Quantity versus quality
Newsletters favor the former at the expense of the latter. Who really benefits from this?
Jon Malesic wrote a bit back about the problem with Substack expecting writers to produce so much content in order to move up to the tiers where you can actually earn money on this app. Here’s Jon:
The problem is that to produce a good newsletter, you need a lot of ideas you can process quickly — and I don’t. I think slowly. I don’t like writing quick reactions to breaking news, because I’m not good at it. My brain doesn’t work fast enough.
I’ve been thinking about this since I returned to full time teaching a couple of weeks ago. Like a lot of people who teach writing to college students, I’ve spent years designing classes that require assignments to be scaffolded. Reading and discussion and taking notes and reading responses are all done before you write any kind of essay shaped thing, followed by an “idea draft” (idea dump), then a rough draft, revised, and final. You have to do all these steps to get full credit for the assignment. Then my program plugged in a requirement where students have to revise again at the end of the semester and reflect, in writing, on what they’ve learned.
For reasons I cannot remember but which likely had to do with the fact that I actually liked writing and it was also easy for me, I never took the kind of foundational writing courses I’ve taught since 1997 because I must have tested out of them. Many days, I wish I had. While many of my colleagues are panicked about Chat GPT, the fact is that the AI can’t write in that many staggered steps, can’t write thoughtful analysis, can’t write in anything that sounds like a human voice. Yet? I don’t care, because the way people talk about Chat GPT at UC Berkeley much of the time sounds more like a moral panic and “kids these days!” than it sounds like an actual substantial discussion of how we teach and talk about writing in a way that makes students see it as a process that sharpens their voices and makes them aware of their agency.
Newsletters in general, on the other hand, and the many blog apps that preceded the one I’m using (RIP LiveJournal, my old friend), rewards A. speed and B. “takes.” I recently culled my newsletter subscriptions because I simply do not have time to read a newsletter that arrives 3+ times a week. The more a person posts, the more they get access to whatever bells and whistles and stickers and ribbons and gold stars the app decides to reward its most prolific posters with. Who benefits from that? The writer gets a cut if they’re charging you to read. But mostly, the money goes to CEOs. And it also means readers aren’t getting the best written stuff. And that’s when our ideas of what makes for good writing start to deteriorate.
I have no idea what these bells and whistles entail, because I am someone who needs a lot of time to think about a topic before I write. Ruminating is just as important as revising. Back when freelancing was more of a frequent part of my career, sometimes editors would ask me for things with a quick turnover. 24 hours? Yeah sure, I used to be able to do that. But those pieces weren’t thoughtful or particularly well written. The pressure caused me to value cleverness over reflectiveness, snark over satire. I’d make my deadline and collect my $75 or $100 and complain about my pay rate to other writers. Then I’d do it again.
It did not make for good writing. It made for teetering piles of word trash threatening to collapse in on themselves if one element of their obvious and banal argument were sliced out in editing. But I didn’t get much editing because I was a “pro,” and my head swelled and I became convinced I could crank out infinite takes on any topic for the rest of my life.
Queue cancer, but also, queue the year of treatment for cancer that led to a lot of reflective time spent being plugged into chemo machines or fried under radiation machines but mostly waiting around in waiting rooms full of other people with cancer. During treatment, I did not care much any more about the idea that I could write a lot, write poorly but quickly, and spend whatever was left of my life doing that for a few dollars here and there. I cared about writing things that mattered.
If you keep writing long enough, at some point you have to choose not just what you’re going to write about but how you will write it. My day job is trying to convince students that writing is a practice or a craft, but even more so, it’s trying to convince them that their voice matters and has meaning. And it can’t and won’t ever do that if they’re making themselves into self-appointed experts on whatever is whipping by in the news cycle.
It’s a cliché because it’s true: good writing takes time. I wonder what would happen if every person about to press “publish” on something that they whipped up in five minutes waited an hour or ten or a hundred instead. The CEO of this newsletter app would earn a little less money today. Earth would continue to turn. And the words would have a little more time to be tested and polished before they’re sent out to the world. In an age of content, craft is something we have to fight for.
The final scene of Wong Kar Wai’s In the Mood for Love. If you know, you know.