I loved this. Thank you for sharing! I was an "aspiring writer" for years before I actually started my Substack last year. I gave myself writing goals but knew they were just going to a file on my computer, so I never really wrote. Starting publishing here motivated me to keep writing! But now I already feel the need to have balance and not instantly think "Oh, how can I make that an article on Substack." Your insights were very helpful as I think through how to live out that balance!
Exactly! It's hard to resist the compulsion to overshare. What I mean by that is, we often think of oversharing as "sharing overly personal/vulnerable information" but it can also just be "sharing chronically". I tell my students that the same muscle controls their mouth and their bladder, and that muscle is called self-control. "When you shout out in class without thinking or without raising your hand, it's the same as your sibling in kindergarten peeing their pants because they couldn't wait to go to the bathroom. Are you verbally peeing your pants?" Sometimes when I start to feel myself more frequently considering how my thoughts would read as a Substack posts, I just delete the app for a week or two, then only read paper books and hand-write in my journal until I feel I've regained self-possession.
I'm glad this post resonated with you, and equally glad you've made the leap to become a writer and start sharing your work! Congratulations!
Yes! That's sooo good! I love the thought of deleting the app if I feel that I'm focused too much on how a certain idea would land with this audience. I appreciate your thoughts on this.
I get where you're coming from but I disagree that there isn't an intrinsic pleasure in writing and that it can't be enjoyable for its own sake in the same way that running is and for the same reason. Nor do I think all private writing is necessarily either navel gazing or diving into the depths for the purpose of something to bring back for an audience. For me as a poet especially, but sometimes even in my essay writing, writing is both play and prayer. I write for the joy of discovery of what language can do, the play of words bouncing off of each other, of dancing with each other, not so much to communicate with another person but the joy of language as its own imago dei. If Christ is the Word, then all human words are little echoes of the one Word and all writing is playing in and with the Creator's gift of language and words. When I stare into the depths I find not just myself there but God is there as well, playing in the quiet and in the wordless places and inviting me to enter into the dance with my words echoing his words and his wordlessness which is the mysterious language that is above and beneath behind and before all human language. Christ went into the desert not really for solitude, but to commune with his Father and with the Spirit, to be alone only in the sense that he is apart from other men; but always he is God the Son communing in and with his never-alone Triune Self. And I think the wilderness of writing is a similar communion of the writer with the Triune God who is always there waiting in the silence and the desert places. It might be that what I find there is a message only for me, the joy of language that is a private and unsharable communion. It might be that what I find there is also a gift for others, to be refined and purified until it contains some echo of that primal Word that spoke all of Creation into being. Writing is play for me-- though it can also be work, of course it is-- but it is also play because it is a participation in the play of the Creator God who is Word. And I don't think that's any different from the joy of running for its own sake, which is at heart the joy of communing with the Creator who made your body, who made the act of motion, who created the laws of the universe to be such that bodies can move and commune with the Eternal through the poetry of running and motion. When I write I feel God's pleasure.
I loved this. Thank you for sharing! I was an "aspiring writer" for years before I actually started my Substack last year. I gave myself writing goals but knew they were just going to a file on my computer, so I never really wrote. Starting publishing here motivated me to keep writing! But now I already feel the need to have balance and not instantly think "Oh, how can I make that an article on Substack." Your insights were very helpful as I think through how to live out that balance!
Exactly! It's hard to resist the compulsion to overshare. What I mean by that is, we often think of oversharing as "sharing overly personal/vulnerable information" but it can also just be "sharing chronically". I tell my students that the same muscle controls their mouth and their bladder, and that muscle is called self-control. "When you shout out in class without thinking or without raising your hand, it's the same as your sibling in kindergarten peeing their pants because they couldn't wait to go to the bathroom. Are you verbally peeing your pants?" Sometimes when I start to feel myself more frequently considering how my thoughts would read as a Substack posts, I just delete the app for a week or two, then only read paper books and hand-write in my journal until I feel I've regained self-possession.
I'm glad this post resonated with you, and equally glad you've made the leap to become a writer and start sharing your work! Congratulations!
Yes! That's sooo good! I love the thought of deleting the app if I feel that I'm focused too much on how a certain idea would land with this audience. I appreciate your thoughts on this.
I appreciate your insights on discipline and productivity!
Thank you! Always trying to improve the ratio of practice : preach!
I get where you're coming from but I disagree that there isn't an intrinsic pleasure in writing and that it can't be enjoyable for its own sake in the same way that running is and for the same reason. Nor do I think all private writing is necessarily either navel gazing or diving into the depths for the purpose of something to bring back for an audience. For me as a poet especially, but sometimes even in my essay writing, writing is both play and prayer. I write for the joy of discovery of what language can do, the play of words bouncing off of each other, of dancing with each other, not so much to communicate with another person but the joy of language as its own imago dei. If Christ is the Word, then all human words are little echoes of the one Word and all writing is playing in and with the Creator's gift of language and words. When I stare into the depths I find not just myself there but God is there as well, playing in the quiet and in the wordless places and inviting me to enter into the dance with my words echoing his words and his wordlessness which is the mysterious language that is above and beneath behind and before all human language. Christ went into the desert not really for solitude, but to commune with his Father and with the Spirit, to be alone only in the sense that he is apart from other men; but always he is God the Son communing in and with his never-alone Triune Self. And I think the wilderness of writing is a similar communion of the writer with the Triune God who is always there waiting in the silence and the desert places. It might be that what I find there is a message only for me, the joy of language that is a private and unsharable communion. It might be that what I find there is also a gift for others, to be refined and purified until it contains some echo of that primal Word that spoke all of Creation into being. Writing is play for me-- though it can also be work, of course it is-- but it is also play because it is a participation in the play of the Creator God who is Word. And I don't think that's any different from the joy of running for its own sake, which is at heart the joy of communing with the Creator who made your body, who made the act of motion, who created the laws of the universe to be such that bodies can move and commune with the Eternal through the poetry of running and motion. When I write I feel God's pleasure.
Thanks for sharing, Melanie!