the tao of poasting

beyond mindless grinding and overwrought hypotheticals

Vagabond Manga #250: An End To Fighting, written and illustrated by Takehiko Inoue

context is where it lives

I’m still in the process of figuring out what a substack post is – how it lives, “where” it lives, how people perceive it, interface with it, what they expect from it, what they want out of it. of course this is wonderfully complicated by the fact that there are many different correct answers, some of which contradict each other. I suppose I should narrow it down to my experience of it, my interpretation of it, which is in turn complicated by my natural tendency to seek out alternate, conflicting interpretations. Life would be simpler if I could stick to one thing, but I have not yet grown wise enough to deeply enjoy simple things.

I could contrast all of this with twitter, which feels like a ‘late stage’ domain for me at this point. I mean that in the context of my own body of work, rather than as any sort of proclamation about the state of twitter¹ as a whole. I have a rather ‘complete’ sense of ‘what a tweet is’ – how it lives, where it lives, how people perceive it, what they want out of it. I can finesse and wrangle and construct tweets with an effortlessness that I haven’t yet developed with substack posts.

In some sense, I do believe the only way to cultivate that competence is to just write and ship posts, but it’s also a costlier endeavor (in terms of time and effort) than tweeting. Not only is it easier to write 100 tweets than 100 substack posts, I’d argue that it’s actually easier to write 100,000 words worth of tweets than 100,000 words worth of substack posts. At least, it is for me, given my background and context. I can imagine that for some people it might be the other way around, perhaps because they’re used to writing articles and essays, and find tweets to be a disorientingly small amount of space. It’s really a different skillset entirely. I’m sure there are filmmakers out there who can make feature-length films who find the idea of making tiktoks somehow overwhelming or unmanageable… anyway, I’m not too interested in really developing a high-res picture of the intricate nuances of those specific details– I’m much more interested in quite simply figuring out how to write substack posts in a way that seems correct to me.

when to think ahead, and when not to?

To follow up on a previous thought– while I do believe that ‘the only way to cultivate competence is to write and ship posts’, I also think that there’s some amount of thinking or drafting or plotting that can save me a bunch of ‘wasted’ effort. That’s partially one of the ideas I was hoping to get to in On Scaffolding – that it’s worth doing a bunch of low-res sketches of things before you figure out which elements are worth spending more time and effort on.² This isn’t an issue with tweeting, since every tweet is essentially a sketch. The best way to workshop tweets is to simply tweet more. And because the timeline is composed of many standalone tweets, you don’t really have to worry about any single tweet wasting anybody’s time, because if it didn’t hit for them they’re already on to the next thing.

It could be possible that the same ‘just post bro’ attitude is actually still optimal for substack posting– even though a post might take you a few hours to write, and take a reader 20 minutes to read. After all, if they got bored midway, they’re always free to close the tab. I have books on my shelves that I spent actual money on, that I may or may not have spent some time reading, that I may or may not have gotten any value out of. And even so, I have never felt like I’ve wasted any of the time I’ve ever spent reading a book. I wouldn’t assert that this means there are no bad books– there obviously are bad books– but I don’t spend a lot of time reading them, and the time I do spend reading them is time that I’m refining my sense of taste, my internal algorithm of what’s good and what’s not. And even ‘bad material’ can be somewhat instructive in that it teaches me what not to do, or what to subvert.

All of that addresses the ‘time spent reading’ part. What about time spent writing? I don’t think I’ve ever truly regretted time spent writing, either. This is true even if I’m writing something that I feel like I’ve written about somewhere else before already, or if I feel like I’m working on an irrelevant part of something that I’m not eventually going to use. All time spent writing, if I bring a modicum of sensitivity to it, is time spent ‘working on my craft’. And while I have certainly sometimes gotten into tedious internal back-and-forth arguments about whether I could have better utilized some fragment of time/effort, when I step back and look at the totality of it all, I find myself thinking that… I could probably just have written more altogether. Honestly I think I could probably have written about 4 times more than I’ve written so far, and thrown out the worst 90% of it, and ended up with writing that’s at least twice as good.

But all of that is hypothetical, and hypotheticals are tricksy and seductive. Because ultimately we’re always left with the actual reality we inhabit. There’s a tension here, between the power of imagination (which I am a huge advocate of, because it can expand your sense of what is possible, and inspire you to pursue it), and the costs of abdicating reality (which I have subjected myself to on far too many occasions). It’s an age-old tension. ‘Idealism’ vs ‘realism’. The ‘realist’ might be trapped in a model of reality that isn’t even accurate. The 'idealist’ might be manufacturing grand machines of fantasy at the expense of making any sort of actual meaningful progress. You can substitute in all sorts of models and archetypes here. The dreamer and the accountant. The head and the heart. Yin and yang. Chaos and order. And when things start to get a little too complicated, a little too overwhelming, I find myself reaching for: inhale and exhale. Day and night. Each follows the other in a cycle of balance. And over the course of a year, days get longer, and then shorter. So there are short-term imbalances that make up a longer-term balance.

notice the cycles in all things

In practice: If I’ve written 10 posts in a row and I feel like I’m going nowhere, then that’s a good time to pause, zoom out, reorient, look for clues or signs re: where I might want to be going instead. If I’ve gone, say, 2 months in a row thinking and reorienting and I haven’t published anything, then that’s probably a good time to pause the thinking and just freestyle off the top of my head to see what comes up.

Writing this out, it suddenly all seems so simple. I remember there have been times in the past with my 1000wordvomits project or with my old blog where I felt like I’d written 10+ posts in a row and yet felt like I hadn’t really written anything at all, felt like I was thrashing about in place. And I remember there was a time early in my marketing career when I was tasked with writing blogposts for work, and I had written a bunch of posts, and I was underwhelmed with how they were doing, and then I did some thinking and reading and reorienting and my subsequent posts did much better. (And then later on, once I figured out a larger vision, and had a clearer sense of ‘what a blogpost is’, I could actually write ‘low-effort posts’ that did really well– way better than the posts in the early days– because they were well-framed, well-positioned, and ‘hit the spot’. I could even hire freelancers to follow some simple instructions and their posts would achieve our goals, too!)

Writing this out, it also becomes clearer why I’ve been spending so much time thinking and stewing and reorienting. Day to day, I felt quite bad about ‘not making progress’, and I found myself mentally back in a really old, wretched place of “am I just being a procrastinating loser right now, avoiding my work out of fear, fear of judgement, fear of embarrassment, etc?” And… I think some of that is true, but there’s no reason to get all knotted about it. It can be something to be worn with lightness, something to laugh about, something to ayy lmao through. I’d re-encountered an old Chesterton quote earlier– “It’s easy to be heavy; hard to be light.” I do keep circling back around to this central essence. And that’s okay. If we have to do it again, we have to do it again!

So what is a substack post for? For me lately, in the current phase of my current era, it’s a kind of ‘sketchbook performance art’. I had spent a bunch of time simulating a bunch of hypothetical ideal readers, before eventually returning to writing primarily for myself. My goal right now is really just to think honestly out loud, to flow from some thoughts to others, to use ideas to set up other ideas, to scaffold, to fill out a blank space with tendrils that feel alive, that compel me to keep exploring, to keep playing, to be excited for the next one. And these aren’t the only goals– a big part of what keeps me interested is the knowledge that there are goals-within-goals, some of which I will find surprising and compelling. And a particularly deep longing I have, is to cultivate a sense of how to make something artfully incomplete.³

1. I think twitter has lived through many cycles of change over the years, even before Elon took over, and as long as it doesn’t die, it’ll likely live through more cycles still. I do pretty much intend to stick around until the end, if only out of stubborn persistence. I do honestly believe that… despite all of the chaos and changes and crises, as long as twitter remains the global schelling point of thoughts mingling in plaintext, it will be a place of opportunity. It’s become a more hostile and tedious place, but it does still remain a place of opportunity, as long as people are able to reply to each other.

2. I’m reminded of Nietzsche’s ‘recipe for a good novelist’ being to write 100 two-page sketches while collecting anecdotes for 10 years. I co-sign this heartily.

3. I can feel myself arriving at the end of this piece, both in terms of the time and energy I’ve expended on it, and my sense of the length. Popping into a wordcounter, what do we have? ~1600 words. How many headers? 3. Should I break up the paragraphs more? Maybe. Should I add more headers? Maybe. It’s becoming clearer to me that I’m converging on some kind of familiar, recurring style, and I’m starting to be at peace with it. There are many parts in this post where I could’ve easily spent another hour or two elaborating on, maybe carving out into other posts. But my time for tonight is up, and I am satisfied with what I’ve done. If I can just do this at a regular cadence, everything will take care of itself.