Category: WritingCategory: Writing

Life should inform the writing on your website, your newsletter, your creative output.

This from Lyly Dhommar, from a recent Email Guidance exchange.

Uncle Seth aka Lord of Social media escape club, confirmed that yes, connections and actions in the real world are the way I should live now. Then, I’ll write about them if something happens, not the other way around.

Do all the things. Go to the shows. The art openings. The ice cream stands. The hikes. The book shops. Live in the world as much as you can withstand, read, draw, dance, and dream.

Then, when it’s time to write your newsletter, you’ll have a rich life to pull from.

I hear it all the time – “my inbox is overflowing, I can’t keep up,” which usually leads to the idea that your newsletter is going to get lost in the shuffle of your subscribers inbox.

I subscribe to a lot of newsletters. I’m drowning, too. But there are names that pop up in my Newsletter folder that I will absolutely read. Names that make me smile. Newsletters that I know I will read and get something from.

You can be that for someone else. Believe that.

If you’ve got four subscribers, 40, or 400 – there are a certain number of people that will make time for you, week in and week out. Not everyone, but a subset of your total subscriber count. That’s the way it works.

So don’t be dismayed by the numbers, the trends, whatever – celebrate the few people who love the work that you do.

If you’re a musician playing on stage and see several people walk out, you don’t stop and go, “Hey, here’s some pop tunes you’ll like!”

Seth Godin recently said:

“You might be able to get the folks in the back row to smile a bit if you play your hit song just like it is on the radio, but perhaps your objective is to please the real fans in the front row–by jamming on something new.”

Focus on the audience that stays.

The first song you write might not be your finest work. Nor your first sculpture, sonnet, play, or novel. But if you’re course-correcting at the behest of every audience member, you’re not making art, you’re doing color by numbers, trying to please the most people while excluding yourself.

Your direction matters most, so stick with it.

“Creativity is not something to hustle or to use.

Creativity is something to tend to, like you tend to a garden, and it in turn uses you in ways you couldn’t imagine.”

This from “This Is Drastically Changing My Creativity,” a post by Blake Roberts.

I’ve told two people this week (via my Email Guidance offering) to not set up a website. To not set up a webstore. To not start a newsletter.

These two people were still very much in the “figuring it out phase,” to which I stressed that maybe you don’t need to figure it out in public.

Not everyone wants to document the journey. It’s okay to go off and do your thing for a few months, or a few years.

Because what if you fully tend to your creative garden, without the distraction of sending a newsletter, posting on socials, or the dreaded “figuring out” your website?

I believe that if we immerse ourselves in the art, the practice, the work, that in a years time (or whatever feels right) you’ll already know what the newsletter is about.

And you’ll know exactly what sort of website you need.

A most gracious Michael Maupin wrote this tonight, after chatting with a stranger for a bit:

Live in the world, but your Substack (and online life) is a part of it. They feed each other. You can’t be online all the time.

OPEN UP. Git yer ass outside.

I only really know Michael via Substack, but we’ve talked once on the phone awhile ago. Online met offline, at least by way of actual conversation late one night.

Same as Michael’s conversation with someone at a closing eatery. Stories shared, and he got a new subscriber to his newsletter. It’s not all about “growing our audience,” of course, but it all takes place one person at a time, whether you’re trying to run a store front, sell a record, or live a good life.