Writing Beyond Hope and Fear

Online harassment, subscription models, and the future of writing

I owe you all an apology. In my last post, I mentioned how other work would prevent me from Substacking for a few weeks. Some contract writing work did occupy me this summer, but that wasn’t the full truth. Also, I was scared to post here.

Back in June, Joni Mitchell performed at The Gorge with Brandi Carlile, as you may recall. In the media, a kind of pop triumphalism celebrated this comeback performance as Joni’s highest artistic achievement. No one in journalism was asking the most basic questions about how this comeback diverged from Joni’s earlier career, an omission that left many of us uneasy.

As a writer, I often ask, what’s not being covered or said? And then do it. So I wrote a kind of Socratic dialogue with myself about Joni’s comeback in which I asked those questions, penetrating ever deeper into my resistance until I eventually arrived at the comeback’s value and meaning.

The post was widely read, discussed, and appreciated. Many readers said I’d articulated what they’d been feeling themselves. Most feedback was positive.

I’d expected some criticism and misunderstanding. It came. The Socratic Q&A form was dissed in certain quarters. A few fans took issue with my characterization of the Gorge performance as a greatest hits show. Fair enough. Other criticism grew more vicious. Yet even when a Joni fan group discussion degenerated into ad hominem character attacks, I remained philosophical. Waging holy wars for any departure from zealous agreement with one’s tribe is the online way.

When I made a full accounting of the post’s response, though, a sobering truth emerged: After reading my Socratic Joni Q&A post, more people were moved to reach out with a suggestion that I off myself than were moved to become paying subscribers.

Yes, the post generated more suicide recommendations than new paid subscriptions—and the suicide tips came with no offer of a kill fee, either.

Dark humor aside, this statistic discouraged me.

“But everyone was reading and talking about it and you shifted the discourse!” a friend attested. “Your piece made an impact.”

Whatever my Socratic Joni Q&A post may have done for the discourse, I was worried about further online harassment and the sustainability of my Substack and writing career.

I started having trouble sleeping. Not the usual trouble of waking after too few hours of sleep, but the trouble of never sleeping at all.

The BBC emailed that they’d enjoyed the Socratic Joni Q&A post and requested an interview, which I declined. I was reluctant to make a public appearance when I was separated from my kid, who was at camp. Given the viciousness of the online response, the wrong on-air interview comment might move some unhinged fan to harm my family in the real world.

Of course, my anxiety was not only about this episode of online harassment for low pay but also the general state of the culture and my prospects in it.

Ongoing media consolidation has narrowed the range of voices in journalism. This contraction creates a winner-take-all culture that rewards a small handful of mainstream perspectives. Most GenXers with one of the few remaining platforms in journalism, arts, and culture are normcoring as hard as they can, eager to hold onto positions that might see them to the finish line, send their kids to college, and enable retirement. If I still had such a position or, indeed, any chance of being able to send my kid to college or of one day retiring myself, I might be clinging to the dead center, too.

Mainstream media looks more and more like a religion to which I don’t belong. Remember when you were a kid and went to church with a friend’s family? As an outsider, it was easy to see the cultural construction of norms and beliefs. After a childhood friend once went to mass with my family, she said, “All that reciting and kneeling and standing is why you Catholics think the weird things you do.”

From where I sit, arts and culture journalism looks increasingly conservative, recoiling from difference of opinion, sticking to the most basic interview and review formats, and retreating into nostalgia and pop triumphalism. As my experience with the Socratic Joni Q&A post showed, discourse can be so homogeneous and dogmatic that someone merely posing questions on their way to embracing a mainstream view is heretical enough to stoke the harshest character condemnation of all: Off yourself.

“Why yes, I AM a writer.” Cartoon by Ellis Rosen

Along with consolidation’s homogeneity of perspective, other forces are creating angst for writers. When once-successful journalist friends now call me with doubts about their careers, Artificial Intelligence (AI) comes up as frequently as anything. Its recent proliferation has everyone on edge.

At a dental cleaning last week, my dentist told me ChatGPT had written some clear and concise orders for a patient. Fantastic, I said, and meant it. If only technical writing were AI’s primary use.

A book coaching client recently told me he was doing nonfiction writing research with ChatGPT. When I expressed concern about its accuracy, he said, “But ChatGPT is just another conversation partner for my writing, like talking with you.”

AI, create an image of my book coaching income swirling down the drain.

AI’s existential threat to writers has everyone wondering about the future of our field. The other day, my 11-year-old son came to my writing desk and announced, “Mom, I have a Substack idea for you.”

To paraphrase my kid’s idea: He recommended that I create a fictional character to dramatize writers’ general malaise about AI. The Hollywood writers’ strike would mean more to the public, he explained, if people could see writers as relatably miserable characters. But funny characters, too.

“This sounds more like a TikTok series,” I joked.

“Mom, I hear you giving writer friends advice on the phone,” he said. “Maybe if you create this writer character you can give yourself the advice you need.”

His idea of sharing the writer’s less-than-stellar present reality didn’t inspire a fictional character, but it did inspire this post about my recent challenges, which is my most honest and revealing Substack to date.

Now here’s me giving myself the advice I need. Others may need to hear it as well.

We all have our blind spots. It can be especially hard for people from poor, rural backgrounds who once found success to accept later career realities. That’s my weakness. After we’ve bucked the socioeconomic odds, we believe we can and should buck them forever, even when the odds grow absurdly long. Exceptionalism is a motherfucker. So is merit.

The truth: The consolidation of media power and emergence of AI now combine to make earning a living as a writer nearly impossible, or only possible with willful suppression of reality, 15-hour workdays, and crippling anxiety. Yes, exceptions exist. They are few.

Substack promised a solution but now looks like a viable financial model for only a lucky few (again with the lucky few), most of whom start with a large platform. “How I Write the Best Substack in the World” posted my fellow jazz enthusiast Kareem Abdul-Jabbar recently. Kareem’s Substack is indeed one of the best in the world, the product of a sharp mind, engaged heart, and committed character. Yet for all the considerable merits of Kareem’s writing, his Substack also flourishes on his celebrity.

Substack perhaps did have a moment when non-notables could break through. Then, as with podcasting, the Substack market was saturated. Attracting a critical mass of paid subscribers now usually requires both excellence and an established platform—celebrity, a giant social media following, etc.

Besides, we all have subscription fatigue. The paid subscription model has subsumed not only media but everything from food to hair dye. Unsubscribing from anything feels liberating these days. As much as we might want to support individual writers, paying a single rate for the New York Times’ hundreds of contributors is cheaper and more convenient than ponying up for scores of disparate newsletters.

I’m 50, which means it’s late, but not too late. Given the dim prospects for writing’s general future, my best course is to get a day job that has nothing to do with writing.

I’ve also found support from Pen America for any abuse that comes with writing against the mainstream. I’ll continue to lean on friends’ humor and sympathy for the relatively mild mockery that all writing invites. Including this post.

With a real job elsewhere and support to handle online abuse, I can keep Substacking my alternative, idiosyncratic, and sometimes contrarian perspectives with neither hope of financial reward nor fear of online mobs.

Also, I’ll now offer a half-price subscription rate to the cruelest online haters.

But seriously. We must keep writing with our genuine voices and perceptions. Because many of our ideas aren’t represented in the shallows and narrows of today’s media, and because outlier writing sometimes represents what a silent majority have been thinking all along.

If nothing else, we have to keep giving AI fresh material, right?

Maybe I’ll find a paying readership here eventually. Payment will remain an option, and I’ll remain grateful for every paid subscriber. But I can’t hope for it. I’ll write what I want, what I must, and what I can.

Years ago, I was discussing arts and culture with my dear departed friend Tom Terrell.

“Do you know how different growing up on that Kansas farm makes you as a thinker and writer in New York?” Tom said. “Don’t ever lose that.”

We all have some difference to preserve and share. I was scared into not sharing mine this summer. It won’t happen again.

Next post: Socioeconomic issues in arts & culture, including some serious dish on MFA programs and the children of famous writers. If they thought I was dissident before, wait until they read me beyond hope and fear.