Being an Individual as Part of a Community

Why I joined Substack

*SUBSCRIBE, PEEPS!

Photo by Joshua Earle on Unsplash

I was sitting at my writing desk on Tuesday, October 25th, trying to come up with something to write for my next Substack post, when I had a stark realization. The realization was twofold: 1. That so much of my writing is selfishly all about myself; and 2. That I constantly worry about how I’ll be perceived, and therefore am always to some degree trying to “sound good.”

To a fairly large degree I’d argue this is very human and pretty normal, especially for many writers, even more so if, like me, they write autobiographical literary fiction. That’s not to say that I very often tow the trendy or Woke line with regards to my work; on the contrary, I seem to always been in a perpetual, Dionysian struggle within myself between being liked and telling the truth. Sometimes the two go hand in hand. Sometimes they absolutely do not.

Like a majority (but not all) of American writers, I am self-conscious, sensitive, insecure, deeply wounded. On the flip side I am also self-aware, intelligent, and sharply attuned to others’ concerns and criticisms.

I often struggle with this idea we now call “community.” Part of me wants to belong to a community (Substack, for example), but part of me very much doesn’t. This is yet another fairly common trait for many writers, though it’s certainly not ubiquitous with all writers: We tend to isolate. Writers as a breed—and I do find that we are of a certain type—tend to be highly independent, perfectly okay with being alone much of the time, social loners, extroverted-introverts, and often quite self-absorbed.

My personal self-absorption is interesting. On a certain level it makes perfect sense. I’m an only child. I come from the upper middleclass. I was born in the early eighties, growing up before cell phones and the proliferation of the internet as its known today, but also in a culture slowly being shaped by all the above and more. I was just on the cusp of the Helicopter Parenting Generation. It was more pronounced after my childhood but I felt some of it.

My family is in part a family of writers. My mom is an author and was once a magazine writer. My uncle writes novels. One cousin does travel writing and another writes for a videogame company. Writing started for me as reading; specifically, listening to my mother read the classics to me at night when I was a kid. As a teen it was an escape. In my early twenties it was a call to action. (Kerouac’s “On the Road” literally changed my life overnight.) After getting sober, in 2010, when I was 27, reading morphed into serious writing. I obsessed about it. I wrote novel after novel after novel, some of them decent drafts, some bad, all rough, most containing the raw talent I knew deep inside I’d always had.

Over the years I’ve attended dozens of writing conferences around the country. I’ve belonged to several writing workshops, and even started two myself. I landed my bachelor’s degree in creative writing from San Francisco State, going back a second time at age 30. (I’d been off the grid during the Kerouac Years.) I taught at writing conferences. I interned for a literary agent. I joined a writing group when I moved to New York City.

But all the time I did these things there was a firm voice in the back of my mind that said: You don’t need to do any of this. Just write.

And it was true: In the end, though I did feel helped along a bit with some of the community activities I did, the one thing which really pushed my writing forward was simply sitting down day by day and actually writing. It’s the discipline part, the consistency, that’s hard. But forming a regular writing routine (which changed over time) was what ultimately led me to getting my writing published for the first time, in 2012. I moved on from there. When I wasn’t writing I was usually reading, when not running or with friends.

Everyone of course has their own unique writing journey. I was accepted into the MFA in writing program at SF State after receiving by BA but I rejected it at the very last moment. After eleven years and seven different colleges (long story involving alcohol, women and travel) I was psychologically and spiritually finished with formal education. If Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Kerouac, Bradbury, Angelou hadn’t needed it, well, I didn’t either. Direct real-time life experience was what every writer absolutely requires, and that I had.

My nature is slightly twisted and perverse, to be fully open and honest. I am a complex soul, as many of us are. I have simultaneously a big heart and yet a closed mind. I can be rabidly arrogant at times. I wish I wasn’t but it’s true. And pretentious. I can be an asshole.

However, I can also be one of the best listeners and conversationalists you’ll ever meet. I genuinely love learning about other people. When I can, I like to help people, usually in small ways. (Like giving someone a ride to the airport, say, or talking to someone with a drinking issue about AA.) In the end I am a good man. Far, far from perfect. Complicated in the most human, essential ways. When I die one day people who knew me will probably be both shocked and not shocked to read my plethora of physical journals, which I’ve been writing consistently since 2006, when I was twenty-three.

For me, writing is a lonely and isolated, sacred and torturous experience. Whenever I attended writing workshops there was always some small but insistent and crucial part of me that felt “apart from,” that felt different, severed from the group, on my own. Smiles and handshakes and back-pats and overly positive praise never felt completely authentic to me. It’s always been my fingers and the keyboard and the blank computer screen. We dance together and create something new and uncertain.

And yet of course Substack has been the best thing that’s ever happened to me as a writer. I genuinely DO crave acceptance, and want to be a part of the SS “community.” And yet I also want to get real, get raw, tell the (or perhaps MY) Truth. Like I said: Bridging these two concepts can be slippery and tricky; the concept itself can easily slide right out of your hands like a slick silver fish fresh out of water.

But, always a fan of deep, 3-D characters on the page, I see all of us humans, all of us writers, in the same light: We’re interesting particularly because we’re all unique and unusual and different. As they say in AA: “You're different, just like everyone else.” The point here is to connect and understand each other and communicate and be honest.

In other words: Participating as part of a community, for me, means being who I truly am, while also loosely sharing that space with other writers. (It does *not* mean collectively hewing to fill-in-the-blank ideology.)

I am an individual; I always have been. Heck: I’ve been using that word since I got involved in the LA-area punk scene in 2000, when I was seventeen. But it was true then and it’s true now. Substack seems to be a new place where the differences are a good thing. Where freedom of expression is emphasized and encouraged. The modeling we’ve all seen the past decade has been complete binaries: You’re either a Woke Lefty or a Conservative Extremist. Substack seems to go beyond that, beyond the lazy labels and binaries.

I joined Substack to be myself. Selfish to a degree, self-promoting, yes, but also as honest and authentic as I can possibly be.

So, Substack writers or readers: Why did YOU join SS?