Reflection: One Year of Substacking
In December, the lilac tree in our front yard was visited by a red-breasted sapsucker, who drilled several rings of holes around the boughs. The holes are shallow, only piercing the outer layer of bark. The sapsucker drills the holes, then returns later (it returned at least once a day for weeks) to eat the sap that oozes from the tree and any insects caught in the sap.
I’d never seen one before, and it was a delight to see it return day after day. The sapsucker didn’t seem to mind if I got close to it. It would hop to the far side of the trunk and peek around to see if I was still there. If I got too close, it hopped to an upper branch of the tree and waited until I left. The bird had a job to do and it didn’t want to leave.
On at least two occasions now, we have seen a hummingbird fly up to the holes in the lilac tree and drink up some of the sap. I don’t think we can say for certain whether this is theft, opportunism, or if the sapsucker’s work is a gift for others to enjoy. For the sake of metaphor, I’ll go with the third option.
I started this Substack in October 2023. I started it for a number of reasons:
I wanted the discipline of a weekly writing assignment.
I wanted to share my writing/ideas with others; I wanted to be mindful of an audience while I wrote.
I wanted a place where I could process my ideas, theology, and grief in an expository manner; that way, when I worked on my writing projects, the “exposition” would be out of my system and I could play around with metaphor, imagery, and allusion.
I wanted to build for myself a library of my thoughts. I do this all the time, everywhere: in notebooks, in Word docs, on my phone, in my head. But all these places contain assortments and fragments. The blog helps me gather my fragments into something greater, even if it’s just a larger fragment.
I had two main hesitations about starting a Substack. The first was that I was nervous about sharing my writing with others. So I started with a lot of “About Me” posts. I love talking about myself. That made it a little easier.
The second hesitation concerned my writing process. Though I wanted more discipline in my writing life, I worried that my Substack would eat into the time I could be working on my other writing projects.
I once overheard one writer say to another, “Don’t let Substack keep you from your real writing.” I can understand the warning. If I spend most of my writing time during the week working on my next post, where will I find time to work on the “real” projects I want to do?
This is a false dichotomy, however. It conveys a scarcity mindset, whereas writing is a gift that traffics in abundance. For those who write, more will be written. “All writing is useful,” a writing mentor once told me. “The writing you do in exercises trains you to be a better writer. When you come to your writing projects, you’re that much more equipped.” That’s another way I’ve come to view Writing Under the Writing: as a “writing gym” where I can practice, exercise, and train my writing craft.
It’s as if I’m a sapsucker, and every post is a tiny hole I drill in the trunk of my Substack. I return later to find these holes filled with sap which nourishes me. Perhaps you, my readers, are like hummingbirds who come to taste the sap as well, though your main food sources are elsewhere. I offer you my work as a gift.
Here are some things I’ve learned about myself and my writing process now that I’m a year-plus into this blog.
Solidifying My Process
Because of this blog, I’ve experimented with my process. I tried new things and discovered more about what I like and what works best for me.
If I didn’t have a weekly (or at least, close-to-weekly) deadline for myself, I would find it very easy to “just take today off” from writing. But if I know ahead of time what I will write about, I have all week to draft, revise, tinker, explore, think about, and research my piece.
This was especially true in December, when I wrote four pieces on the Advent themes of hope, peace, joy, and love. All week, I was in a “diffuse flow state.” My mind and my writing were productive, even if they weren’t efficient and straightforward.
What I’ve discovered is that I like this kind of process—what I call the “thicket-mind”—where I wander around in the intersections my ideas make with each other and with what I’ve read and experienced. And when I write, I go where the words take me.
Expanding My Understanding
I’ve written several posts about grief and about theology. While I had an idea of what I wanted these posts to be about, it wasn’t until I was actually writing that they took shape. And in the middle of writing them, I discovered new insights, new understanding.
Sometimes, I didn’t know what I thought until I wrote it. And even then, it took a few weeks to understand my own ideas. This happened with my post on “writing flow,” which is one of the posts I am most proud of. Before I wrote it, I didn’t think much about “writing flow.” After I wrote it, I began to wonder what the “diffuse flow state” I had mentioned would look like in practice. I wrote the post in February. In the fall, I finally experienced it. Or at least, I was aware of my experiencing it. And once that happened, I knew I could make it happen. And now it is part of my writing process, a part that is suited to me. But it may never have come about had I not written on this topic. My own writing changed me.
Compost
In my very first post, I mentioned that this blog would be like a “compost pile” for my ideas. I could write about various topics to get “explanations” out of my system. And then when I worked on my “real” writing projects, I wouldn’t get tripped up by everything I wanted to say about a topic. I could focus on the story or poem at hand.
One thing has surprised me. I thought the compost would work one direction. That is, I thought my Substack writing would help me hone ideas that could be translated artfully into my fiction and poetry. That has happened, yes. What I didn’t expect was that my fiction and poetry would be fertilizer for my Substack posts. For example, “Viewing Children as Our Peers,” “Life-Giving Death” and “The Web of Love” came out of my project A Darker Travel.
I also, to some extent, view these posts as “rough drafts” for possible future essays. I may expand some of them or combine them or recontextualize them someday, making them more suitable for publication. This is one reason why I started adding an “Appendix of Related Quotes” after several posts: my thinking on these topics and trajectories is not finished. These posts become the compost (pun not intended!) for my future understanding.
Posts I’m Most Proud Of
Below is a list of ten of my favorite posts. They are not necessarily my most popular, nor the easiest to write. But these are the ones I most enjoyed writing (even if it was a struggle) and am most satisfied with the end result. (Of course, I could always revise them, but I will let them be because they represent sacred moments in the history of my thinking.) These are arranged chronologically from earliest to latest.
This was my first lengthy post, and it set a precedent for how I would write posts in the future. It’s about dinosaurs, but really it’s about my love of language (and making a list of Greek roots in third grade—my first lexicon).
This is an update of a blog post I did on WordPress. I actually revised my earlier thinking as I wrote this—showing more grace for my inner tourist than I had previously.
This was my first post based on a short quip I wrote in one of my butt notebooks.
This post began as a reflection on our experience at a Christmas Eve service—the first one we’d attended since our firstborn Emerson died in 2017. It grew into a reflection on grief and church and hospitality and making room for sorrow. I am surprised and grateful at how many people read and shared this post (and sent me messages, too).
As I mentioned earlier, this piece began with curiosity, and ended with new insights that only slowly sunk into my soul. Now this post has shaped my writing process.
This is one of those fragments of theology I crafted into something larger. I’m proud of the way I brought in old and new thoughts and readings.
I liked how this one came together.
The kernel for this post came to me over a decade ago, when I was still in seminary (this summer will be ten years since I graduated!). I’ve never written anything about it until now. It was fun to do a more biblical-interpretation kind of piece.
This post grew out of the work I did on A Darker Travel. I didn’t realize how much this idea was already present in my theological understanding until I started writing about it here. There is a sequel post coming sometime this year.
This post is at the leading edge of my understanding of writing. I’d heard about the importance of details for years, but this wisdom never energized me until now, when I saw what a lack of details did to my students’ writing. I wrote this post for myself, and I just really like how it turned out.
Monthly Updates
I liked doing the monthly updates. It made for an easier week, and I could practice (very brief) book reviews while the books were still fresh in my mind. I think I will continue doing these, but I might change the format.
Future “Secondary Posts” Ideas
I’ve had the idea—but not the bandwidth—since I started this Substack to do some “secondary posts.” I’m not sure if I would post these on this main “channel,” or if I would create another “section” you could subscribe to separately. I would try to keep them short, and they would be thematically unified. These are some of the ideas I’ve had for those posts:
Prayers for various occasions. I’ve written dozens of prayers as needed for various occasions, and I’d like to write more on a regular basis. I’m inspired by the various prayerbooks I’ve read through and used in recent years.
Cartoons. Trying to get myself to draw cartoons more regularly—by creating a cartoon Substack, I could keep myself accountable to creating new stuff more consistently.
Biblical Commonplace Book. I’m not sure what to call this. It wouldn’t be like a commentary. It would be my observations, connections, questions, and inspirations on a short passage of Scripture. I would move slowly through a book of the Bible—maybe a chapter or even less per week.
Abstract Noun Devotional. I don’t know if this would be a devotional per se. I posted what I called a devotional-invitational on my WordPress blog in 2021. Each day in December, a new emotion was invited into the holiday (grief) experience. Each entry had an “invitation” to the emotion for the day, followed by Scripture passages and quotes from others about that emotion. There were questions for reflection and a poem at the end. For Substack, I would do something similar, except I would write a little more of my own ideas for each emotion (or whatever the abstract noun is).
Let me know if you’d be interested in one or more of the above. I will probably try some of these out on the regular blog and see which I can commit to—either as a second post every week here, or as a secondary channel altogether.
The Future of Paid Tiers
I keep delaying the date when I will set up a paid tier. I like being able to share my writing with you for free; however, I would like eventually to earn money for the work I do. I want to be able to supplement my income so I can devote more time to writing. My current job ends this year, at the end of the summer. I have been picking up more classes to teach, and, Lord willing, I will do more teaching in the future. But if teaching opportunities are lean, I’d like to contribute to the household income through my writing, and not through another job that keeps me away from writing.
I’m in the early stages of composing a post about writing, money, and work. Once that is drafted, I hope to have a better idea of when (and how) paid tiers will work for Writing Under the Writing.
Thank You Thank You Thank You
Most importantly, I want to thank all of you for reading, subscribing, commenting, liking, messaging, and overall supporting me in my writing. I’m glad my words have connected with you in some way, and I hope they continue to do so. I’m glad to be the sapsucker in your life.
I started this Substack with ten family member subscribers. Every new subscriber boosts my confidence. Every read—even the like or two I might get on a post—gets me excited to write more. Sure, I crave affirmation. But this kind of affirmation doesn’t get me big in the head—it makes me want to write more, to improve my craft and process, to produce work I can be proud of. You are all a part of that. Thank you.
I feel a bit shy asking this, because I am terrible at self-promotion (great at talking about myself, not so great at promoting myself, if that makes any sense), but here goes: would you consider sharing Writing Under the Writing with one other person? If there is someone you know who might enjoy reading what I write, please send them a link to my homepage or one of your favorite posts of mine. If I can outsource promotion to you, that would truly be a blessing to me.
Okay, there, I asked it. I’m going to sheepishly walk into a corner now.
Seriously, though. Thank you for subscribing and for consistently reading whatever random ideas I write about. It makes a huge difference in my self-confidence as a writer. I cannot express the depth of my gratitude. Thank you.
I, too, worried that even a monthly newsletter (now substack) would sap my energy and time away from other projects. But my experience has been that it keeps me going through the long stretches of working on projects that seem like they might never reach any reader at all (hopefully they will, but that's how it sometimes feels!). I appreciate the metaphor of the sapsucker --- so good!
I love following along with your writing here, Nate! Keep writing and keep sharing your thoughts. They’re compost for other people’s writing, too.