I’ve decided to start a blog, because I want to have a low-pressure but public place for writing, solely for myself. I want to write things for fun, without having to consider an audience or whether it’ll make money. It feels reactionary to start a blog, writing as I do in the beginning of 2024.
I mean, everyone’s got a Substack these days - why not do that instead? I’ve thought about it and I feel uneasy about writing an email newsletter, at the moment. I used to write one—Yours Affectionately—on TinyLetter from 2017-2020, so I do have some experience in the field. I’m not a hater! I’m a lapsed practitioner. I used to like writing it, until I didn’t anymore. Since I last wrote it, the ecosystem of newsletters has changed substantially. I don’t really want to start my old TinyLetter up again, because it feels like a relic of a past life. Anyway, TinyLetter is shutting down in early 2024, and even if it wasn’t, it has been dwarfed in popularity by Substack, which has emerged as the main platform for writers and creatives, which feels like reason enough to let it alone.
So no TinyLetter. What about Substack instead? Well, there’s the fact that I blanch at how fragmented the media landscape is now, and feel uneasy about throwing myself into something I haven’t made peace with. And recently there was the Substackers Against Nazis protest, in which multiple creators sharing the same open letter to Substack’s management, criticising them for platforming and monetising the likes of Richard Spencer. It would feel odd to sign up for Substack for the first time in the midst of both fragmentation and Nazis.
While all valid, this unsavoury state of affairs is not the real reason why I think my public writing space has got to be a blog, and not a new email newsletter. One of them is that if I’m honest, I’m intimidated by the dizzying swathes of content—round-ups, personal essays, curated guides—that are shovelled into my inbox every day from the Substacks to which I’m subscribed. If I joined in, I couldn’t compete. I don’t flatter myself that I’m anything more than a competent writer. If I joined Substack, I wouldn’t be adding value, I’d only be adding to the noise.
I had such a profound crisis of purpose in 2020, which I could only respond to by dealing with overwhelm. That sense of overwhelm had crept up on me without me noticing. Little by little, the experience of using the internet had morphed from something like going to a library, into something like walking through a crowded fairground, all music and gaudy lights, with people grabbing at you insistently from all directions. I found that instead of navigating intentionally and choosing where to lay my gaze, I was being subjected to a succession of increasingly frenzied bids for attention.
I feel very strongly that if I am to write, I must not contribute to the overwhelm of others. I want to write, but not at the expense of other people’s attention spans. To be worth breaking your focus, the words I write would have to be good, and that’s too much pressure. It’s stopped me from writing before! So if I want to write publicly, yet allow myself to write badly, it will have to be a blog, so nobody will be exposed to more words unless they seek them out.