author of The Power and Disobedience and co-creator and lead writer of fitness ap Zombies, Run. Naomi is promoting her new book, The Future.

I’ve been to a lot of author events over the years and they can often feel a bit rinse-and-repeat. The same generic questions. Authors rolling out the same witty anecdotes from the last time they were in town, hoping nobody notices. Audience ‘questions’¹ set to maximum cringe².

Not the case here. This was one of those literature events that expands one’s mind and rejuvenates the creative spirit. I come away with renewed clarity and momentum.

The Power is a visceral book that grabs you by the shoulders and demands that you pay attention. It wants to be an uncomfortable read, forcing you to consider new perspectives on gender roles and patriarchy. It does so while also being a fiendishly entertaining page-turner. That same energy comes through when Naomi speaks. Simply by being in the same room as her you feel like you’re becoming more clever.

She has a radio documentary show coming up later in the year about the three key information crises (development of writing, invention of the printing press, invention of the internet) which will be required listening, especially if you find our online world bewildering and difficult to manage. These are the three crises which radically upended human relationships with each other, on an increasingly grand scale. It’s difficult to identify the age in which you’re actually living, because you’re in it, but that’s what Naomi is trying to do. As she notes, those living through the industrial revolution didn’t know that at the time, because nobody had given it a name; perhaps humanity’s growing pains can be reduced if we can identify them, like how a doctor’s diagnosis is the first step on the road to real recovery.

Naomi throws so many ideas into the audience that my brain is buzzing by the end. If you put your ear to the side of my head you can actually hear the thrum.

6 March: I re-edit the video and remove the paywall. My anxiety subsides. It feels right.

7 March: World Book Day, and my 11 year old son goes to school dressed as a character from his own comic book. The one he’s been writing and drawing for the past six months. I think that’s pretty amazing. He’s so far ahead of where I was at his age.

He also has no care for ‘an audience’. His only consideration is himself, though he does happily show his friends and talk about his work. Can’t help but feel like that’s the way to do it. There’s a purity to the way he creates. Brain, to page, to reader. He doesn’t need a strategy, as long as he’s telling his stories.

8 March: Another unsubscribe. That’s four in the last couple of weeks, plus a couple of expirations. That flurry of new subscribers in January feels a long time ago. Each cancelled sub feels painful, and my monkey brain inevitably focuses on them rather than paying attention to the lovely comments and discussions taking place, or the new readers that continue to show up, or the exciting collaborations coming together with other writers. Bad news always speaks louder than good.

It feels like that dream future is receding. I have to remind myself that I’m not here to make money. That’d be nice, sure, but it’s not the point. I’m here to write, and I’m writing more than I ever have.

The very possibility of ‘losing paid subscribers’ would have been impossible two years ago, because I had none. I need to remember that.

10 March: The more I plan, the more I analyse, the more I make decisions based on data rather than creative impetus, the greater the risk of choosing the wrong path. The numbers strongly suggest I should spend all my time making helpful videos on how to use Substack. Those are what move the needle, because there’s a clear value proposition. It’s a useful service.

But, god, that would be dull.

Sure, I’ll keep making videos if I have something useful to say, and if I feel like people need a hand, but I didn’t come here to build a video channel.

Fiction will always come first, must come first, for the simple reason that it is all consuming. Half of my brain is always living in another world. I don’t just write stories about the ‘triverse’: I’ve been there. My memory files my own world building in the same cabinet as family holidays and visits to real cities. There’s a tangibility to my writing which feels very personal.

Sometimes it’s a little frightening.

In Kieron GiIlen’s astoundingly good DIE graphic novel, he recounts the Bronte siblings slowly succumbing to the lure of their own fictions, of becoming trapped within their own minds and forfeiting their true existences. I can imagine myself as a 90 year old man, unable to discern the difference between my lived memories and those of my fictional stories.

3 June, 2074: It used to take me two to three years to write and serialise a novel, back in my early 40s. I slowed down with age, inevitably, but the stories kept on coming. I’ve a solid body of work, representing over a half century of creative focus.

Looking back, now that I’m at the end, I can see that my life was about making things. And even better was that people came along for the ride. Some of those readers from the 2010s are still reading, week-by-week.³ Still dropping the occasional comment. It feels like we’ve gone on adventures together, even if we’ve rarely met face-to-face. We’ve followed Kay as she rebelled against an unjust government; we’ve travelled beyond the Barrier Mountains to Aviar and witnessed its fall; we’ve seen little Erik seize his own future; we’ve traversed the triverse in all its complexity; and those were just the first decade.

The spaces are long gone: Wattpad is no more, we all know what happened to Substack. The whole AI thing went in a direction none of us expected. The post-tech world might be changed, but people are still people. The stories exist, are out there in the universe. I don’t control them anymore. They belong to everyone.

There have been so many words committed to paper, you’d think I’d have said everything I could possibly have had to say. But the world keeps offering up new ideas.

I’m old, no matter which way you look at it. I remember back when Scorsese was talking about running out of time. That must have been, what, in the 2020s? I get it now.

I’ll keep at it until I drop. There’s always time for one more story.

1. Brilliantly, the hosts made a point of saying that questions should be questions, and not merely comments. Turned out the audience was full of intelligent, interesting people: presumably the kind of readership that Naomi has cultivated over time.

2. Where do you get your ideas?

3. Hi, Mike.