A Question For Substack Writers: Where Were You Headed and Where Had You Been When You Joined This Platform?

Did it take some chutzpah to show up here? Or did you arrive effortlessly?

Lately, I’ve noticed more and more conversation about the pros and cons of writing on Substack. There’s no shortage of opinion or uncertainty.

While one writer demonstrates economic benefit, another argues it’s costing writers money in the long game. I imagine both are right, and that of the writers who come here looking for income, some will succeed where others will fail.

Beyond money, there’s the potential for community. Or for building one’s platform. Neither is without risk. Where friends are made, so too are enemies. Where platforms are built, a rope hangs overhead, waiting for the next victim of cancel culture.

As for me, I didn’t come here looking for money or community or engagement. You could say I showed up here with no planning. My impetus was purely physiological. It was a trauma response.

Let me take you back to the days of way back when, sometime in early March of this year, mere days before I joined Substack.

I was meeting with Rachel, my critique partner, over Facetime, as I’m in Florida and she’s a west coast girl. We weren’t discussing our pages. We were procrastinating. We were suffering from resistance.

In the interest of maintaining my friendship with Rachel, let me make clear that my analysis of our mutual resistance is my own. It’s quite possible that Rachel has an entirely different opinion about all our circumnavigating. I’ll need to ask her. She’s a psychotherapist and I’m a former psychotherapist, so my prediction is that she’ll agree. (Resistance is a big therapy topic, in case you don’t know or are reluctant to learn.)

In any case, Rachel and I were feigning productivity by discussing the literary community at large.

“So,” Rachel said, “What are we doing about this Substack thing?”

I don’t remember if she leaned toward her computer screen or if I clicked the window to enlarge her image, but suddenly, she seemed much closer. My reflexes kicked in. I pushed my feet against the floor, causing the chair to roll backwards. The word itself—Substack!—repelled me.

“No fucking way,” I said. “I will never go there.”

Rachel listened thoughtfully. She listened for a long time. My argument against Substack was not succinct. It was a diatribe accompanied by physical symptoms such as tachycardia.

“I cannot handle another platform,” I said, explaining how the literary community, despite also being a source of support, sometimes made me feel like a victim of peer pressure.

Take Twitter. Before I’d eventually joined, I heard a philosopher ask: “Can you be a writer without joining Twitter?”

That philosopher was me. I’d been told by many a writer, that to be a writer, one must go and stake some land in Twitter. That one must build a platform there and deliver Tweets according to some predetermined schedule that would gain followers. I resisted and I resisted for too long. By the time I relented, Twitter was not yet X, but it was already saturated, and it had already deteriorated from an online utopia for writers into something far more historic—that of the town square designed for public shaming. I watched, horrified, as writers were ostracized in real time. Books got cancelled; careers suffered actual harm.

I explained my Twitter-terror to Olga, my dear friend. I’ve written about her in previous posts. Olga is all-knowing. Like G-d. I complained anyway, telling her what I thought she already knew.

“Twitter is a terrible place. They make writers go there. And then, they kill us. It’s an online Hunger Games.”

“Get a grip. Twitter isn’t real.”

And that’s when I first realized that Olga does not know everything. Bless her one ignorant moment in all our years of friendship, for she did not understand that Twitter had become real. Not like Pinnocchio or the Velveteen Rabbit. More like a major organ of a circulatory system. A heart, for instance.

And so, the idea of Substack loomed like another potential dystopia in my mind. I resented what felt like peer pressure for writers. Even George Saunders has a Substack now! The herd was calling.

It seemed like everyone was leaving Twitter (now called X), or at least threatening to leave Twitter while staying on Twitter to tweet repeated threats of abandonment. Some people disappeared but returned later. I also heard about Threads and some mysterious Blue Sky Zone—who the fuck knows—but nothing seemed to gain traction except for Substack.

Were writers really expected to abandon the short tweet and create newsletter length posts now? What kind of mad fuckery was this? I’m sitting here in my pajamas as I write this. I ain’t got no cape. Only a superhero of a writer could replace a brief Tweet with a fucking Stack!

I saw it in my mind’s eye. An intrusive image—that of little blue birds flying by, tweeting effortlessly, when suddenly, a giant stack of newsletters silenced that birdsong, flattening feathers to the ground.

I planned to resist. I would never succumb to the pressure. Joining Substack seemed like just another manifestation of online conformity. It would never happen to me.

Two weeks later, I was making a logo for The Holy Chutzpah.

As I chose my color scheme, I felt like a refugee. I hadn’t conformed. Quite the opposite. Words like defiance, rebellion, and chutzpah sum it up.

It was right after Guernica literary magazine retracted a nuanced essay written by Israeli writer, Joanna Chen. I continued to witness other instances in which the literary community censored voices (or threatened to censor voices) due to Israeli identity. And because I’ve been married to an Israeli man for almost thirty years, I felt cancelled too.

If the literary establishment was going to ostracize writers with a connection to Israel, well, fuck them. I’d publish on Substack instead.

I knew writers who were just as pissed off, but they planned to keep quiet their support for Israel’s right to exist. They would fake it. I cannot fake it. My husband knows this and said, “If this were Germany back in the day, you’d already be dead.”

Indeed.

On the other hand, it’s also possible I’m more flexible than either of us realizes. Take joining Substack, for instance.

But enough of me. I’m curious how other writers conceptualize this space. What does it mean to you? Are you all in? Or do you feel ambivalence about publishing words here? Tell me!