It's Good To Be Back
Writing About Writing
You Found Me!
Hello everyone, Thank you for joining me here at my new Substack Gibberish. This is my first issue of “Writing About Writing”—something like a letter to the editor, but mostly about the in’s and outs of my writing habits, as well as the whole “business of substack” idea.
I’ve been away for November and December so getting back into the writing routine has been very nice. I’ve enjoyed flexing my fingers and my brain again and putting digital pen to the digital paper. I hope you have enjoyed my offering so far as well; only been a few weeks here at Gibberish so not much to show for it but I hope you join me in seeing the potential of this space.
How I Write
Someone at the recent office hours asked me about my workflow. I mentioned I have a Wordpress blog as well as these two substacks—how do I do it all?
The answer I gave was pretty unsatisfying to me. I don’t really have a workflow, I have enthusiasm and a schedule. Maybe that’s half the battle.
Let me share an expanded idea of how I write.
Wordpress is for my ad-hoc ideas. It is mostly my Catholic faith, intermixed with politics both religious and secular, economics, occasional grumpy rants about things. I’ve been writing there since December 2018, and it has really helped me to find my voice. By voice I mean the things I enjoy writing about, the way I enjoy writing about them, and the attitude I take to that writing. I won’t try and define the specifics of what my voice is, because that kind of defeats the purpose—everyone reads with an imagined idea of who the author is and what they sound like. It’s like establishing a character, you have to make them sound different somehow. So I have come to feel more comfortable writing about my chosen topics, and I write ad-hoc at Wordpress, which means “whenever the spirit moves me” I’ll fire off a post.
The Peasant Times-Dispatch is the first substack I created. I created it back in February and after thinking about it for a while, I launched my publishing there in April of 2022. It was fun and exciting but also different. Substack gives us all kinds of tools to use and it made me feel like a professional writer just by being able to use them. But I hadn’t thought about my writing in the context of business—there’s a product life cycle to be mindful of. More on that in a moment.
I have evolved the Peasant Times-Dispatch multiple times in less than a year. I have been tweaking the paywall, the schedule, the type of content. I hoped to make it a magazine-style, and maybe it will still end up that way, but right now I am just trying to start a conversation, trying to drum up some interest and enthusiasm for my writing. So I have a schedule there but I have a rigorous idea for what to post for each schedule milestone, so that I can make sure I am staying on-theme and initiating the kind of conversation I want to have.
When I started the Peasant Times-Dispatch, I wanted to tell people about the Peasant Faith, and one of the ways I wanted to do that is by telling a peasant parable hidden in a science fiction story I have been dreaming of. I started publishing episodes with very little quality control, and quickly realized that it doesn’t quite fit in with the kind of content I have there. My business-school is really showing, here. So that’s why I moved my writing content to Gibberish—here I can write about writing and I can write fiction and I can really make this my home as a writer while the PTD has become my home as a Catholic. There will of course be overlap but you can understand how thematically these two spaces are very different—it is worthwhile to keep the two distinct. I’ve only been writing here since January so I may evolve Gibberish as we go, but I am hoping to keep things simple here, too.
In that comment at Office Hours, I suggested that the thing that will help take my writing from “good” to “great” is decent editing. I have an idea for how I want to do it but utterly no experience for doing that. It will also increase the amount of time it takes to write, which I usually do in one sitting and then fire off before I think better of it.
Goals & Strategies for 2023
My goals right now are to maintain some consistency. That is a struggle right now, but the bones are there and as my life outside of Substack settles down, my life within Substack will settle down too.
Editing is a big one. Like I said, I have an idea for how to do that—I’m thinking a checklist I can go through after writing each post. Basics like “read through it backwards to catch spelling and grammar” and “don’t end a sentence with a preposition” or “keep sentences simple and small”. I’m no editor so I am not going to be digging out an English textbook to make my writing sound like…well, an English textbook. I will aim to make edits which enhance the clarity of my writing while preserving my voice, however that may come through.
I also really would like to grow. This is where I have to be mindful of the product life cycle. When just starting out with something no one knows about, how does one grow? The first step, of course, is to keep showing up. But remember that a newsletter is a product and products have a life cycle. There’s the introduction, the growth, the maturity, and the decline. When a product is being introduced, there will be early adopters, and they will tell people about their experience with the product, and the product will begin to grow in popularity.
My Substack offerings are firmly in the introductory phase. No one knows about them, so my behavior needs to target the early adopters. Who is my target audience? How do I reach them? How do I make my offering appeal to them? One mistake I made early on is hiding some content behind a paywall. That is a “Maturity” phase decision, not an introductory phase. Mature publications can have paywalls because they have a subscriber base to appeal to and focus on. I do not, so no one will know what I hide behind a paywall.
What I do have is a “patronage” model, which will allow those early adopters who see value in my writing to support me through the lean introductory times. If you are an early adopter and you appreciate my writing, kindly consider a paid subscription?
Anyway
I would like to write more about the Product Life Cycle here on substack, but I think that is best served as it’s own post. I’ll leave it here for now. I appreciate all of you for reading, and thank you for joining me on this journey!
God bless you all!
-Scoot
Ad Jesum Per Mariam