I'm turning on paid subscriptions

Time to name names and write something interesting

It’s been just over a year since I started Discussion Candy, and there’s been a lot of trial and error trying to figure out what exactly it is I’m doing with this project. The question of what I’m doing with Substack is totally enmeshed in the question of what I’m doing with my writing career, which at the time I launched the blog was only a copywriting day job and a past life as a reporter.

Last May, I seriously considered quitting my stable copywriting job and going back into local journalism, but I got nervous about how little money I’d make/not having health insurance, and so in place of a total career shift I started writing casually on Substack just to give myself a creative project outside of work. But since I started Discussion Candy I’ve been going around in circles trying to write things on here that are both interesting to read and safe to say totally publicly, and the overlap between those two is just not that big. So to make things slightly less public I’m putting up cheap paywalls on some posts going forward. 

I’m not sure if it’s just this way on my feed, but most of what I see on Substack these days is either hyper-internal diaristic blog posts or kind of quasi-academic cultural critiques mostly of online discourse. What I know after a year here is that neither of those modalities quite work for me: Effective (read: interesting) diary-style posts and amateur culture critiques both require carefully leading the reader through abstract, heady trains of thought without much to ground them in reality, and working from a place of such abstraction is just not my style. Personally I really love being grounded in reality. I really love sensation, I really love action. I was never good at calculus but I was great at statistics, if you get what I’m saying.

I told myself I wouldn’t say this explicitly because I’m trying to curb my snark on here, but listen, this really helps illustrate what I mean: My least favorite opening sentence that I see all the time (and have myself used versions of in my weakest pieces) is: “I’ve been thinking about CONCEPT a lot recently.” I read that at the outset of some piece, and I’m nowhere. I have nothing to grab onto except CONCEPT. CONCEPT is almost always intangible, so present it to me in a vacuum and it’s like serving me heat for dinner.

Me amongst CONCEPT (via)

Right now there’s a lot of social cachet online in being considered an “essayist” or a “culture critic,” although I don’t think for most of us that would translate quite the same face to face. (Imagine if you asked someone at a party, “So what do you do?” and they said, “I’m a culture critic.” You’d be like “Wow! ………so that entails…???”). I certainly get the allure of the writer’s glory, of having written some great essay on a beautiful, elemental concept, like human connection or yearning or self-destruction or fear of God or what have you. But I have never been able to write from CONCEPT outwards. I need STORY, SETTING, CHARACTER, CONFLICT if I ever want to write inwards to CONCEPT.

Ultimately, blogging without direction didn’t scratch the itch to nail down in words what life is, which I’d say is what most writers are scratching at, outside of making money and getting praise. So in March I started freelancing for local publications, and I wasn’t really able to articulate all this until I started reporting again. This is what I said about that in my last post, and I’ll say it again here: When I’m writing for the newspaper, I actually have a job to do … Perhaps the best part for me is that the writing doesn’t even matter; my only job is to research and interview until I understand what’s going on well enough to be able to tell it to someone, and then write that down.

What I forgot about writing until I started reporting again is how easy it is to write something interesting when you’re grounded in reality, how when you talk to people and ask questions the story just reveals itself, and these grand and beautiful concepts end up shining through like light through a prism every time. I could point to each of the little nothing articles I’ve written since March and name them: This one’s about GREED, this one’s about PUNISHMENT VERSUS REDEMPTION, this one’s about LEGACY, this one’s about DEVIANCE, this one’s about HOPE VERSUS DESPAIR, and so on. Not one of those articles ever actually mention its essential concept by name (although maybe that’s not a bad idea). If you find those concepts within them, great; if not, you still will have learned the facts about a local happening. Dems the news.

All this is to say that after of year of experimenting, I think the best way that I can do what I want to do, which is to capture what it is like to live here and now as accurately and concretely as possible, is to just write about what goes down in San Francisco, or wherever else I end up, with the same observational skills I use as a reporter (and a conscious person). Since I started reporting, I’ve also fallen into a few really interesting local scenes, and I just think going to parties, having conversations, living, and then describing what happened is simply more fun to write and read than a muted analysis of the internet landscape or a lyrical whiff of the miasma inside my own head.

I mean, even this post is hard for me to write, because I’m just telling you what I’ve been thinking. So for the sake of something to point to, here’s an example: After the elite capture article went viral, I would’ve liked to write about the actual experience of emailing with Hamish McKenzie, getting invited to the offices, what my friends thought was going to happen, and then what it was like to actually have coffee with him for three hours, this reluctant tech bro-turned-rising magnate with a confusing amount of power, what the offices looked like, who I met there, how it felt when I drove home. That would’ve been a lot more interesting than my bloodless reflection on it a month later, but frankly I’m nervous to name names like that without some sort of protective barrier to entry.

And so this brings me back to the paid subscriptions: They are now available! I’m starting pretty low, $5 a month, and I probably will not increase the rate unless the paywalls don’t work the way I’m hoping they will or this project becomes a more serious business venture down the line.