My most useful articles from 2023
Helpful things for writers and curious folk
I’m trying something new for 2024 and this newsletter. I believe it’s called ‘having a plan’. It means I know what’s coming up this year, including these exciting things:
A video introduction to Scrivener
An up-to-date tour of useful online platforms for writers (this one is taking a lot of research)
A dive into the pros and cons of creating maps for your fiction
More guides to running your own newsletter and writing more
Before jumping into exciting new material, it occurred to me that a lot of you are quite new to reading this, and might have missed some of the newsletters I sent out last year. Today I’m highlighting my top 10 most popular articles from 2023. It’s like one of those TV episodes where they re-use clips from earlier episodes in order to save budget.1
There’s an audio version of this newsletter - click the play button at the top, or you can find it in your podcast app.
To kick off, my most popular newsletter from last year was this:
In retrospect it makes sense. Substack is a rapidly growing platform and there’s lots of interest in it - and questions to be asked. This video still seems to me like something the main Subsack website should really be answering rather than, you know, me, but I’m glad it proved useful to lots of people.
I hope it means that there are lots of writers out there eager to share their perspective on the world. I’ve met so many exciting writers over the last two years, and look forward to getting to know many more of you in 2024.
Next up:
This post is very much tip-of-the-iceberg in terms of understanding stats. There’s definitely a bit of an ouroboros loop going on here. A writer on Substack writing about Substack. Never been done before, right?
This year I’m going to continue trying to be as helpful as possible, but I’ll be branching out a bit. Hence I’m intending to do guides for all sorts of writing tools, such as Scrivener. Big thanks to
for pointing out the obvious to me in a Note last month:Next we go back to May, where I was explaining my move from Wattpad to Substack:
My thinking about platforms for writers is always evolving. I still think Substack is one of the best places for a writer to build a sustainable audience, even fiction writers. No place is perfect, but the toolset is incredible and the fiction community is wonderful. However, my referring to this newsletter being ‘my Substack’ is going to shift in 2024.
I happen to use Substack’s tools. But what you’re reading is my newsletter. For new and veteran writers I think that’s a healthier attitude to have: your newsletter is yours, which means any success or failure is also yours. Don’t get attached to any particular toolset, especially when it’s owned by a tech company.
I’ll be writing in detail about this later this year, but it’s more important than ever for writers to protect their own work, and to defend the spaces in which words can flourish.
While Substack provides a great set of tools for writers, it’s not quite there when it comes to the reader experience, especially for fiction readers. This one generated a lot of valuable discussion:
We haven’t seen much movement on that front since I wrote it back in June 2023, though Substack co-foundery person and podcast foot-in-mouth expert Chris Best did conduct an impromptu feedback session about fiction over on Notes towards the end of the year. Fingers crossed we get some useful new features in 2024.
This next one is less about Substack and more about writing serial fiction online in general:
I’ve been writing fiction online every week consistently since 2015, and it’s been the most creatively satisfying and rewarding time of my life. Every week committing to delivering a new chunk of fiction, building worlds out of my imagination piece-by-piece. And having readers come along for the ride!
The way I write and publish didn’t exist when I was a kid, or even when I was in my 20s. While the same old challenges remain for writers and fiction writers especially, I do think we’re in something of a golden age - at least in terms of independent writing and direct-to-reader mediums like newsletters.
Those of you who have been on the newsletter for a while will know that I like to get very nerdy about serialisation, which is exactly what happened here:
It was also an excuse to use a thumbnail of Naruto for the article. Again, lots of brilliant discussion on this one - over 124 comments to date. The emergence of a community of talented, intelligent and friendly people (yes, I’m talking about you) was the big win for me in 2023.
I’ve had people comment on my fiction in the past, when I was back on Wattpad. But this newsletter has generated something different. A community that is self-sufficient, and which generates its own momentum. Most of the time you’re being more clever than I am, and I’m extremely fortunate to be able to provide a space.
There’s no shortage of writing advice. If any of it really worked, there’d only be one book. A simple How To Write tome that everyone could read and be done with it. But writing is a weird thing, and is different for everyone. That means that there’s always something new to learn and to share, and it also means that one person’s advice isn’t necessarily going to work for you.
Beware of writing tutors who claim this is the way. The only hard and fast rule is that writers write. Beyond that, we’re all just flailing.
I was happy to see that one of my top articles this year related to my actual fiction:
Start reading Tales from the Triverse
Tales from the Triverse is an anthology of inter-connected detective stories. They can be read individually or in sequence. Over time, a larger story is being told that will reward regular readers. Think of it like a TV show, with some episodes more standalone than others.
It’s crazy to think that I only put that index/intro post together in January of 2023, when I’d been writing Tales from the Triverse since mid-2021. That very much shows how I’m making this up as I go. Writing that intro post has I think helped a lot of new readers find a way into the story, and has made the serial less intimidating to jump onboard halfway through.
As mentioned in the ‘How to fix the fiction experience’ article, hopefully nice indexes for serialised work (fiction and non-fiction) will be implemented natively at some point, but until then it’s really vital to give your readers a welcoming introduction.
Going back to nerdy, at number 9 we have this mad thing:
As a way to explain my broad method for writing serials, I found this useful. Turned out a fair few of you have a similar approach, even if you hadn’t bothered to come up with a silly name for it and draw elaborate, unnecessary schematics. Presumably you had better things to be getting on with.
It’s interesting that I can write something this peculiar and have a lot of people show up to read it. Can you imagine me trying to pitch ‘the Story Loom’ to a writing magazine?
Talking of mad things, as a bonus mention I feel this is related to the Story Loom, even if it didn’t quite crack the top 10:
If you’ve ever wanted to visualise your plot and character journeys but weren’t sure how to do it, that’s the post for you. I actually found it rather fascinating how each of my books has quite a different shape.
On a sort-of-related note, I recently came across this behind-the-scenes on the brilliant film Nimona:
I was intrigued to see graphs vaguely similar to the ones I’d been drawing in that video, used to chart the characters’ emotions across the arc of the film, to aid the animators with each scene (given that they would have been worked on out of order).
Right, for the final entry in this list we haaaaaaave:
A Miles Morales gif. Distracting, isn’t it? Anyway, this was an unusual one for me in that it was a response to another writer, and a critical response at that. Not something I tend to do, as it seems a bit impertinent and unnecessarily abrasive. I think I was compelled to do so in this instance in large part because I really like
’s writing and was therefore surprised by his article and my strong reaction to it.And there we have it - my 10 most popular articles of 2023.2 I hope there was something in there that was useful / entertaining / interesting. Or, ideally, a combination of the three.
I’ll see you on Friday for more Triverse and on Wednesday for any of you taking part in our very exciting Babylon 5 re-watch.
And yes, I’m using this as an opportunity to work on upcoming exciting things. Such as new how-to videos on how to use Scrivener. I’m looking forward to that one.
There was a bit of curation in there, to avoid having multiple Substack how-to videos. That would have been dull.
I particularly appreciated the understanding Substack stats - it has been very helpful as I review in the lead up to celebrating my first three months here, and use the email tool for subscriber subsets, which I didn’t even know about!
A treasure trove of info, thanks Simon!