Writing About Writing
Words mean things for a reason, shouldn't writers know that?
This morning I was scrolling through Notes when I saw one that said something to the effect of “if you’re actually writing and not writing about writing, come say hi!”
Scrolled a little farther and saw one that said “I mute the writing advice peddlers”
Stuff like that makes me roll my eyes right into last week.
It’s right up there with the people who think writers should be writing for free because money somehow sullies the craft. Tell Stephen King that.
I see notes complaining about people who ‘write about writing’ pretty often. You know what’s ironic about it? We don’t skewer any other profession for talking shop the way we skewer writers for it.
Photographers love to talk photography. Omg, have you seen the newest mirrorless lens, or what about that new 28-135mm, my god it’s a beauty! And amazingly, no one says omg, shut up and go take pictures, already. No one says omg, if you actually just TAKE photos instead of talking about it, drop a link cuz I wanna see them.
Someone who sews might talk about French seams or the computerized machines that thread the needle and adjust tension for you so you can stop cussing and get back to sewing and no one is saying omg, if you just sew can you let me know?
It’s not that writing is the only place where that snobbery exists, though.
It’s that the snobbery is related to doing not talking.
Photographers can talk shop all they want, no one minds. It’s in the doing where snobbery rears its ugly head. People who still shoot 35mm scoff at people using digital. And in the digital world, people shooting manual look down their nose at people who are shooting automatic. (Omg, you shoot automatic? lol)
Or wait, wait. Shooting raw. lol. Boy oh boy, almost nothing makes a photographer, even an amateur, feel superior faster than saying they shoot raw.
It’s always in the doing, where perceived superiority comes into play.
It’s just that with writing, talking and doing are both fingers on the keyboard.
You know what the real problem is? Know why so many people gripe about people writing about writing? It’s their own lack of discretion. And yes, I will explain.
We live in a world where no one earns enough and most people have at least one side gig if not more. Some people sell stuff. Some sell their time and some sell products. Of those selling products, some sell tangible things like t-shirts or mugs and others sell downloads like fonts or how-to courses. Which is fine in theory. But…
Let’s take a side step over to Medium for a minute. It will help illustrate and take the focus off Substack and Notes for a minute so I can make a point, okay? Doesn’t matter if you wrote there or not, you’ll get what I’m saying.
On Medium, there have always been people who wrote killer essays, built a following and earned pretty decent money, at least for a while. People who could write an essay and earn hundreds or thousands on one strong piece of writing and a little luck.
But other people looked and saw opportunity. I watched several of them.
They’d start simple. Omg, you guys, I doubled my views last month. Omg, I doubled my income last month. And all the new struggling writers would click to read. And a few seasoned writers too because curiosity is a beast. Their following is growing in leaps and bounds and then bam. They have a “how to Medium” course for sale.
The joke is a person like that can’t teach anyone a damn thing about how to write an essay that will pay hundreds much less thousands because they’ve never done it. All they can teach is that writing about money makes money.
That person can’t teach you anything about how to be a better writer, or what you’re doing wrong that’s impacting your results. But there are people who can. People who know the craft. People who have written for years and have ample experience.
Also? People who learn a platform. I had a guy in one publication use the same keyword in a kicker, title and subtitle and then tell me it’s because Medium has no SEO capability so I showed him how to get his post ranked the right way.
There’s carrot on a stick and there’s actual help and they aren’t the same.
That “how to make money writing” schtick isn’t a problem on Medium anymore. As of April 1, posts “about” Medium are no longer allowed behind the paywall. If writers paywall that stuff, Medium will remove it. There’s no such rule on Substack.
Words mean things for a reason. Words are how we communicate and understand each other. They’re not perfect, but they’re all we have.
To lump the “make money” crowd in with “writing about writing” is both inaccurate and incorrect.
We live in a world where 57% of the internet is AI generated content. By next year, that number is expected to push close to 90%. When people use AI, it doesn’t just generate the content, it writes the title, subtitle and tells the “writer” how to optimize for views. In that world, writers can use all the help they can get.
If you’re going to call yourself a writer and act superior because “you” are doing real and authentic writing and not “writing about writing” at least use the right words.
If you have an issue with people “how to make money” stuff, say that.
Rant over. Thanks for listening.
I love writing about writing. I am endlessly curious about how other writers write, up to and including what time of day they write, whether they have time limits or word quotas, whether they work on paper or at a keyboard, how they draft, when they edit, how they push through confusion and procrastination and being stuck, and, most of all, how they feed and care for their creativity when they are not writing.
Dickens walked for hours every day, working out his narratives in his mind. While, writing, he could be heard through the door of his study acting out all the parts, becoming the characters, and so developing his dialogue. Anthony Trollope wrote for four hours every morning, at a rate of one page every fifteen minutes. Toni Morrison woke up early enough to watch the sun rise, and then worked on paper -- that's after she could afford to not have to write on the subway.
I am also very interested in how writers make money -- and in how they found the gumption to keep writing during the often long, initial periods when there was none.
"If writers paywall that stuff, Medium will remove it. There’s no such rule on Substack." If enough of us object to the idea of writing about the platform on the platform, they'll put a similar rule in.