wise words from my friend ‘jennie’, a top writer
"wheat" by fairfield porter, 1960
—
Last weekend at a pool party I met Jennie (not her real name), a friend of a friend. She didn’t know who I was but I knew all about her: many of our mutual friends had chatted about her at some point or another over the past few months, all of it owing to her success on Substack. Until three years ago Jennie had never written a word in her life, but when she quit her investment banking job and started a Substack she saw almost-immediate success.
As I write this, Jennie has thousands of paying subscribers and makes nearly as much money as she did working her investment banking job. And she works, like, three hours a week.
So, at this pool party, we got talking about Substack and what it takes. She was hesitant to discuss this with me at first (perhaps unwilling to reveal the secrets of the trade?) but after a little while I convinced her I was somebody worth confiding in, and she told me everything.
—
“If you actually want to get famous on Substack,” Jennie said between sips of beer, “you need to understand what kinds of posts go viral. You need to know the formula.”
“Okay,” I said, “so what’s the formula?”
The first thing she told me is that most of my nonfiction essays should be fake. I should just lie. “It’s more interesting to lie,” Jennie said. It’s easier if you have an anonymous profile picture and a pseudonym, sure, but basically everyone on Substack lies. “All of those personal development essays that open with a specific situation from real life that helped the author realize something profound?” Jennie said. “Well yeah. Those are all just fake.”
This was news to me, but it made some kind of sense. Perhaps real life is not tidy enough for a viral Substack post. Perhaps getting famous means making up a bunch of sordid details. If you tell the true details of some party you went to, and the goal of the essay is to make a point, well, the details might conflict with your thesis. Or they might not be as clear as you would like them to be. But if you just make up details to fit your thesis it’s all a lot easier.
“Okay, so step two,” she said, “is you need to come up with your thesis.” When I asked where she came up with all of the ideas on her Substack, she waved vaguely and told me she has a Notes app on her phone. “Whenever I think about something interesting,” she said, “I just write it down. So I have like 100s of these theses in my phone, and all of them could be essays.” She made a point to emphasize that the thesis of a viral Substack essay was really about vibes. “It doesn’t have to be something that holds up under real interrogation. We’re not going to do real interrogation here. We’re looking for the kind of thing that people read and think: wow so true.”
The ‘meta’ on Substack is apparently to use the thesis as the title (or, at the very least, the subtitle) of your Substack post, so it damn well better be catchy. Jennie told me that if I really couldn’t figure out how to make my thesis catchy I could use Claude to do it, but stressed the importance of none of my readers ever finding out. “They really, really hate AI.”
This thesis part sounded like a lot of thinking, so I asked for tips. What can I do to come up with a catchy thesis? Jennie said it depended on the kind of essay I was writing. If I were to write an essay about people (relationships, friendships, dating), as an example, that I should come up with some kind of label. Labels are good, she said. Pretend you just invented a new way to classify people. “Like just pick an adjective,” she said, referencing her popular post about the differences between ‘spiky’ and ‘smooth’ people. “Or you could pick some kind of literary label, like the whole ‘Alice’ thing in the Henrik Karlsson dating scarcity essay,” she said.
Whatever the thesis, Jennie said, it is important that I present it as though I have, simply by living my life and thinking my complex thoughts, stumbled upon a novel and powerful idea that could change the life of anyone who reads it. The packaging, she stressed, was crucial.
“And by the time you’ve done all this you have basically written the essay,” she said.
“Ok. Um yeah cool but I still have to write. How should I start?” I asked.
She suggested starting the essay with a personal anecdote. Fake, of course, but they’re all fake. A personal anecdote works, Jennie said, because no matter how fake they are they help the essay feel real. They make the author seem vulnerable; give you a glimpse into their life.
Jennie said that most of her dating essays involved completely made-up anecdotes. She said that she often gets comments from readers about them, which is how she knows they’re good. I pondered this. “If you’re a literary guy or whatever, like, you read a bunch of books or at least you have Middlemarch on the shelf with a bookmark on page 12,” she continued, “then I guess you could open with a literary anecdote instead. Just reference a scene in some movie you watched or didn’t watch but heard it was good. One friend of mine just asks ChatGPT to find scenes from Agnes Varda films that would fit his thesis. So yeah you could do that.” (This friend of hers, by the way, runs a literary-esque Substack with 1000s of subscribers.)
“And as for the writing itself?” I wondered.
“Just write. I don’t know. Set a timer or something. Go stream of consciousness. People really like stream of consciousness type writing.” Other things she suggested were: writing in lowercase (at least in the title/subtitle), using incorrect/weird/informal punctuation, and perhaps my favorite, anonymizing the names of people you refer to in your stories even if they are fictional (or so distorted from reality that they may as well be).
—
“Doesn’t this feel a little fake?” I asked.
“How so?”
“If everyone on Substack wrote like you did…”
“Yeah?”
“Well then I feel like it would just be a depressing place to be. Like there would be all this faux-philosophy stuff, all this literary cosplay, all these posts about 'spiky vs. smooth people' and 'aliveness' and 'frequency', and—"
“You are thinking way too hard about it,” she said. “And that’s why you’ll never be a Substack writer.”
—
So I guess that’s why I’m starting this Substack. Welcome, dear readers, to my first post. I walked away from that pool party feeling disgusted, upset; I had been briefly invited into a world I idealized from the outside, but I was horrified by everything I saw once I walked through the door. I learned that a large portion of writers on Substack are what I now call pool party philosophers. I learned that I have no desire to become a pool party philosopher.
The reason I am writing this post, then, is to try something new. To see if perhaps there is a home on Substack for real and authentic writing. For ideas worth thinking about.
If you feel the way I do, and if you’d like something real…
Then I’d encourage you to subscribe.
* * *
Note: The style of this essay-story is somewhat different from most of our other writing on Quarter Mile, and so if you were in doubt, yes, this is basically a piece of satire; we are not actually starting a Substack. Nor should the fictional author of this essay.