Joining the writing 5%
Grinding it out, week by week
A nice feature of writing on Substack is that I can set a writing goal (such as, publishing weekly) and get email reinforcement for that goal. Each week that I successfully publish an item, I get an e-mail from Substack, congratulating me for meeting my goal. Along with the congratulations, there’s also a summary of how many weeks in a row I've published, and what fraction of writers are unable to hit that number.
For example, I was told that publishing for 32 weeks in a row was better than 92% of writers. The next week I was told that publishing for 33 weeks in a row was better than 93% of writers. Then my progress stalled out. I had the repeated experience of being told that I was doing better than 93% of writers. It wasn't until I reached 40 weeks that I was told that I was doing better than 94% of writers.
Part of what's happening is that as I've gone on longer, I'm increasingly competing with other writers who are as regular and/or as tenacious as I am. Intellectually, I didn't really expect that it would keep going up 1% each week indefinitely – after all, when you hit 93% there's only 6% left (I nearly wrote 7% there, but of course I can’t logically expect that I could ever get a note from Substack saying that I had done better than 100% of writers. It seems like 99% is the best I could anticipate.) Still, I must admit that I had an odd sense of disappointment when each week after 33 I would get my congratulation note and it would still say 93%.
I didn't know in advance that at 40 weeks I would get my reward and see the counter tick up to 94%. And now that I'm doing better than 94%, I have no idea how long I will have to keep going before I'm doing better than 95%, or if I will ever reach that next level. For one thing, It’s hard to know whether something will develop in the meantime so that I am no longer writing every week. I assume that most of what ends a writer’s streak after 40 weeks is just random problems that develop in their life, although I also won’t be surprised if it turns out that a lot of people stop after 52 weeks.
Another part of the congratulation email is a little out of sync with my writing reality: it urges me to “keep my streak, and start your next draft.” At one level this is just a classic web come-on to “use more of our product” – in this message, “start your next draft” is a hyperlink to the editor in Substack I could use to write another post. It’s not that there is anything exactly wrong with the suggestion, but it does imply a much more linear process (start writing at the beginning of the week, publish at the end of the week) than what I find myself doing. I feel confident that if I actually tried to write that way, there would have been some week early on where the draft just didn’t come together in time and I wouldn’t meet the weekly deadline.
The only way that I can succeed in publishing every week is by having a large inventory of partial drafts. Some of those feel pretty close to being done, while others are just a few paragraphs that seemed interesting at the time but now are languishing, waiting for me to either combine them with another fragment or find something more to say about that topic.
My first draft is typically dictated, which helps save wear and tear on my hands. (I continue to be impressed by how well dictation works in Microsoft Word, although of course it has its glitches from time to time.) Cleaning up that first draft gives me a chance to revise and restructure, as well as appraising how much further I have to go. After that, it’s a somewhat random process that determines what gets picked up and worked on. Part of the challenge for all of this is that I am not a full-time writer. Perhaps if I were, the linear process would be more plausible. But I suspect that I would still work the same way even if I didn’t have full-time employment responsibilities occupying much of my time.
Length of one’s weekly writing streak is obviously a shallow figure of merit. It often seems like I should care more about writing well than about writing regularly. But those two issues are not as easily separated as one might think. A widespread problem among writers is some form of block or near-block – just the general experience that almost anything in life seems more interesting and important than sitting down and writing. There is an entire book about that phenomenon, called The War of Art, which I highly recommend to any creative folks who don’t already know it. The weekly nag and weekly reward from Substack are quite effective at overcoming that resistance, and prompting me to come up with something every week. But apparently their utility is not universal, since they work better for me than for 94% of other writers.