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Some notes on self-censorship, plus the best from my feed!
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This week I’ve been thinking about stage fright and self-censorship in the age of being extremely online. In particular, two things came across my desk that were echoes of thoughts bouncing around my head.
Taylor Sterling of the wonderful newsletter MOONBOW posted this to her Substack feed:
Whew. The twenty unfinished newsletters in my Substack drafts really identified with this admission. I keep hoping they’ll magic themselves into cohesive, coherent posts. They haven’t, of course, and they won’t—largely because I’m holding them to the standards of what’s considered your typical, well-produced “content” for today’s Internet. But maybe this is a mistake. It begs the question about purpose in making. Which leads me to a thought-provoking newsletter from Catherine Lacey, who writes Untitled Thought Project.
(Sidebar: Subscribe immediately for her incredible 144 Words series; a perfect example is here.)
Her essay this week was about abandoned work, and detailed the many ideas (and occasional takedown) she’s left unpublished, if not abandoned altogether. She ended the letter with this, about Substack itself:
Should I abandon this?
I’m vacillating about whether its worth keeping this Substack going in the way it has been going in the past year or so. I genuinely prefer the very long and private work of writing books, and when I publish shorter things I know I am way better off with an editor. So I’m trying, yet again, to figure out why I’m even writing this thing and whether I should yet again, change the way I do it.
Part of the reason I started this series of letters was because Substack reminded me of the indie literature blogspot world of ~2007-2010, and yet I also quit writing and reading there (as much as I loved it) once I realized it was using up energy I wanted to spend on writing books. I’ve been writing here less frequently this spring because I’m changing my ideas about how often and for what reason I need or want to write in an immediately public-facing way, but also because I have a long, slow project that needs most of my focus.
In both these cases, I see writers figuring out the role of the medium in their creative practice/nourishment, as well as that of the (wretched!) audience. And we are wretched, aren’t we? We want regular, quality content, but don’t make too much of it! We want unvarnished thoughts, delivered in beautiful packaging! We want your realness, but edit it for quick consumption, please!
(These are near impossible conditions to create under.)
Personal example: I stopped sharing on Instagram because it was maddeningly time consuming (mostly due to my own self-censorship filters, though now that I think about it, those filters only exist because of you, the audience). But whatever the reason, making stuff for IG requires so much creative energy that the juice was not worth the squeeze. The things I was making for that audience had nothing to do with what I wanted to make for myself. Hence, abandonment.
But amidst all the disappearing acts and self-censorship, sometimes I worry that the most interesting content will disappear from digital media. Maybe it’s already going. Because who can withstand feeding such an insatiable machine? And then what are we left with?
If I open my Substack feed on any given day, it is clear there is some kind of wrestling match going on for the heart of the Internet. Arguments about who should be paid, how, when, and why. Missives about what people want to see and make (and what they don’t); how they want content presented; how edited it should or shouldn’t be. I don’t have any answers. No big wisdom to impart, certainly no “five ways” lists or suggestions for how AI will make it all better (yeah, no).
But I will say, a recent spate of querying had me questioning my relationship with external validation to…well, maybe damn near every decision I’ve ever made. And I arrived at the thing my creative heart knows to be true but so easily forgets in this world where to publish is to be more public than ever:
The pleasure in creativity is derived from yourself as the audience.
Make for you, first and foremost.
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OMG the last line of that poem though 😭