The Grasshopper Sunday Edition, May 7, 2023: Luminous Beings Are We

It’s a gift we are not appreciating

Photo by Alexander Grey on Unsplash

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about magic in writing. No, not wizards or witches. The other stuff, less defineable, more strange. Wizard magic in fantasy always seemed to me to be the sign of lazy writing, just an easy way to fix or get out of a situation.

The exception to this that comes to mind would be J.R.R. Tolkien, decidedly not a lazy writer (the guy invented whole languages as background for his stories). In The Lord of the Rings, Gandalf is always reluctant to use magic and you get the impression that it takes a lot out of him. But I digress.

Earlier today I opened a new Doc and wrote this sentence:

The sound of boredom is loud, only eclipsed by the sound of loneliness.

I had been walking and it came into my head and I thought it might be a good opening sentence for a new story. But I have no idea what that story might be. Opening lines are a lot harder to get right than you might think and they are where you set the tone for the entire tale, which if you think about it is pretty magical when they work.

I rewrote the first paragraph of my first novel The Rememberers about ten times and I’m still not certain it works the way I wanted it to. I like to think I did better with the second novel but it could not have been more different in its subject matter.

Brief apology: I realize my readers can’t read my novels because they are unpublished. I’m working on changing that, but it’s a bit bigger project than I thought it would be.

So, for me, magic in writing does not involve waving wands or making incantations. It’s when you make that connection between your deep self and the page. I’ll let that settle in for a bit.

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“Instant gratification takes too long.”

~ Carrie Fisher

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Substack, the platform this newsletter is built on, has been rolling out a lot of new features lately, which is great except they seem to be pretty buggy. It’s a bit frustrating because I have something I want to do with one of them that doesn’t seem to be working at all. 

Part of my subject matter, writing online, is dealing with the quirks of the two platforms I write for, Medium and here. Both work quite well most of the time, but I don’t like making excuses when they don’t. I want the reader experience to be as seamless as possible, and it mostly is, but you have to expect a hiccup once in a while.

Which gets me to a topic I don’t touch on enough, editing. More accurately, self-editing, because online writing typically doesn’t have the benefit of outside professional editors. I try hard to get things right because when I don’t people see things like typos that disturb them enough to have them take time to comment on them.

I always welcome those corrections because with online writing you can revise at any time, but it bugs me when I miss them. Worse than typos is when I get my facts wrong, especially in my opinion pieces. I’ve recently written about a disturbing new fact we are dealing with: that with AI writers like ChatGPT, it is getting harder and harder to know what is true and what is not. One clue may be those typos and factual errors.

I don’t want readers to think my work is generated by an algorithm and it will be a big problem in the future. We are already hearing about AI-generated writing starting to flood the platforms with stuff created just to build volume and make money. Not to mention political and social misinformation designed to divide and confuse.

This is going to make writing a much more difficult challenge and I can’t see any way around it. These bots can emulate unique style and voice to appear that the writing came from specific authors, while bypassing those authors.

It’s a real threat to my ability to make a living, but it goes far beyond that.

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Substack has a piece out today about writers, mostly journalists, who have been laid off and now make a living from their Substack newsletters. This reinforces an idea I have about the two classes of Substack writers, those who can actually make real money and those who struggle with that.

I’m in the latter category but have a leg up on many writers here because I leverage my following on Medium, currently around 6000 followers. But I’m finding getting readers to upgrade to a paid subscription is tough, which does not surprise me in the least.

Substack regularly publishes these encouraging articles about success here and sends them out to their writers. I appreciate it but I also don’t want to gild the lily. For most of us this is no fast path to financial independence. It would take thousands of paid subs to amount to anything more than a side hustle that buys the coffee or an occasional martini.

It’s not even buying dinner yet. Like most creators, asking for money is hard, though over the years I’ve gotten a lot better at it. And you have to if revenue is a serious goal. That’s just a fact of life. I’m continually amazed at the cost of things like housing and cars. The average car purchase in the US is something like $45k and in many areas, average homes can be in the upper six figures.

I honestly don’t know how people do it, especially if you have kids, which I do not. I suspect there is a lot more debt out there than most of us realize. One of the reasons I can eak out a living as a writer is a no kids, no car lifestyle. But I fully realize that is not an option for many Americans.

I’m a rarity in that I do not use credit. I only recently realized how unusual that is.

If you’re one of my readers from the 52 other countries my readers hail from, cars in America are pretty essential because this place is big and public transit sucks. In my mid-size metro, many people are literally afraid to ride the bus, which I doubt is really justifiable. But they took my bus line away a few years ago to save money.

I spend a small car payment a month on Uber and Instacart deliveries from a Wegmans grocery a few miles away. I do have a upscale gourmet bodega nearby that is actually called Bodega, that I go to in a pinch, though it is extremely expensive.

I’m writing about the money end of writing because it is a form of validation and you need a thick skin when that kind of validation is not forthcoming. But I know from my Medium experience that building up a following takes time and patience. I also understand why so many writers do it as a sideline while working elsewhere to pay the bills.

I made a choice during the Covid lockdown to focus on writing and making a living from it. I spent the first two years of the pandemic freelancing and slowly building my Medium following until I could pay the bills without freelancing. Then, a year ago, I learned how Substack works and started The Grasshopper as a more personal project that I thought might make me a few dollars.

Not there yet but working on it. 

Did you write today?

Martin

1258 words

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