With so much talk these days about where and how to publish, how to get more (preferably paying) newsletter readers, more followers on social media, etc., I often find myself wishing that the people proposing answers to these questions would ask another: why should anyone read my writing anyway?
Is every thought I have, every sentence (or stanza or paragraph) I put to (virtual) paper worthy of existing in public space, of being read by other people – people who have jobs to do, dogs to walk, parties to go to, revolutions to foment?
In a recent exchange on Substack notes, a friend wrote that he thinks a lot of people on this platform treat their newsletter writing like therapy. I guess by that he means a place to express experiences and emotions, to try to work out what they are thinking. Like journalling, but for an audience. I find this baffling, which is, I suppose, why I find so much online writing baffling.
I keep my private journal, which I write in irregularly, on my bedside table. It’s a bog-standard paper notebook, not one of those little diaries with its own lock and key like I had as a teenager. I have long since lost any fear (or conceit) that someone else would want to read my journal. The thought of sharing that writing with the world horrifies me – not just because I don’t want to expose my feelings in all their rawness, but because the writing in my journal is rough. I’m no Virginia Woolf; my stream-of-consciousness prose is clumsy and messy, not avantgarde.
On a platform like Substack there is little harm in everyone and her aunt uploading their unedited scribbles because of course no one is compelled to read them. The situation is different with conventional publications and publishers, where someone does have to read, or at least skim, every single submission. While in theory the notion that anyone on the planet can submit their writing to the most prestigious publications is democratic, in practice it relies on an enormous amount of labour on the part of readers and editors, many of them volunteers.
On a recent (well-written, witty and clearly edited) post on Substack, the editor of a new literary magazine that focuses on poetry writes about some of the challenges facing editors of other poetry magazines. All of these other editors complained that “they were drowning – they all used the word drowning – in submissions of poems, more than they could possibly read and judge fairly”. These editors had come up with various solutions to this problem. Some had enlisted “‘sifters’: an army of un- or ill-paid interns, enlisted to dredge the slush-pile so that the editor need only read the ‘best’ work”. Others charge a submission fee.
From the perspective of overworked editors, both of these solutions seem reasonable to me. But both rely on a system whereby people can only work for and submit to literary magazines if they can afford to do so. The Little Review has come up with a different solution, which they call the “NB rule”: “Any submission that includes poems must include at least one book review per poem.”
The NB rule (for “no bores”) is designed to address three problems at a stroke. First, it helps to keep the number of poetry submissions to a number that the editor can properly read and assess. Second, it minimises submissions from “Writers (capital W) […] those people who write stories or poems but never read them”. Finally, it ensures a steady stream of book reviews, which otherwise are submitted in smaller numbers than poems.
I love the NB rule. I love it as an editor of academic journals who in the past spent far too much time reading early drafts of articles that had been submitted as ready-to-publish while struggling to find scholars prepared to review others’ work. I love it as a reader who knows that the only writing worth reading is that which is shaped by close engagement with the writing of others. And I love it as a writer who knows that this close engagement with others’ writing helps to improve my own.
Writing a book review is one of the best ways to engage closely with another’s writing. In turn, there are few things in a writer’s life more satisfying than to get a good review. By “good” I don’t mean a review that reads like a series of generic one-liners of the kind publishers plaster onto book covers (endorsements which, if not actually written by AI, certainly read like they could be. Just how many “best writers of their generation” can we have among a given cohort? How many decades can an individual writer be “at the height of their powers”? How many empty superlatives can a single publication generate?).
No, I mean the review written by someone who has taken the time to read the book carefully and is prepared to be honest about it, flaws and all. Reading for a book review – like reading for research and reading intensively for pleasure – requires what scientists call “deep reading”, a skill that is largely lost in the practices of skimming or scrolling. It requires not only intention and attention but memory. Taking notes, without which it would be impossible to review a book, helps the process because notes act as aides-mémoires.
Writing a good book review also enhances our editing skills because reviews are typically quite short (say 500 to 800 words, significantly shorter than this post, for example). That means lots of cutting and refining before submission or posting. Good writing may be a pleasure, but it’s one that requires some discipline – and readers as well as writers benefit from that discipline.
Finally, rook reviews are reminders that writing and reading are communal activities, conversations across pages. A good reviewer is the ideal reader – the kind of reader every writer should aspire to be.
So maybe the question is not whether we write too much, or even whether publish too much. It’s whether we value our writing and our readers enough to be the best kind of reader.
Pen in Fist is written by me, Carrie Lou Hamilton. You can find my other writing and projects here. If you like what you read, you can leave me a tip.
This newsletter is human written. No generative artificial intelligence tools have been used for the research, writing or editing of this post.
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