Your Writings Are Problems, Substackers
The most common writing style of Substack is everywhere on the platform and also on other media. There's a problem. And it's time to change.
The Posts With Common Writings→Popular
Go around Substack and pick and read one long post. Go do it again with another post. You’ve done? Good. Now compare those two posts with each other. When I say compare their writings, I’m not talking about their contents, but their grammar, vocabulary, and sentence structure—the prose.
I’m sure you’d get lines such as “In the morning”, “I come to New York”, and blah blah blah. All of them are simple, mediocre, and ordinary sentences with no feeling—nothing more. Their only purpose is to tell the readers what happened. Tell me, how does it feel? You probably feel jumped up but only by the contents and rarely get calmed down to deep thinking or evoked emotionally. But awkardly, these chefs of words receive a lot of likes, comments, and subscribers like the common cereal—simple but eaten by everyone.
Their guns are from the hands of reporters, the ones who give information. Their bullets only need to have simple shapes with no artistic aesthetic to kill the readers. But for Substack, a platform for writers of fiction, literature, and thoughtful stories? Such writing is a disgrace. The disgrace is also in you. Everyday we, readers, blindedly flirt with the attractive news and ignore the beautiful bullets in our pockets. Sharing news is good, but a punch onto the false beauty must accompany. This is a platform for sharing one’s beliefs and works, but we’re only here to sleep leisurely on the beach without attention to the bomb near us. We only relax and don’t pay attention.
Nature of Substack
The current situation of Substack is lame. Everytime I goes through the platform, I get stuff like news, what happens today, and news. That’s all. The long posts, which are vehicles to drive complex and important thoughts on writing, are nothing more than racky newspapers. According to my gut, the pop simplers use Substack more as a way to sell potato chips with no nutrition, instead of the richly flavored meals.
To me, only the nostalgia of literature and life can hook up Substack’s beauty, not the reports. Some examples are the essays. Many essays published on literary publications cook up language well to make the readers fainted. Remember the essayists who slapped everyone with their writings like Joan Didion, George Orwell, and Mark Twain. I wish for Substack to have many writers like them. They don’t need to be perfectionists of the language, only the people who are willing to shout out with colorful paints on their hands. Like me, I’m no professional writer but still endeavors to change the performance of Substack for the betterment of the users and its purpose with this chucky and wanky writing. You’re welcome to make love with us. Go write out with unique styles like James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, or Herman Melville. You can keep the simplicity but provide the spices under them like Ernest Hemingway or F. Scott Fitzgerald. Each writer’s pride is their unique writing style. Clinging to that common style for reporting is not actual writing. Writing is not supposed to be blah blah blah but BANG BANG BANG.
Future of Substack
I still remember the first day when I got onto Substack. I was an child trying to walk on Facebook and Instagram. However, I found no voice, until I found Substack, which cheezed me up with other writers. They gave me different pants to try. And I’m sure other users also had the same romance. Substack should exist for the authors, not the reporters. Ever since I found more posts covering news recently, that romance faded away bitterly. If the pop simplers will expand their empires further, soon, it would be no surprise for this platform to be a dryer with no fancy pants for us. What will you do to this topic? Will you write differently to keep your voice and enrich the future of Substack?