Do women need to mine their personal lives more than men? Am I doomed as a generalist? Questions after two months on Substack
Please let me know that I'm not the only one having these thoughts. Plus working up a remote working sweat.
Earlier today working from the British Library I needed to find a graphic designer and wondered could I just post it on here? In the past week I've tried to replace X with Substack notes and I’m not sure how it’s going. I don’t miss any one that much from X - yet - apart from one person who might be reading this. But I’m not talking to people on here like I did on that site.
I’ve now been on Substack two months and these are some of the thoughts running through my head about this platform.
Also: it feels slow. Being on a site without algorithms is weird. Sometimes I still go to hashtag. But maybe that’s the point. Pause and think.
I am however reading. A lot more. And varied material. One minute it’s something on Palestine. The next it’s about single women and dating.
Having said that this site seems slow, I'm amazed that I have 38 subscribers already - and each time someone signs up I'm surprised. As we were reminded in a Zoom tutorial on Substack last week, it's a big thing to give someone your email address to someone. And I’ve been bought six virtual coffees.
Am I doomed because I’m nicheless? It’s a thought that I have several times a week. In one post on here I’ve written about the Julian Assange trial. Then there’s the time I met my teenage penpal. As a generalist will I get anywhere? After all I see post after post on LinkedIn talking about how you need to “niche down”.
It’s messy. I find myself going back and changing things on posts, deleting things, trying to Google “how to unpublish on Substack”. And I wonder: are other people also doing that very same thing.
So many writers on here are very honest. But are women mining their lives a lot more for content than men? Let me say that I have no problem at all if they are. Memoir is my favourite genre. My favourite writers on here are the candid ones like Tiffany Philippou and Poorna Bell.
But it’s something that I can’t help thinking about a lot. In 2014, writer Hadley Freeman wrote a piece for her column titled “The latest message for female writers- don’t think, just spill”.
“The book publishing world has, for some time now, become wholly memoir-ified,” Freeman wrote. “Nothing gets a publisher’s chequebook out faster than a memoir, to the point that nonfiction books that are ostensibly about a specific subject (butchery, say, or George Eliot) are now styled and sold as memoirs (respectively Cleaving: A Story of Marriage, Meat, and Obsession by Julie Powell; and The Road to Middlemarch, by Rebecca Mead.) Everything must be seen through the personal lens, the theory goes, and a personal story gives the reader a narrative to follow, because the disintegration of a woman’s marriage is far more interesting than some boring old butchery. Make the writer a celebrity and the book will sell itself – ta da!”
Is the same happening here a decade on?
Of course it may be that women are more honest or that I just follow more women writers.
We also all need ideas. I’m doing 57 million things a week now and trying to do even more but I constantly think oh well I’ve got things to write about. Of course I also want to do journalistic work on here, but that takes longer to produce.
Some days it’s unbelievable having a blank slate in the form of this site. It’s a different mindset to waiting to get a commission from an editor before you get the green light to write about something. Of course you still need to figure out the money. But no topic is off limits. Sometimes it scares me that there’s no one holding me back (says the person who wrote about a teenage penpal, nor has a lot of subscribers at the moment).
Will potential employers find anything that I write on Substack? Should I have it in my email signature and on my website?
Has someone who hates me secretly read something but not subscribed and laughed? After all, if you’re happy to put a lot out there when someone consumes it and they don’t end up exchanging something in return is there feeling of violation? Sometimes I worry for others, too. Wow that’s really brave I hope she’s okay, I think.
Will it all end in disaster? Will this post end up being one of the ones that I delete?
Please let me know if you’re on here and you’ve had any thought that is even remotely similar.
We’ve gotta work, work, work, work (remotely)
Speaking of remotely, this week I’m going against what Boris advises. Turns out you can recite the first hundred lines of Homer’s Iliad in ancient Greek by heart and make model buses but you don’t know your basic rom coms when trying to force people back into the office.
I’m not only working remotely, I’m working up a remote working sweat. Yesterday it was the Royal Society of Arts (RSA) where I went with an artist friend who is a fellow and introduced me to it. It has to be London’s best kept remote working secret. So, so much space!
Today I went to the British Library. I’m saving all of this for a London remote working guide on here, but here’s a spoiler alert: if you sit in the room called the Newsroom (fitting) you can actually hear the Tube announcements. Yes really.
Looking forward to that London's remote working article! Keep on keeping on!