The Grasshopper Sunday Edition: Shout Out to Substacks I Read
Send a little reader love their way
First, the big one. Heather Cox Richardson publishes everyday, seven days a week, and has millions of subscribers. Her Letters From an American are journalistic takes on current events, meticulously researched (she has a staff) and addressing unfolding events that are critical to our country.
The difference between her and mainstream media journalism is that she is a historian, not a journalist, an expert in the Civil War period and the Reconstruction, the most calamitous period in American history after the Revolution.
She believes we are in a similar time, a time when our democracy hangs by a thread. Every American should read it.
Booker Prize winning author George Saunders (Lincoln in the Bardo) writes Story Club, a substack about writing, specifically writing fiction. In addition to his writing, Saunders is renowned for his teaching, with his short story courses at Syracuse University among the most revered experiences any writer could aspire to. Very few get in.
Story Club gets you in. If you write, you will learn and be entertained.
Kana Chan’s Tending Gardens is not famous like the above examples. She is a young woman, an American, who is living in a rural village in Japan. Her newsletter, which is not on a regular schedule, records day to day life. I find it both charming and meditative, a treat when it shows up in my inbox.
Same Day, Different Humans is an entirely different animal. David Martin explores the unfolding impact of AI on society and the environment by chronicling new developments weekly, and they are startling. It’s a record of a change most of us don’t see but that is materially affecting our lives on a daily basis.
A lot of my paid writing is about climate and its effects on us on a global and personal level. The personal level is brought into focus by Minimal Viable Planet, a quirky but informed letter that combines entertaining writing with toons to tell us how warming is hitting a woman and her family and neighbors in Toronto.
I don’t subscribe to many substacks (not enough bandwidth!) but these are always a pleasure to see in my mail. Support your local/global writers. They help us remember we are all humans on a small planet.
Note, several of these have paywalls for some content. Writers need to make a living like everyone else!
“MURAKAMI: I’ve hardly ever experienced inspiration. I merely write down what comes into my mind at the moment. “What’s coming next?” I wonder, and the story develops from there naturally. Just ideas that come to me. I would like to experience inspiration sometime, like a light bulb coming on over my head.”
From an interview with Haruki Murakami in Interview Magazine
What’s more important, process or result?
You probably know which I favor.
Did you ever notice that when interviewed, many Hollywood superstars say they never watch their films? The common answer is ‘I can’t stand to see me acting’ or the idea that they can only see where they could have done better.
This is a common thread among artists. We move on. As a former musician and producer I can’t remember the last time I listened to anything that I had worked on. After I got rid of all my CDs when streaming became a thing, I kept a box of those I had played on or produced, mostly regional bands, but it is in a storage room and will stay there.
I don’t even have a CD player anymore.
So, my answer is process. When I think about a novel or book in my past I think about what I wrestled with while writing it. For one nonfiction book from years ago on selling, my only memory is that I procrastinated and ended up writing it in one month to hit a publishing deadline.
That was twenty-five years ago. A few years ago I was doing contract marketing work with a client and they were considering hiring a sales training company. The company gave them a book they had written to show their expertise. It was handed off to me to assess.
Like most of that stuff, it was crap. But it got me wondering whether the thing I’d written way back then on the topic was any good. I really did not remember and did not own a copy so I went online and bought a used copy (it’s been out of print for ages).
I skimmed through it and realized it was much better than I thought it would be, given my rush job to cover my own procrastination.
This was a rare instance of looking backward.
We don’t write to point to our past work and bask in its glory. When I think about my first novel, I think about where I struggled to get things right and where the story surprised me.
In other words, I remember the learning process I went through.
Writing takes place in two places. Real time, as you do the actual writing, and somewhere in the subconscious where you do the actual creating. The latter is what you might reflect on later. But you seldom think about the finished work, at least I don’t, if it really is finished in my mind.
My definition of finished is that it is no longer in my hands. It has gone out into the world. There is a story, probably apocryphal, that a couple had a major Picasso painting he had given them thirty years earlier. It was a famous piece, loaned over the years to galleries and museums around the globe and worth millions.
One summer Picasso was staying with them.They awoke one morning and, to their horror, Picasso had his brushes out and was changing something on the painting. When confronted about why he would do something like that he simply said, “I could see how I could do it now. Back then I didn't quite get it right.”
Great story, probably not true, but I hope it is.
Sunday Editions appear most weeks. I skipped last weekend but rolled the content into my regular Wednesday issue, which is on a schedule (I need deadlines like everyone else). M
The following piece appeared earlier this week on Medium where it was mostly ignored. But I have to write one of these rants every few months about the low quality garbage many ‘writers’ publish there in hopes of riches.
This is Not a Side Hustle, This is My Hustle
And I own it. So should you.
I’m going to try and keep this brief. After thirty years of being a professional writer, when asked what I do for a living, my answer is ‘I’m a writer’. It’s an honest answer. I don’t do it as a sideline, while having a ‘real job’. I’ve had a string of real jobs that paid real money.
And most of them required my writing skills.
I hate the phrase ‘side hustle’ and I hate the constant fantasy articles here about how to find one, that little thing you do on the side to make the big bucks. But I’m going to emulate them and offer a little secret to succeeding here:
Not one of the top writers here thinks of it as a side hustle. You don’t get to 10k or 100k followers without busting your butt writing about things that you are passionate to the core about.
My readers know I write about controversial subjects like politics, climate, and current global events. My articles are passionate observations and opinions, and I own them. I could not do this daily if I was holding down one of those great jobs I have had in the past.
Nor could I write a growing newsletter on top of my political writing. I had to go full in. And I love every minute of it. This morning one of my pieces is going viral. It is already my biggest thing yet, and it is not even noon EDT. That is extremely exciting but…there was not one trick or gimmick that made it happen. Zero, nada.
It just happened to resonate with this moment. Right place, right time. But to get there you have to be in the game and in it full time. The reality is that in anything you pursue, overnight success takes years.
I’ve published almost 800 articles here over the past three years. I’ll hit that number later this week. My newsletter, which launched in April of this year, totals over 50,000 words of writing about writing and being a creator. I never planned to write a book’s worth of that, I did it because it interests me.
And that is the only reason you should be in this game. If something passionately interests you, it will interest other people. It’s that simple, and that hard.
Make it your hustle, not your side hustle.
This was a long one, 1551 words. I had a story go viral this week and as a result I have added many new subscribers here. Welcome. It’s a lovely mild fall weekend here and I’m finishing this up on a Friday so I can enjoy it! M