Wild early drafts

My Substack year in review

Unsplash+ / Natalia Blauth

One of the best editors I’ve ever worked with once told me that every writer falls somewhere on a spectrum. On one end are the heavy self editors: they file a piece that is tight and measured, with all the superfluous (and potentially transcendent) stuff already taken out. On the other end is the stream-of-consciousness types: they file wild early drafts with great sentences and ideas mixed in with some rather mad and sloppy stuff that needs to be cut.

A good editor’s job is to figure out where a writer sits on the spectrum. The former may need encouragement to leave some so-called “mistakes” in early drafts so you can find the gems they are unwittingly cutting too soon. The latter needs you to rein them in a bit, to ask them for a structure or outline early in the writing process so the draft doesn’t get too bloated and unwieldy.

The longer I’ve been a writer, the more I trust myself to stay unwieldy in the early stages. These days, I know that if I’m sitting down to write, something is probably there, and I just have to keep my butt in the chair long enough to figure out what it is. Easier said than done, I’ll admit.

In the last 12 months, I published 19 pieces in this newsletter. By the standards of Substack best practice — and compared to most other writers with a similarly-sized subscriber base — that is very low. I didn’t even meet my own low-stakes goal of wanting to publish twice a month. Alas, I have to earn real money outside of this newsletter (want to work with me in 2025?) and I only have three days of childcare per week, so that is the best I could do.

But what I did manage to do in the last year is publish a handful of more ambitious pieces that were in the works for weeks or months, rather than just firing off posts when the mood struck me. Prioritizing time to work on these can feel almost comically hard amidst everything else. But as a person who often feels like I am drowning in the demands of whatever the fuck it means to be a “working mother” (iykyk), these slices of time can feel like the most meaningful part of my week.

Obviously, my last essay about collapse awareness was one such essay, the enthusiastic response to which really surprised me — I recommend spending some time reading the amazing comments. In addition, I wrote about my evolving relationship with wellness in the context of a broken world; how getting my son’s American citizenship made me confront my own American identity (I’m sad to say this aged well); and a series of posts about village-building, the response to which has genuinely changed how I am trying to live my life.

Once upon a time, I may have pitched these ideas to other publications, and allowed them to be shaped by that publication’s style, limitations, and audience. But here, I don’t have to do that. After more than a decade of conforming to the incentives and ever-changing business models of journalism — which, I’ve come to believe, primarily remunerates people in prestige — I have found myself in the terrifying and liberating position of saying whatever I want to say.

I’m the first to admit that, without the editorial infrastructure of traditional journalism, getting to a place where I am confident enough to hit send on these essays takes me a long time. After my wild early drafts, I come back at least a dozen times, in different moods and headspaces, to figure out what exactly I am doing. I cut a lot of words, and often entire essays. I ask writer friends and former colleagues for their feedback (my husband Dan also edits every one, shout out to him because he’s great at it). The whole process is incredibly inefficient and often somewhat panic-stricken.

But the beauty is that the pieces I put the most care and time into tend to perform well in terms of numbers and engagement. I almost can’t believe that I get to say that, because it certainly wasn’t always my experience when I was a journalist. While there is a lot of discourse about the growth of lifestyle “content” and influencer-type writing that does well on Substack, that has just not been my experience in the last year. You all want to read the good stuff.

There are a lot of different ways to be on this platform. I do not begrudge the people making $100K from gift guides or churning out multiple posts a week. Honestly, good for them! Indeed, as my newsletter has grown to nearly 11,500 subscribers in the last year, I too have felt enticed by the collapse-adjacent ideas of growth, metrics, and money that come with trying to succeed on any investment-backed internet platform.

I manage to avoid that temptation simply because I know where it leads for me: burnout! death to my creativity! eye twitches and insomnia! But the fact remains that having a bigger audience means I have to be even more intentional about what I am trying to achieve here.

Like yours, my life is full of constraints: the amount of money I need to earn; the amount of time I have; the amount of times per month my kid gets sick and misses childcare; the ever-expanding list of boring responsibilities and demands that seems to replenish with each passing week.

I also feel totally overwhelmed by the amount of information, news, discourse, and memes online. I have come to view a lot of bad online behavior — cancel culture, polarization, chronically posting, reactive opinions and takes — as symptoms of the emotional dysregulation and mental anguish that is so widespread in our culture. The last thing I want to do with this newsletter is to add to all that, to contribute to what has been called the “intellectual obesity” of our modern age.

So in some way, my underachievement here this year is a kind of achievement in itself, because I’ve done exactly what I want to do, and nothing more. I don’t hit send to meet an arbitrary posting goal. I could probably earn more money by writing more, by weighing in on trending news events, and by cleverly using paywall cliff-hangers to convert more readers. But then the whole tenor of the thing would feel different, and I think you all would notice that. My nervous system certainly would.

In her elegant and concise handbook on writing, Steering the Craft, Ursula K. Le Guin wrote, “To make something well is to give yourself to it, to seek wholeness, to follow spirit. To learn to make something well can take your whole life. It’s worth it.”

To seek wholeness, to follow spirit. When I get it right, that’s what it can feel like I’m doing here. When I can ignore the calls to optimize, grow, pivot, or expand — video! podcasts! chat! influencing! meetups! — and just focus on getting better at the thing I’ve been doing for nearly 20 years now.

It’s a state of being that I wish for everyone to experience, via writing or any other pursuit. Realizing that this is available to you — even if it’s just in a small, quiet corner of your life — is a kind of invitation. To figure out how to make a contribution to the world that feels both authentic and well within your human limits. To participate in an energetic exchange that isn’t predicated on burnout or a ceaseless expectation of more. One that feels firmly rooted Here, in the parlance of my last post.

It’s taken me years to build anything close to this, so I know it’s a precious thing. And it’s one that the subscribers of this newsletter participated in this year with their support, shares, comments, reading time, and especially voluntary paid subscriptions. In the context of my own small life, that exchange feels enormous.

So thank you for being here, and see you next year.

Things I enjoyed reading

• According to a couple’s therapist, the conflict between couples isn’t that different from the the conflict across the political divide. [NY Times gift link]

• A first-hand account of homelessness in America. This is an extraordinary piece of writing. [Esquire]

• “I’ve been giving grace to strangers on the internet for years in the wake of their cancelation, but I couldn’t give just a smidge of that understanding to myself?”

  Mari Andrew
  with a lesson most of us need to learn (and re-learn). [Out of the Blue]

• On the evolving ethics of saving the world’s tiniest, most premature babies. [The Guardian]

• I so enjoyed this profile of the female director Marielle Heller, whose new film, Nightbitch, is described as “a comedy for women, but a horror movie for men.” I loved the novel it’s based on and can’t wait to see it. [New Yorker]

• I love these very usable tips from

  Jenny Xie
  on how to stop buying clothes you don’t need or, as she writes, “untangling the web of desires that power a constant yearning to shop.” [Ode]

Things I enjoyed listening to

• It’s been a long time (five years?) since I’ve listened to an investigative narrative podcast series that’s totally gripping without feeling tabloid-y or icky. Hysterical by Dan Taberski (who also made Missing Richard Simmons) is just that. [Hysterical]

• “Healing should not be seen as an individual process, it should be seen as a social process.” Gabor Mate on Mel Robbins’ podcast articulates the problem at the core of so many of our modern afflictions. [Mel Robbins Podcast]

Word soup

“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.” —James Baldwin

“The tiny baby steps, false starts, and periods of staring off into space being totally fucking unproductive aren’t just something to endure: they’re the things that add up, eventually, to how we change our lives.” —Emily McDowell

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