We're All Bitched From The Start

Why it's a hard time to be a writer right now, and a couple of tips for getting seen on Substack if you're struggling

“Forget your personal tragedy. We are all bitched from the start and you especially have to hurt like hell before you can write seriously.”
—Hemingway to F. Scott Fitzgerald

It’s a hard time to be a writer right now. I mean, hell, it’s always been a hard time to be a writer. I used to mail submissions in manila envelopes and wait weeks to hear back. And I can promise you, there was a time when there weren’t print magazines paying writers and if you were called to writing, well good luck with that. Pray.

But. We are in uncharted times and I’m going to come right out and blame it on AI.

I don’t know if you write on Medium, or ever did, but a lot of people are leaving Medium for Substack in utter frustration. If you only write on Substack, hang with me because hoo boy, this conversation applies here on Substack, too.

Maybe more than you know.

Last October, Wired ran an article titled AI Slop Is Flooding Medium. Turns out they’d hired an AI detection firm to look at Medium.

Pangram Labs took a sampling of 274,466 recent posts within a six week period at Medium and said 47% of them were likely AI. Wired also hired Originality AI to do a second pass and they estimated the AI on Medium to be at least 40%.

To credit CEO Tony Stubblebine, he responded before they went to print. Lot of companies respond to media with “no comment.” He said Medium relies a lot on their 9000 publication editors to oversee the quality of content going up.

With regard to AI, he said “it doesn’t matter as long as no one is reading it.”

Problem is, people are reading it.

Last month I reported an AI post that had 6K claps and over 100 comments. I don’t know how much that post pulled out of the payment pot for real writers. But I know how long it takes me to write a piece that I’m proud of and it makes me angry.

Sure, a lot of posts don’t get 6000 claps and 100 comments. But if almost half the content on Medium is AI generated, what do you think that does to the pot of money writers get paid from? Writers truly don’t comprehend the magnitude of that and create some imagined scenario by which Medium doesn’t want to pay them.

Here’s the kicker.

Most people do not recognize AI. We think we do. But we don’t.

Those 9000 publication editors probably read AI submissions and say wow, finally someone who can write. And accept it. Like the post I reported, which was in a publication with a very significant number of followers.

A human editor accepted it. Let that soak in for a minute.

And that post with 6K claps? I looked at the comments before I reported it. All the comments were people commiserating with the writer. Yeah, I feel you bro. Omg, that’s happened to me, too. Hahahah so funny, so well written, I followed you.

So the pay goes down. And down. And down.

In frustration, writers say f— this, I’m going to Substack.

And I laugh. You think it’s not happening here? It is.

One of the top Substacks on the leaderboards is someone teaching people how to make money with AI writing. Over sixty thousand subscribers.

You think people aren’t using AI here? They are.

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In 1934, Ernest Hemingway got a letter from his good friend F. Scott Fitzgerald. They’d been close friends for over a decade. Fitzgerald wanted feedback on his writing.

After The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald hadn’t written for nine years. He’d just written Tender Is The Night and wanted Hemingway’s thoughts.

Hemingway sent back a pretty scathing letter. Gave him a lot of little observations like stop being self indulgent. Said you need to write things the way they actually happen. Told him he was making silly compromises in his writing and reminded him that good writing comes from both seeing and listening.

Then he said look, I write shit, too. I try put it in the wastebasket.

I write one page of masterpiece to ninety one pages of shit. I try to put the shit in the wastebasket. — Hemingway to Fitzgerald

He’s got one up on me. Half the time I don’t know what belongs in the wastebasket. Sometimes I don’t know for a good week, and then I unpublish and rewrite. One of the hardest things in the damn world is being objective about our own words.

Anyway, Hemingway finished the letter by saying he thinks we have to hurt like hell to write seriously, but cautions Fitzgerald against putting the focus on himself.

But here, you read.

Forget your personal tragedy. We are all bitched from the start and you especially have to hurt like hell before you can write seriously. But when you get the damned hurt use it — don’t cheat with it. Be as faithful to it as a scientist — but don’t think anything is of any importance because it happens to you or anyone belonging to you… You see, Bo, you’re not a tragic character. Neither am I. All we are is writers and what we should do is write. — Hemingway to Fitzgerald

The late Irving Stone spent his entire life writing novelized biographies of famous creatives and writers. At the end of his life, he was asked if there’s a thread that connects them all. If there was one thing the “greats” all had in common.

He said yes.

For years, they are beaten down as humans. Sometimes, vilified. But every time someone knocks them down, they get up. You can not make these people stop.

Seems to me every successful writer has pain in their past. I could write a post every day about the pain successful writers have lived. Hemingway, Poe, Wolf, Dickinson, and on. But you have to learn to turn pain into art or communication or both.

The other day I saw someone on Notes say it took five years to get five hundred subscribers. I went to look and here’s what I wanted to tell the writer. The whole world wants to hear Kim Kardashian’s daily minutiae.

Karen or Jane or Sharon or Jeff or Joe from God knows where, not so much.

The point is, Fitzgerald had published The Great Gatsby and was still asking for advice to improve his writing skills. We need to do the same. Me included. Harsh, I know. Also true. Because now we’re writing in the era of AI. For every piece of writing you or I create, someone has pumped out three or six or ten pieces using AI and the kicker is that the average reader can’t tell the difference. They just think they can.

But we are writers. It’s what we do.

The best tips I can suggest for anyone struggling are these. Write better titles. Open stronger. Use appealing cover images. And ask yourself if five hundred random strangers would be interested in what you’re putting down on the page.

And if you’re writing on Substack, for gosh sakes make sure your tags correspond with the leaderboard categories. That’s how you get into the topic feeds here. Works the same as Medium. You can make up tags if you want, but if they’re not the tags the system is using to distribute content, your made up tags won’t bring you readers.

On Medium, the list of tags is too long to post here. Might do a separate info post on that. But on Substack, it’s a short list. The distribution topics are:

Culture, Technology, Business, U.S. Politics, Finance, Food & Drink, Sports, Art & Illustration, World Politics, Health Politics, News, Fashion & Beauty, Music, Faith & Spirituality, Climate & Environment, Science, Literature, Fiction, Health & Wellness, Design, Travel, Parenting, Philosophy, Comics, International, Crypto, History, Humor.

Use one or two of those every time you post. Watch and see which brings you signups. You’ll know by looking in your stats at signups per post. And since we’re talking about getting seen, I’d love to know what you write about. Feel welcome to leave a comment to say hi and tell me what you write here. :)

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If you like my writing, I also write about life, writing and AI on Medium

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