Here, I Made This
Or: Self-Promotion: On making art, making an impact, and why soup doesn't belong in a colander but I'm pouring it in there anyway
“I am an amateur poet, writing for the love of the work and to my own satisfaction—which are two of the conditions of “self-employment,” as I understand it.”
Wendell Berry, A Timbered Choir
Introduction
As a writer, I’d like to achieve two things: to have a large reach and to affect my fellow writers.
As it stands, I have neither. My humble Substack has 36 subscribers, the majority of whom are friends or family who don’t actually read it. I get an average of two likes per post. One from my wife and another from a poet friend (the only friend I have who is also a writer).
It seems like I’ve got a problem—a gap between reality as it stands and an ideal state of affairs, which, if closed, would make me happier.
It seems.
There’s a formula for closing this gap on Substack. You can look it up. Firstly, one should have many social media accounts and cross-post the Substack work regularly. Secondly, you should read similar authors on Substack and comment on their posts with thoughtful praise—becoming a part of “the community”. Thirdly, you should write quippy little “notes” (equivalent to tweets, for those unfamiliar) and post them, hoping to go viral.
I have no social media accounts. I don’t read within my genre on Substack (I’m subscribed to a total of six and read even fewer). I don’t write notes either.
The conventional narrative would probably explain that I’m setting off dazzling firework displays in the Antarctic tundra and wondering why no one is impressed. How can a song make an impact without anyone in earshot? How can the articles help people if barely anyone reads them?
Convention would elaborate that no one likes self-promotion. No one is excited to make their articles into tweets or schedule regular posts on TikTok. But they do it anyway, because they don’t want to yell into an empty cavern. They want to speak to a bustling auditorium.
A part of me believes in this kind of talk about extending reach and maximising readership. Another part of me recoils. In this essay, I’d like to explore what is repellent about self-promotion and how we can better understand what we’re doing here as creatives in the world.
We are all, don’t forget, making unique contributions with our speech and actions. “It has been said at various times by various people—and has always been true—that every human being is an artist,” writes Martin Versfeld in his charming work The Philosopher’s Cookbook. “All of us need some creative activity to defuse our neuroses.”
As artists of life, we have a responsibility to consider how widely we can share our contribution. Will we put up one flyer advertising our guitar lessons or one hundred? Will we run for secretary of the Parents and Friends Association of our children’s school, or will we whisper to the person next to us at the back of the meeting?
How will we spend our precious time? In self-promotion, or otherwise?
Words from the Internet
In the case of Substack, being a part of the community means reading more articles and more comments. One would need to do it regularly. There are people who like to do these things, so perhaps there’s no problem for them. For me, there are a few.
Increasing my diet of words from the internet is precisely the opposite of another project in my life. I’d actually like to reduce my diet of internet culture. This is for two reasons: the activities that words from the internet displace are more valuable to me, and words from the internet make me a worse writer.
Internet? Schminternet.
Before I rekindled thoughts of increasing readership, I’d been steadily unsubscribing from all my internet interests. I’d found that the more time I spent online—whether that be watching YouTube, reading Substack or on Wikipedia—the more I felt like life was getting away from me, like I wasn’t proud of how I’d spent my days. I’d get to the evening and think, Where did all the time go?
I think we all know where it goes.
Walking the dog, meditating, reading books, cooking, growing food, calling old friends—these are all competing, to a degree, for my daily time. I don’t care if words from the internet can provide extra readers. If passively watching Young Sheldon for an hour a day got me 10 extra readers, I’d still rather walk my dog or bake a pie. Some things simply aren’t worth it.
“A precondition for reading good books is not reading bad ones: for life is short.”
Arthur Schopenhauer
Anyone… More Slop? Anyone?
The second reason that I’d like to resist words from the internet is because it hurts the quality of the work.
I think it is fair to say that the more I read words on the internet, the more mentally involved I become with the content, style, and form of those pieces of writing. Not only is most writing on the internet unnecessary, boring, and easily replicable (which is precisely why AI can write it so effectively). They’re also written as fast as possible to compete for clicks in the massive ocean of content. This is not the kind of thought I want swirling around my brain when I sit down to write.
Further, they’re generally immersed in a certain kind of lifestyle—middle class, metropolitan, liberal, cosmopolitan. Most writers on the internet spend a large amount of their time on the internet, reading the news, on Twitter, giving opinions about ‘topics’ that are current or viral. These, too, are not the kinds of ideas that I want percolating when I attempt to write about the value of silence, depth, or non-duality.
Schopenhauer wrote that “when we read, another person thinks for us: we merely repeat his mental process.” The more we do it, the more we naturally slip into those grooves, grooves that take the journalistic class’s worldview for granted. Further, one gradually “loses the capacity for thinking; just as the man who always rides, at last forgets how to walk. This is the case with many learned persons: they have read themselves stupid.”
I’m trying as best I can to write thoughts of my own and make novel connections at Kind Regards. Empty space—especially space empty of the New York Times or popular writers on Substack—seems not just important but indispensable.
If “the safest way of having no thoughts of one’s own”, Schopenhauer continues, “is to take up a book every moment one has nothing else to do,” then what about the other forms of self-promotion that don’t require reading other folks’ work? Search engine optimisation, writing about what’s presently viral, and promoting the work on social media accounts can all coexist with a clean media diet.
While this is true, for me there’s something lurking beneath the desire to increase readership.
Keeping Sight of the Goal
In his book The Practice, Seth Godin wrote that the work is never going to be good enough for everybody, but that it is already good enough for somebody. This was inspiring stuff, so much so, in fact, that it catalysed my writing practice.
There’s a balance in making art: between originality and accessibility, popularity and obscurity, and generosity and solipsism. We’ve got two extremes—a writer who writes only for themselves and one who writes only for other people.
If all you want is to write a hit, you’re going to become a hack. Someone who goes wherever the crowd goes. Someone who does the cheapest work they can to get the largest amount of profit.
What does this do to the quality of the work? In a recent interview on Subway Takes, Ethan Hawke said, “If there’s 200 people on the subway... and it’s my job to feed them all. Shit, I got to make some hot dogs, right?”
If I want a wide readership, it’d pay to intentionally use the lingo of TikTok and the journalistic class. If I want to be easily marketable, I should immerse myself in the internet, in what’s current in metropolitan life, and in the cultural zeitgeist.
While it might be true that we need hot-dog vendors who crank out articles about how green smoothies are so hot right now—do we really need another one? Do I want to become one just to see a small number be replaced by a larger one?
“Nothing that is mass-produced is ever made for you,” Versfeld wrote, “being made rather for an abstract individual endowed with standardised tastes.”
I don’t wish to treat my audience as abstract individuals, and I don’t wish to see them—like corporations do—as means rather than ends. Strutting down the boulevard of self-promotion, at least from where I’m standing, does exactly that. It turns all readers into hot-dog-eating chumps. It turns me into a greasy salesman, convincing and convincing until I can slip a dollar bill from their pocket and yell sayonara.
Godin also wrote in The Practice that selling and marketing can be generous acts. It isn’t simply manipulation. There’s a method of branding and marketing that kindly shares something worth sharing with folks who previously didn’t have a chance to enjoy it.
While this may be true, I’m yet to find the wholesome feelings to guide me. As it stands, the attitude of wanting to commune with living creatures and wanting to grow the little number in the stats page of Substack are too divergent. It isn’t simply that the world doesn’t want another hack or huckster; it’s that in my heart I don’t want to be one.
Some things simply aren’t worth it.
There is a day
when the road neither
comes nor goes, and the way
is not a way but a place.Wendell Berry, A Timbered Choir, 1997, VII
Settling into Place
Also, I don’t have to be one. There is no demand. Godin wrote that while the work isn’t going to be good enough for everyone, the work is already good enough for someone.
Someone out there is interested in my work as it is right now. Work that comes out once a fortnight, rather than once a day. Work that doesn’t lure people in with clickbait or leave them feeling poorer than they were when they arrived. Work that isn’t pretending to be bigger, more important, or more widely valued than it is.
I don’t want to write from the road to somewhere else. I want to write from where I am, from this place—a small and internationally ‘insignificant’ coastal town. I want to write about what I’m doing, trying to grow an ‘insignificant’ amount of thyme, trying to have a cleaner media diet, and trying not to walk around dripping wet with other people’s ideas all day. I don’t just want to write about silence and stillness but to commune with them each day and maintain a deep commitment to them.
This is my place, and, unlike so many writers on the internet, it is not a way. It is not trying to be elsewhere. For the few people who read the work regularly, it has an effect precisely because it doesn’t conform in order to reach, because it isn’t written to eventually get published in a magazine, because the work comes from a person who isn’t trying to max out their sales or finally move to Sydney and “become a writer”.
I am writing for others, and the few people who read it make the effort worthwhile. It isn’t an empty cavern. It is a modestly populated one. Wendell Berry wrote that “Thoreau gave the definitive reply to the folly of ‘insignificant numbers’ a long time ago: Why should anybody wait to do what is right until everybody does it? It is not significant to love your own children or to eat your own dinner, either. But normal humans will not wait to love or eat until it is mandated by an act of congress”.
If what is right is making quality work and living a quality life, then it needs no further justification. I can write without a certain number of readers. I can have my own style before it is recognised. I can work on the quality, before I attempt to magnify its impact. I can make myself less like mass-produced work, instead of playing to the formula.
Best of any song
is bird song
in the quiet, but first
you must have the quiet.Wendell Berry, A Timbered Choir, 1997, I
Patience
It is true that I’d like a bigger audience. I don’t mean to deny that. I’d like to be useful to many people.
But, as it is with so many of the articles I write, the answer is patience. Slowing down. Turning my back on cultural assumptions that incessantly whisper that more is always better, gratifying one’s desires is the only way to be rid of them, and the faster we gratify them, the happier we’ll be.
When I set down my desire for more subscribers, more comments, more positive feedback—when I do nothing—I find acceptance, not exclusion. The walls don’t fall in. Instead, I get a sense that I’m allowed to be here, supposed to be here, even, and that the fleeting desire for a certain number of witnesses doesn’t change that fact but only covers it up for a while.
With a little bit of patience and a little bit of faith, we can be free of how other people do it, how they tell us to do it, and how everything is supposed to be big or significant before it matters. We can shed our skin and all the cultural paints that have been caught on it. Once all those ideas are set down, we can be reborn anew into this moment, fresh and welcoming as it is, and continue singing our song just how we like it. For the love of the work and to our own satisfaction.
W.
A bird the size
of a leaf fills
the whole lucid
evening with
his note, and flies.Wendell Berry, A Timbered Choir, 1996, VI
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Reading this piece, I was shocked that you do not have a larger audience. I found you through YouTube and you introduced me to Substack as a platform! I’m not a devoted Substack user and I’ve only been able to read your work because I receive your articles directly to my email hence why I have never known the number of interactions your work receives. I just wanted to make a comment to let you know that I look forward to your articles every week. For a while your emails were being placed into my junk mail, and I thought you had stopped writing, but thankfully this was not the case. The way you write and can break complex philosophical concepts into pieces which are digestible by someone like me (a novice to philosophy) is a skill not many people have. In a selfish way it made me happy that I am one of very few people in the world who get to experience your writing. Anyway, I’m sure this comment section is not meant to be used like this, but I do hope you know that your writing makes a vast impact on my life, if not anyone else’s.
What a beautiful finish to the article.
My only question is: If (the hypothetical) you enjoyed your own work, and you thought it was good and worth reading for others of like-minded taste, would you not be compelled to spread the word? Sometimes I get so annoyed at how hard it is to find stuff on the internet that I actually like, oh contraire, Algorithm! I cannot just type in the specifics of what I like, it do not work.
Oh what if all the good sounds were found in QR codes pasted over powerlines, yes that would be far easier than jumping through hyperspace a million times over, so dodge the brainrot and go "hey what's this? a real thing in the world, this is neat!" Fuck it, even a tidy linktree that spans all social medias which contain only what's Important, that'd be easier to stumble across and bookmark; everyone is spread too thinly across seperated channels, and when they're not, they're hacks.
Be the hack to all the hacks.