100 Articles — Did I Learn Anything?

I think so; I’ll tell you and you can tell me what you think

Starting out on a new piece recently, I realised that, lo and behold, I had clocked up 99 pieces on this platform. I hadn’t been actively counting but knew I was close enough to the century. I thought it fitting to mark the milestone with a small meditation on my journey thus far, and so I’ve put the other article on hold to offer you my thoughts and musings regarding my experience.

I’ve racked up 750 minutes of material here (and I did have to count that, which was, as you can imagine, a little laborious) and if what I’ve gleaned isn’t useful to anyone reading this, I hope it will at the very least make for a mildly mirthful few minutes of mental mastication.

If I can help anyone to bypass one or two of the issues I’ve encountered and/or give writers new to the site an ounce more confidence in sticking to their guns and writing about whatever the hell they want to write about, I’ll be more than happy.

Do what thou wilt

The wickedest man in this weird world of ours, Aleister Crowley, and his version of Kant’s categorical imperative — ‘do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law’ — epitomises how I’ve come to think one should, for the most part, write.

At first glance, the universal maxim that sits at the heart of Thelema (the religion Crowley founded) sounds like it endorses anything whatsoever, urging one towards any abomination that can be dreamed up by the boundless abyss of the baser parts of our imaginations. And, it is true, Crowley himself was an inveterate wretch in many aspects of his life.

Yet the central Thelemic Law is an exhortation to discover one’s true will and bring this in line with the harmony of the cosmic order. This harmonisation with the cosmos is essential because, for Crowley, no one’s true authentic self can necessitate the subjugation of another’s. That Crowley did not live according to this himself is a testament to his own flaws and failings and does not invalidate the law itself.

There are legions of writers who will tell you what you should and shouldn’t do to be successful. They will tell you what your will should be. This advice may coincide with what’s in your head and your heart and it may not, but it matters not at all because as long as you’re in line with the cosmic order, meaning not being hateful, horrible, cruel, and callous, then what you write about and how you do it is for you to decide and discover yourself.

Do what thou wilt: write about whatever you please in whatever way you wish, as long as you’re not being an asshole without good reason.

Folks will pillory short-form and praise long-form. Folks will praise short-form and pillory long-form. Folks will say you need infographics. Folks will say there should only be a certain number of words in your titles. Folks will say thought is best digested when it comes wrapped in single-sentence paragraphs. Folks will say the opposite. Folks will say you should niche down. Others will say you shouldn’t. Folks will say SEO optimisation is indispensable. Folks will say it’s immaterial.

There are many paths to success, and what that looks like is defined by you. Look at the most successful writers on any platform and in traditional writing; do they have much in common apart from the singular fact that they are successful? Nope, not really, apart from presenting the world with a quality product (and that’s not even true given the ubiquity of so much mediocrity).

Do what thou wilt: write about whatever you please in whatever way you wish, as long as you’re not being an asshole without good reason.

Variety is the spice of life

It is inevitable that you will gravitate towards certain themes and topics and will develop a penchant for certain structures and styles. It is not possible for a single human to be everything, everywhere all at once, for this would be the reign of pure chaos.

I write mostly long form. I write mostly about the big burning issues in politics, society, and culture, which means serious non-fiction pieces. I have also discovered the magic number for my work to be ten — 10-minute articles. This allows me sufficient time to dig down into the matter, let it open its lungs, breathe deeply and fill its alveoli, and, at the same time, engage the sort of reader that reads my work, offering enough depth and detail without dragging them down into something that’s best delivered in a book.

But poetry and fiction are my first loves, and despite the lamentable state of affairs that these don’t tend to do well, it was simply impossible to exclude them. Writing fiction and non-fiction are worlds apart and the former exercises fundamentally different parts of my mind than the latter. The exact same goes for poetry, which is very much its own unique species.

Were I to exclude poetry and fiction, it just wouldn’t be a real representation of who I am and what I do. I am a writer of fiction and non-fiction; that’s who I am and who I want to be.

But that was also a bit boring. So, I threw in some listicles. They’re fun to write and you can rifle through them without the same sort of tedium and taxation that other, more serious formats, involve. Not that you can’t write a serious listicle or reinterpret the genre as is your wont. You can, and you can make them longer too. Just remember that just as the writer can rifle through writing them, so too can the reader rifle through reading them; for this reason, it is my experience that they don’t pay well.

I also plan to branch out into a few other short-form formats and a few multi-part longer pieces. For me, writing the same sort of stuff ad infinitum gets boring, doesn’t help me grow and develop as an author and thinker, and simply doesn’t showcase what I’m about and who I want to be. I suspect many of my readers like the variety too.

If niching down is your thing or a single style or format suits you best, do what thou wilt! But I suspect for many, new recipes, new ingredients, new techniques, and continually tasting what you have to offer, whilst maintaining consistently high standards, will make you a better cook, will make your fare more nourishing and delectable, and make your restaurant more popular.

Count calories but don’t overdo it

As with health and fitness, it is good to have a fair idea of stats and data, and, as with health and fitness, it’s more about generally going in the right direction rather than knowing the details of every day or even week down to the nth degree.

Stats and metrics reveal a great deal, but given just how much they get tweaked and just how closed the inner workings of operations are, they elucidate and infuriate at equal turns.

Lastly, if you think there is an anomaly, you’re right, and that anomaly is you.

There are three things I’ve learned to never forget:

• Firstly, there is almost always a disconnect, sometimes a gulf, between how the medicine is supposed to work on the bottle and how it works in reality.
• Secondly, we live in the land of the eternal present and whatever is at this very moment will be presented as everything working to a perfect metronome.
• Lastly, if you think there is an anomaly, you’re right, and that anomaly is you. This is the only explanation ever given.

As such, I’ve learned to set my expectations lower than I used to. I’ve got used to ever-present tweakery and non-transparencery. And I’ve got used to checking the stats but understanding they can and are intended to be just like soft porn; only so much skin will ever be shown.

And so, I think one should be checking what’s in their food and monitoring the calories, but don’t be surprised if you pile on the pounds for a week or two only to become an emaciated mass of skin and bones for the next month despite what the stats seem to suggest.

Hone your craft but stick to your guns

I started out writing long pieces. You might think my present pieces long. They were a lot longer in the past.

Some were long but still within the realms of normality.

And some were very much a labour of love about things I care about deeply but ended up absurdly long.

The longest is the culmination of my series on suicide; a whopping 34 minutes. It has 90 claps from 5 people. I may mine the series and repackage it at some point, but no bones about it, this sort of writing is best at home in books.

Notwithstanding my forays into the world of megafauna that few have the patience to view in their entirety, long form is what I’m best at and where the themes I talk about are best unfurled in the manner in which I unfurl them.

For some of my articles, cutting them off at the six, seven, or even eight-minute mark would feel like some form of castration and leave me with a big bag of ifs, howevers, buts, and, and althoughs.

Honing, pruning, adapting, and tinkering were all very much required, but ultimately the essence of what I do is just kind of instinctual for me and remains the same.

My motto here would be to hack away at what just doesn’t work, hone and continue to hone, polish, prune, and repeat, but ultimately, if you are made a certain way, go with it; that’s probably just who you are.

Don’t give them a pigsty for they make take you for a pig, and not the smooth, sophisticated, sober-minded and civilised thinker and writer that you are.

I have learned to bring in pull-out quotes and employ italics and other such useful things because they make everything so much more readable. Non-fiction is all about the delivery of information, hopefully in a pleasing form, and that means readability and accessibility.

Ever gone into a messy room with things all over the place to find something? Not a pleasant experience. Don’t make your readers dig about for what you’re saying; shock, surprise, astound, tantalise by all means — and beauty and brilliance are their own rewards up to a point — but provide your readers with a well-organised room where they can find and assess what you want them to find and assess. Don’t give them a pigsty for they make take you for a pig, and not the smooth, sophisticated, sober-minded and civilised thinker and writer that you are.

Be your own master and no one’s slave

It is all too easy to slip into false consciousness writing on an online platform. This was Marx’s term for the condition where one consciousness is subjugated by another and comes to perceive itself and the world around it through the prism of the dominant consciousness, with its values and interests in ascendency.

Depending on the platform in question, the rules of the game will be different with different drivers, dynamics, and incentives, but, nonetheless, many start to perceive their work through the lens of the platform and see success on its terms.

I did this. I still do it a bit. We probably all do it a little.

You will hear folks talking about Substack money or YouTube money, or some other form of money that makes for a nice little alliterative one-two combination. And that’s cause 100 bucks can be a big deal when you earned 50 last month. It shows progress. It shows you’re on the up and up. It shows you’re moving in the right direction. But it’s still only one hundred bucks in the real world when the chips are down.

I’ll give one example and one analogy to demonstrate what I mean.

I write political/philosophical articles for the most part that drag in a whole host of bits and pieces. My main goal, excluding fiction, is to publish in prestigious political magazines and journals on a regular basis and maybe even write some books.

For that, you need to send out a veritable deluge of articles, scatter-bombing each and every publication you deem worthy of your glorious cogitations in sight.

Alas, woe betide my dreams of grandeur, I stopped doing this for close to a year, putting all my effort into the wooing of the mercurial gods of online platforms.

I had started to see both my writing and success through a lens created by someone else, in terms set by someone else, to their benefit and to my detriment. I will do this no longer and I very strongly advise you to not do it either.

The tomfoolery and chicanery of the last few months gave me a great big kick up the arse, and now I’m sending the multiple pieces I have compiled out to multiple outlets. (As a small aside, this is the greatest benefit that I’ve derived from writing on online platforms — the motivation to create a large body of work — of which I will write more elsewhere.)

The analogy:

Foreign languages are not taught well across the world. Few are the students who emerge from secondary education really able to communicate in the languages they study.

This is for a number of reasons, chief among them, the way they are taught, which is as if the best method to acquire a language is by building up to one massive exam. This stands in diametric contravention to how they should be taught: continuous daily engagement, repetition, and immersion, something akin to training and exercise. This is a conversation for another day, however, and one which I intend to write about.

I studied Irish at school for 14 years; I cannot communicate in it at all.

I studied Russian on my own and with language teachers for 10–12 years before becoming fluent. I still have many years to go and much work before I would consider myself approaching anything like a nativish level, nonetheless, the point is clear.

At schools around the world, exams are carbon-copy proxies for the language itself.

Did well in the exam? Yes. Well, you are a high-level communicator in that language.

And we all know that is complete bollocks.

I got average marks in my final Irish exam at the age of 18. I was never able to communicate in that language, be it in written or spoken Irish, bar a few smatterings of the most prosaic phrases with no ability to respond extemporaneously.

My point is: don’t let the proxy of platform success stand in as a carbon copy for what success means to you in the big scheme of things. Don’t fall into the trap I fell into. Writing on a platform is, for almost all, just a stepping stone, don’t let it become the path itself.

Thank you so much for your time. As always, I look forward to chatting in the comments.