The journey of a writer isn't what you think

The real way to win at Substack, and life, and the reader who made me cry

Little Peter Pastureman by John Bauer, 1909

Omg, y’all are so patient with me, the way I show up on the page with a motley bunch of thoughts in my head, trying to make sense of them, but we always get somewhere don’t we? Then you add more to my thoughts, in comments, so I keep doing it.

It all started last weekend when I got an email from a reader. Her name is Pamela.

She said she always dreamed of being a writer, even as a child. She’d climb the apple tree in their front yard in Illinois with a spiral notebook and pen to sit in the branches and write. I was reading that, smiling, because I did that too except it wasn’t in our front yard it was five houses down the back alley but my gosh, I loved that tree.

And mama would say good grief, child, you have sticks and leaves in your hair and just look at your pants, but I didn’t care about those things. Mama, I was writing!

But you know how it goes, right? A lifetime of self esteem issues is how she put it and my god, the honesty in that. Because we are so quick to point at everything else.

At life and bills that need paying and not really fessing up to abandoned dreams. To the part we play in abandoning them. In playing life small and safe and it made me think how I’ve been guilty of that, too. Pitching my tent in the comfort zone.

You know what the number one regret of the dying is? Not anything we did. It’s all the things we wanted to do and didn’t. Because someone didn’t approve, or we didn’t believe in ourselves so we went with the flow until one day, the river runs dry.

As a grown adult she read Julia Cameron’s book, The Artist’s Way and realized she is a shadow artist. Afraid to speak her truths. Afraid to put herself out there. And if you think that’s not you because you’re writing on Substack, keep reading okay?

Anyway. Get this. At age 78, Pamela co-wrote, narrated, directed and produced a documentary and now it’s streaming around the world. On Amazon Prime, even.

Something about that hit me. Because here I sit, closer to sixty than fifty, wondering if I have the chops to write a book, not just posts, and something about this woman chasing her dream and catching a shooting star at 78 damn near undid me.

You know what I did, right? I rented the movie. Like, that very night.

My god it was beautifully done. It’s about the growth of rock ’n’ roll in America and the one man who helped launch many “new” young artists like Elvis Presley, Little Richard, Bobby Darin, and The Rolling Stones. The Beatles and The Beach Boys.

Omg, the live footage. I was just a little kid with sticks and leaves in my hair from that apple tree, but I remember my big sister bringing those albums home. On vinyl.

It’s called The Voice That Rocked America - The Dick Biondi Story and it was beautifully done. If you think documentaries are dry or boring — not this one. But you know what the best part was? The joy on Pamela’s face as she narrated the story.

And Lord, I hope I have that kind of joy on my face at seventy eight.

It’s going to move me for a long time, the joy on her face.

I watched to the last credits because she played footage while the credits rolled and when it was done I sat back and here’s what hit me. She reads my writing. This woman who made this stunning work of art and funded the whole thing on GoFundMe. She reads my writing. And I was so moved, I cried for the second time that day.

She’s writing the book now, and I will absolutely buy it.

. . .

A couple of days later, I ran across a tutorial on how to get more subscribers on Substack and it said all the typical things. How to schedule Notes, and what to post when, and how to make that subscribe bar you see on other Substacks and here’s how to see who is sharing your work and where to find writers who overlap with your audience and I’m watching it and wondering… Why do we do this?

But I get it. Most of us want to grow, right? I watch stuff like that, remembering the four long years I wrote here and didn’t get any damn traction and I didn’t know why and it made me think of Pamela questioning if she’s good enough because I did, too. Four damn years to get to eleven hundred subscribers. God, it was so painful.

It’s not the writing to crickets that hurts. It’s the wondering. If you’re good enough.

It made me realize my approach runs counter to what most people think and it’s not that the details don’t matter. It’s that they’re so secondary to what actually moves the needle it’s not even funny. So on Sunday I outlined my thoughts and I’m writing a series about that as a gift to my paid members. I’ll tell you more about it Tuesday because I don’t want to get too sidetracked here.

I do have a point, I promise.

. . .

Yesterday I got another email from a reader. Charlie Finch. So I went to his Substack and one of the posts had a hockey stick and was called Put Your Stick Out, so being Canadian of course I had to click that first. And damn if wasn’t not crying again.

Seems like the older I get, the more often I cry at the beauty in this world.

It’s about loving and losing a friend because of one stupid tragic thing that happened and in the blink of an eye a life is never the same and I cried my face off and replied to say you did it, Charlie. You found your voice and this is beautiful. Made me cry.

Because, see, here’s what he’d written to me…

He said he always loved writing. But life happens and he went from writing school to law school and then marriage and family came along and somewhere along the way he lost his voice. Didn’t know where he left it. Maybe in the pocket of an old pair of pants that don’t fit anymore, or in a shoebox on the top shelf crammed with old drawings and notebooks full of half-sketched ideas. And he wanted to find it.

He told me that somehow, my writing made the search for his voice more urgent.

Mine? My voice? Helped you want to find yours. And here’s what really strikes me. Punches me in the gut so hard I’m crying as I type this because I’m a sentimental fool but that doesn’t make the truth any less true.

Everyone talks about finding our readers. But that’s not what it’s about.

That’s not what any of it’s about.

It’s about finding ourselves.

Why does it take us so long to realize that?

But I don’t even need to ask, because Pamela answered that for me. Because we are shadow artists. We all start that way. As shadow artists, slowly finding our courage.

It’s not about finding readers. None of this writing stuff really is.

On the surface, maybe. But not in its bones.

It’s about peeling away all the years of crap and strife, bills and life, and all the wrong headed nonsense other people put in our heads and half the time didn’t realize it. So we can see who we are. So we can see the soul that once shone so bright, when we were small and we had no propriety, and the world didn’t cloud our thinking yet.

William Butler Yeats wrote the world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.

That’s what this is. This journey of writing or creating or making our art. It’s about sharpening our senses and we can only do that from deep inside our soul.

And I hope in some small way, I help you with that journey, because my God, you help me with mine so much that the least I could do is give a little back. And I’ll be writing more about it because the more you find yourself, the more your readers find you and it’s beautiful and symbiotic, which is exactly how life should be.

I hope you’ll watch for more, but for now I hope you’ll read Charlie’s post about love and loss, and please do watch Pamela’s documentary. They will both move you in the most beautiful way, trust me on that. I loved them both and I think you will, too.

And thank you, for being on this journey with me. For holding up a mirror so I can find myself when I’m lost in the woods. And as always, I’d love to know what you think…

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