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Three writing pitfalls I’ve experienced on Substack as a 20+ years editor and writer
Some tips on what to avoid
I hope you’re enjoying As I Was Saying with Poorna Bell. If you’ve liked the writing, it is worth knowing it’s entirely a reader-supported and funded publication. If you’d like it to support it, and have access to all posts and regular community chats, the best way to support is through a paid subscription. And you’d have my undying gratitude!
I’ve worked as a journalist for just over 21 years, and have been an author for seven of those, and despite all of that experience, writing is still something I continue to learn, grow and adapt around.
Although I have predominantly sharpened my skills in newsrooms, the last five years have been spent working freelance where I have had to create my own infrastructure, and be aware of blind spots and pitfalls without the beady eye of another editor, or the accountability of a team around me. Journalism, particularly newsroom journalism, is one of the most brutal industries – there are no soft learning curves and feedback is delivered with iron laced between the words – but it does mean you learn, and fast.
Freelancing for news outlets such as The Times, The Guardian and The Telegraph involves being given a brief and being answerable to an editor. On Substack however, where I have been since September 2023, there is none of that. This is the whole appeal: the ability to control your own editorial, to be as soft and flowing, or hard and hitting as you like with your prose. It has renewed my interest in writing in a way I didn’t think possible, because journalism had done such a number on my enjoyment of writing, due to paying terrible rates and the overall editorial agenda of trying to manipulate the maximum number of eyeballs on a page.
But, there is also a downside. Which is that barring reader feedback, there is almost no accountability around our writing, which can lead to some bad habits and blockers around what we write.
Here are my top three as I’ve experienced them:
Getting to the point (see also: word count)
When writing for a print newspaper or magazine, word count is critical because there is literally a finite amount of room on a page. One of my worst memories at News Corp was being forced to sit with the chief sub-editor while he barked at me for every extraneous, grammatically incorrect word. However when it comes to publishing online, there are no such limitations (unless we consider Substack’s email word count limit).
Although on average, it’s a rule of thumb to stick to 1,000 words for most essays unless they are a long read, I’ve found myself drifting into large word counts that are unwarranted. Long reads are often intensely researched and laborious to write because every paragraph needs to make a point or support the argument unfolding, in order to keep the reader engaged. (Especially when you consider online, we have the attention span of flies).
However, in the case of some pieces I write, I’ve noticed that I don’t get to my point until I’m about three or four paragraphs in. It’s fine if it’s a languorous colour piece, or I’m playing about with lyrical prose, but it’s not fine if the headline is promising something that isn’t being delivered until a lot further down the piece.
Trying to stitch two pieces into one
One of the most delightful things about Substack is feeling so EXCITED by everything I want to write but not having enough time to write about it in a week.
However, this surplus of ideas means that sometimes I try to clumsily stitch two pieces that don’t really belong together. I’ve noticed this in some of the other writing out there – the headline will promise one thing, the piece will start off with something completely different, and then will switch tracks halfway through to address the topic it’s supposed to be about.
One of the most critical roles of an editor is to notice these aberrations in how writing is stitched together, and whether or not it serves the overall storyline. And most writers (guilty as charged) err on the side of using too many words, or being so in love with the way we’ve crafted a sentence that it hurts to dispose of it.
In lieu of not having an editor, we need to edit ourselves with the clear-sightedness we would have upon reading someone else’s work. I’m not simply talking about grammatical mistakes, of which I make a ton, but more the appreciation of the work as a whole and being honest with ourselves about what needs to be cut.
Trying not to game the system in terms of content
When I switched tracks from working in print to digital, there was a different pressure system in terms of constantly observing web traffic, engagement and trying to game what would do best on the site. In some ways it was good to know which types of content resonated so this could be amplified, and in some cases it created bad habits of producing different iterations of the same content just to get clicks. In other words, chasing numbers versus focussing on creativity and quality.
While Substack gives a person freedom to write whatever they want, the social ecosystem on here creates those subtle pressures whether we realise it or not. For instance, when I joined, I noticed a lot of the content being shared was self-help, as well as articles on how to be more successful on Substack. What I didn’t see were the invisible strings of the network behind them – how people recommend each other and why, and how that in turn means content gets shared.
While I love Substack, it makes me laugh when people sermonise about how this is so much better than Instagram (the two things are not comparable in my opinion). The social network and the cliques are there – it’s just not as visible as in other places.
Ultimately, it’s about bringing it back to what you love doing, which is to write. It would be disingenuous to say being part of the network isn’t important – it is, but ultimately you have to have a rock solid relationship with your own writing first rather than altering it to solicit success. At the very beginning, I remember writing a few things to try and get more paid subscribers, and realised it was not the kind of thing I wanted to write. If I want to write about productivity, then I’ll write it but not because I’m stringing it to a hook in order to attract more readers.
One of the best examples of this is a post I wrote about women living alone. I wrote about it because it had been in my head, snatches of sentences demanding to be written. I had no idea it would go on to become my best performing piece with over 11K views and 800 likes.
There is no way of predicting it. Maybe I’ll write something else that might be just as successful, but I know the way forward is to not replicate it but to keep writing the things that matter to me, with little bits of beauty strung in between.
Do you have any tips you’d like to share?
I hope you’re enjoying As I Was Saying with Poorna Bell. If you’ve liked the writing, it is worth knowing it’s entirely a reader-supported and funded publication. If you’d like it to support it, and have access to all posts and regular community chats, the best way to support is through a paid subscription. And you’d have my undying gratitude!
Subscribe to As I Was Saying with Poorna Bell
Social commentary and essays from career to mental wellbeing, capturing the general WTF of life and topical news, by award-winning author, former HuffPost Exec editor and lifter of heavy weights, Poorna Bell.
This is such a useful post, thank you for writing it and being honest about your own work. I have been on here for a few months and with no writing experience I am just winging it. Witnessing the seasoned writers with huge followings championing each other reminds me of Instagram and I’m trying to fight the demoralising feeling I was relieved to escape. I have begun to think the only way through is it write more which is debilitating so thank you for your perspective. Substack is such a freeing space so 1000 words or thereabouts it is.
Always refreshing to read honest thoughts from experienced writers on what they make of Substack, so thanks for sharing this Poorna. As you say, it's naive to ignore that things get seen because others share them -which is the same mechanic at play in social media- and it is therefore not a stretch of the mind to understand why content on how to be successful on Substack gets a lot of love. I was a bit dispirited at the beginning by those posts and unsubscribed from a couple of people as soon as their content took a turn into that direction. I'm not here to become famous through my writing, but I do want to be able to log in without being bombarded with all the reasons I'm doing it wrong and I should focus on X,Y,Z metrics. No, sorry, I'm here to be creative and be inspired by other people who also have an equal cluelessness about the way they should be writing or publishing to be seen and simply enjoy sharing things that I would have never read otherwise. May eat my words shortly, but for the time being this is it.