Too Much = Too Little & The Guide for Growth.
How volumes of Substack advice is drowning you and the disciplined fight back - 13 min read.
These days everybody has something to say.
And just about everybody wants to know the best way to attract ears.
It’s a fierce competition of who can scream the loudest.
Thing is, if writing is your passion, then you naturally cannot deny the ink and paper, aka: keys and screen.
Writing happens whether there’s an audience or not.
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Writing happens because your heart is in it and it’s never a chore.
Before platforms like Facebook or Reddit, writers would spend hours absorbed in spirals of fact and fiction, a symbiotic dance that birthed raw, original story telling.
Writers weren’t concerned about whether or not their manuscripts were being built like everyone else’s. Their own story came from a place within them, and no two people are ever exactly alike.
Fast forward and here we are skipping between platforms like rabbits who have lost their burrows.
Always Searching.
A lot of mention about writers experiencing burnout should come as no surprise when the act of writing is caught up in a constant cyclone.
Nobody can keep touch with sanity when they are constantly bombarded with the how-to’s, how-not-to’s, do this, do that, but then not that, but this.
Sigh. Sure.
Why not, when you’ve been handed major sensory overload and a to do list to match.
It leaves the best of us dry in the mouth.
We’re tired before we even begin because everybody has something to keep adding when the thought of capitalizing on it leaks in.
It’s like standing on train tracks and hoping to dodge the train except your information overload is weighing you down.
Here’s The Thing -
Spend time listening to hordes of advice and eventually it pokes and prods a hole in your system.
This happens because it questions your confidence. Or lack of it.
Some of it on Substack looks like this:
Write 100-200 words into notes 3-4 times a week.
But then….
Write only short snapshot sentences into notes 2 times a week.
And then….
Write quick bundles of advice into notes 1-2 times a week.
Oh, and….
Use a myriad of various tools - an endless list, to help the algorithm find you, like site builders, automation tools, editing tools, connective tools, advertising tools, email tools, notes tools and all the other volumes of tools to make it work for you.
Writers on Substack’s early launch days will all agree that it was about comradeship, a support system that helped each person congregate and share and discuss as part of a supportive network.
Now if you are just starting out, then expect an encyclopedia of supposed knowledge to help you get started like having a million and one sales catalogues offering products to apparently assist your introduction to success.
Unfortunately, I can speak from experience when I say that this is how it can feel.
Particularly in the beginning.
Once people know you have arrived on Substack the sales pitch is on.
You walk through the front entry way of the Substack store and get inundated by opportunities from salesy-pitch people and how much those with huge subscriber bases want to apparently help you.
If you are anything like me, if you wanted to just browse before committing and you get swamped, then you walk straight back out of the store again.
But if you have a clear idea of what you have come for in the first place and you are left in peace to do your thing and the salesperson is available only when you instigate interaction, fantastic.
And if you have an idea of what you want to build on Substack before entering, then any advice you seek to compliment that initiation works as an asset to your own growth.
I am certain at this point you are here reading this and knowing exactly what I’m talking about.
Modern life is cramped full of swamping ideals.
You have been flooded with so much before now and your inbox is bulging unattractively at the seams.
I hate to have to tell you this but unless you do some serious sifting of what you want and what you actually need, your inbox will keep flooding with streams of stuff that you never want to look at.
Then there’s the boast post that at first drags you in because you want to believe you can also be like the big wigs on Substack.
It keeps you hanging on with the promise of ‘more’ lingering like a carrot on a stick and you know how that works out.
For those of you new writers, this can be likened to being offered luxury accommodation in the brochure but when you arrive, you are thrown a futon and a tent.
So, let’s decide on what you want or hope to achieve through your writing in basic form first, then margin in on what you need to build on it.
Once you have that clear you can start making decisions with intention.
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Remember that no tree ever sprung up without being a small sapling first.
It doesn’t need to be perfect. Just rough idea.
You can always change it along the way as your writing form develops and navigates you quite often where it wants to go but again, only once you are generally clear of what your writing strategy is.
And that’s the intriguing part.
Writing is an art form. Did you know that?
It takes discipline yes, much like other work does, but it involves more then spontaneous episodes. It requires frameworks and strategies.
Because good writing takes a piece of you, every time, to produce a little magic.
Now when I refer to this aspect of writing I refer to the writer who births the writing to begin with from a deeper place.
Think people like Roald Dahl or Tom Clancy.
These two couldn’t be more at opposite ends of the pencil as far as what they liked to write about, but both wrote from a place of passion - the real fuel of a writer.
When people look to places like Substack, unfortunately some have the idea that all they will need to do is push a few keys to make a sentence or two and others will blindly follow for their next utterance and pay them to utter, at that.
It doesn’t usually work like this.
People have complicated minds and desires and just because you appear one day, will not necessarily sway them to look the next.
You must be a patient sapling.
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Let the seasons come and go as you grow and change bit by bit.
Welcome the rain, and don’t shy away from the heat.
Stay with intent.
Consistently be your own writer at heart.
Eventually, faces will seek the shade of your boughs.
“I Cannot Be Patient…”
That’s how a lot of us feel at times, it’s not unusual so don’t stress.
Until we understand that patience requires discipline, only then can we start to apply it.
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And we can all learn to have patience if we learn how to become disciplined, so why not take a look at what that area involves.
For some, discipline will seem as easy as sighting the back of your hand.
For others it is a mountain of peril.
And that’s fine too if you are initially of the latter.
You can simply take a deep breath and know that discipline must be learned within individual parameters, because none of us are mirror souls of anybody else.
We learn, perceive, adjust and grow in various ways according to our personalities, our experiences and our concepts of meaning.
So that’s where you will start.
With yourself.
And you will apply lessons of discipline as you can manage it bit by bit that I’m going to provide you at the end of this article in my FREE -
‘Guide to Good Writing Practice’
with every paid subscription.