Notes versus Posts

a Note is something you consider, a Post is something you inhabit

(This is allegedly a picture of Edward Browne, an English pamphleteer who was sent to prison during one of the English Civil Wars in the 1600s. I can’t find anything else about him– he has a very common name for an Englishman. Those are supposed to be his children. I’m very amused by how all their faces are kinda blandly morose.)

This is going to be an attempt at something like a speedrun, where I try to write a Post that I feel comfortable hitting publish on. So. Let’s talk about the types of writing I do. I do a lot of tweeting. Tweeting is easy for me. It’s just off-the-cuff thoughts about whatever comes to mind. Sometimes it’s an observation, sometimes it’s a question, sometimes I scroll through the timeline and see something interesting that I’d like to comment on. My bar for tweeting is very low. If it’s an interesting fragment of a thought, it can likely become a decent tweet very easily. And if it doesn’t really hit the spot, I don’t really mind, I can just move on to the next tweet.

Substack has at least two parts to it that I’ve been playing with. Posts, like this one, which could be any mix of blogpost, email newsletter, journal entry, essay, etc, and Notes, which are quite similar to tweets. An interesting thing about Notes, however, is that they don’t have character limits. So I’ve come to think of Notes as like “super-tweets”, or “longtweets”. Here’s a recent note that I wrote that I’m very happy with, which seems to have resonated with people:

It’s 3 paragraphs long at under 300 words. I just tried transposing it into a twitter thread– it required a little chopping and editing, and it amounts to about 8 tweets. I feel it flows nicer as a single post, and I think this is a consequence of the way I wrote it. If I had intended to write it as a twitter thread, I would have written it differently. Some of the longer sentences with more details would be more succinct. An interesting challenge might be to try to fit it in 3 tweets, but I’m no longer interested in that particular flavor of challenge. In fact I’m somewhat more interested in the inverse challenge: how many 8-12 tweet threads could I translate into 3-4 paragraphs instead?

But that’s sort of a technical exercise, and I don’t feel super enthused about doing those. I will be trying to write more Notes at a more regular cadence just to see how it feels, and how it changes up my writing style, and because I think it would be a somewhat lucrative thing to do in an audience-building sense. But even so, what I really want to be doing is writing Substack Posts, or essays.

Now the big question is: what is it that makes a Post deserving of being a Post, rather than ‘merely’ a note? I do think it’s very possible to write a Note that can be ‘better’ than a Post. I almost definitely have some Posts that aren’t as good as the above Note. I mean it in the sense of like… this tweet, for example, is better than some entire tv shows or movies:

(source)

Of course, it’s a different thing entirely. It’s small, self-contained. But within its tiny container is a beautifully wrought universe. It would be hard to translate this tweet into a full-length cinematic movie. It might maybe make for a good tiktok, which could be 15-30 seconds. Making a good movie is a completely different challenge requiring many different skillsets and considerations. Hypothetically you could have a movie with a similar foundational idea, involving a twist around a father-son relationship. The Sixth Sense is sort of like this. There’s a short film from Love, Death & Robots that’s sort of like this, toying with the subjective experience of the protagonist as an unreliable narrator questioning his reality.

Incidentally, I have a tweet myself that’s about my own son that I’m very proud of, that I now realize kinda captures a similar vibe:

It didn’t go viral or anything, but I really enjoyed writing it, and I enjoy re-reading it. I like that it takes you on a little journey away from where it started. It took me maybe a minute to draft it and reword it slightly, experimenting briefly with quotation marks, before settling on the current form. It almost perfectly fits the 280 character limit at 278chars. I love how it ‘breaks the frame’ of the tweet, inviting the reader to fill in the blanks of what happens next. And it really captures the vibe of parenthood– it begins with a feeling, proceeds with a description of events, and ends abruptly with an interruption. Reading it again, it almost feels like I was actually being interrupted mid-tweet— which of course isn’t precisely what happened. I got the bottlecap out of his mouth first, and then took the artistic liberty of writing the tweet as if it hadn’t happened yet. But you get the idea. (Now I’m reminded of Jeremy Mann talking about his cityscape paintings, and how his job isn’t to perfectly represent reality, but to represent our experience of reality. I tried to do the same with my tweet.)

Alright, where was I? I was talking about Notes vs Posts and also brought up Tweets and Movies and Paintings. The question on my mind is: what qualities or elements should a Post have, that distinguish it from a Note? What quality should a Movie have, that distinguishes it from a Short? What quality should a Book have, that distinguishes it from a bunch of tweets or essays?

I can answer that last question from experience, as someone who loves good tweets, good essays AND good books, and has written loads of tweets, many longer posts, and two books. I was dissatisfied with both of my books. I’m still new to the experience of writing books, which is a skillset you really can’t develop any other way than by actually writing books. I was marginally happier with my second book (as an artifact) than the first, because I figured out some things from my previous experience. The analogy I’ve used to explain this to friends goes like this: a twitter thread or a blogpost is like someone showing you around a city for a day. They don’t have a lot of space and a lot of time. They can’t get you to eat all of their favorite foods, you’d get too full after a couple of meals. They can’t bring you to all of their favorite spots, there’s not enough time and you’d get tired. They have to select a handful of highlights and hope that it was enough to get you to want to visit again. A book on the other hand, is a much more substantial experience. It’s like living in the city for at least a few weeks. You get to really feel your way around, see the little details, and see how things change over time. You get to see the same locations at different hours, which turn out to be quite different places entirely. You develop more of a personal relationship with the city. You inhabit it longer. It becomes a part of you.

So. What’s the difference between a Note and a Post? To stick with the city analogy, a Note is like… a quick coffee at a nice cafe, maybe. Whereas a post is a bit more involved– it might take you 15-20 minutes to read, but when you contextualize it against all the other things you might be reading, all the other things that might be competing for your attention, I feel like a solid 20 minute read is somehow the equivalent of hours worth of time in regular life. I can’t quite explain the math off-hand but it feels correct to me somehow. There’s something about the pace of thought that’s different than the pace of ordinary living. I remember finishing Keay Davidson’s biography of Carl Sagan when I was in the military –15 years ago, wow– and I stepped outside of my office to have a cigarette and I felt like I had aged years– when the total amount of hours it took to read the book was probably maybe a dozen hours spread across a few days. We can live many lifetimes through reading. I had to pause here to really think about that. What a wondrous fact! I think all serious readers internalize early this on, and then we take it for granted. To quote Sagan again, he said,

“What an astonishing thing a book is. It's a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you're inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic." — Carl Sagan, Cosmos

I feel this, very strongly. It’s what draws me to reading and writing. And it’s funny and odd that I actually forget this sometimes, and I suppose I persist anyway because I’m carried by the waves of habit. But it feels great to be reminded of the essential magic at the heart of it all.

Again– what is the difference between a Note and a Post? A Note is something for you to consider, but a Post is something for you to inhabit. With a Note, I’m giving you something to think about. With a Post, I’m giving you something to experience. Something to think inside of. It’s the difference between looking at something, and ‘being with it’.

Here I’m reminded of when I first started making websites as a kid, around 1999 or so. I remember enjoying navigating the web, being on other people’s personal websites, participating in forums and so on. It had a real sense of place for me. And I desperately wanted to contribute, to participate, to create spaces that other people could inhabit in turn. At the time I thought of it as html pages with links and images that you could click around in and explore. And to some degree that’s basically correct. But I’m now seeing more clearly from a fresh perspective that even without the hyperlinks, text itself is a thing that we can inhabit.

There’s a quote I like from Theodor Adorno, who said, “for a man who no longer has a homeland, writing becomes place to live." While I’ve never been a refugee, I still feel that quote really strongly, as someone who’s never quite felt fully at home in most of my ordinary life– always a bit of an alien, always an outsider, always a minority, always a weirdo. Home is something we make, home is something we actively construct and tend to. I think anybody who is really prolific in their writing, who writes from the heart, is in the business of building a home, building a temple, building belonging– a way for us to define ourselves, locate ourselves, know ourselves. And that’s something that’s very difficult to do in 300 words. I needed the other 1500 to show you how I really feel.