Just Start Writing

Or making videos. Or singing. Or building that fence.

Today is my birthday. I won’t be doing much writing today, as I’ll be spending some time with friends and family. Thus there likely won’t be a post tomorrow.

I wrote this piece in response to some conversations I’ve had about writing, YouTube, and creativity in general. I hope it is helpful.

Behold, the most dreaded of Substack posts: a post about writing, on a platform for writers, read by people who are also quite often writers. But there is one topic that has come up a few times in conversation lately, offline, that made me want to put these thoughts into the world.

I was asked recently by someone if they should start writing on Substack. I told them they should on the condition that they felt the urge to write. Substack is a good platform: it is functional, it structures itself to support writers, and it is growing. But even if they didn’t want to write on Substack and preferred some other platform, I’d still have answered in the affirmative. If you want to write, you should write.

My friend was worried that nobody would read his writing. He would be wasting his time, perhaps, because his words wouldn’t reach anybody. And that was the real hurdle. And it turns out on that subject, I may be a bit of an expert.

From The Met

I am a success in the world of YouTube and online writing — by which I mean I make some money. Many labor and don’t get to that point. So when I start to talk about what it is like when you’re building an audience, or writing before you built an audience, it can ring hollow. After all, I made it (by some standard of ‘made it’). But for a very long time, I didn’t make it.

I was a podcaster for a very long time — I think I was on four or five failed podcasts within about seven years. When I started the YouTube channel, it was a tie-in with another podcast: The Classical Mind. (They’re still going strong; you can find them on Substack.) Almost nobody knows about those podcasts (at least the ones I ran by myself), as most never had more than 100 listeners.

I wrote on Substack for over a year before I started the YouTube channel. I published regularly enough, writing much longer pieces about primarily the intersection of my burgeoning Orthodoxy and cultural criticism. I used to describe it as my best attempt to channel Wendell Berry, but through my very particular experience. I think at its peak I had 12 free subscribers.

I wrote in many other places before that — most are hard to find because they are poorly maintained blogs run by me or someone I knew. Much of that writing is lost. (This is fine, as most of it wasn’t worth reading.) I received maybe four or five emails about my writing, in total, over the course of the years.

The point, I suppose, is that for quite a few years I was writing with the hopes that somebody would think it was worth reading. For many years, they didn’t think so. But I kept writing.

Sometimes the writing didn’t leave my journal, but often I was putting it somewhere. Eventually I had the idea to put some thoughts on video, just to see if I could make it work. I had a decent mic from my podcasting days, so how hard could it be?

That was when people actually started to pay attention.

A common bit of advice is that you should become a writer if you couldn’t see yourself doing anything else. This is bullshit — it is an overused, tired way of thinking about vocation. (And I have heard it applied to becoming a professor, a journalist, a priest, an elementary school teacher, a lawyer, and a tradesman. Surely it can’t apply to all of those things!)

So let me replace that advice with my own: become a writer if you think you have something to say and you think you could say it well. That’s all it takes.

You become a writer the second day in a row you start writing like this. I say the second day because the first day is too easy. Everyone likes the idea of being at a desk (preferably of a rich, dark wood, in a well-lit study) and sitting down to write. Most people can squeak out a word or two on the first day, but it won’t be good. That’s normal. You become a writer the next day, when you look back on the excrement you put on the page and decide to keep going. You start working on your words, getting them to finally say exactly what it is that you need to tell the world.

And now we get to the real point of the piece: mutatis mutandis, this advice applies to just about everything. It applies to building fences — if you really like to work with your hands and you want to build fences, you need to just start doing it. It applies to making music. It applies to making a YouTube channel, making a marriage work, and running a marathon. Just start doing it, and dedicate yourself to getting better as you do it.

First you’ll try to do the work. Then you’ll realize you aren’t very good at it. Then you’ll make some adjustments, and you’ll realize you still aren’t very good at it. You’ll be looking at crooked fenceposts, or a leaky pipe, or a bad paragraph, or a marriage that just isn’t thriving, and you’ll have to make a choice. Do you keep working at it, or do you walk away?