What Does It Mean to Write Well on Substack?
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Writing on Substack is tricky because we’re writing in two genres at once.
Substack is partly a newsletter, i.e., a routine email that promotes/sells/announces. We’re supposed to address our subscribers, deliver some sort of news or ask them to buy or do something, and sign off.
It’s also a personal media platform where we produce our literary and journalistic work. That’s the reason so many of us are on here: to write essays (personal, meditative, creative criticism, narrative, etc.) or journalism (features, opinion pieces, etc.).
We end up writing those genres in the guise of a newsletter, trying to blend routine hellos, promotions, and announcements with deeply personal, opinionated, narrative, thoughtful, and researched posts.
As I said, it’s tricky.
What’s the trick to writing on Substack?
I don’t know (wish I did), but if one person is doing it really well, it’s
of .We could use any of her posts as a model, but I’ll use “Culture Study Meets Bama RushTok.” (A must-read whether you care about Bama Rush or TikTok or not.) She manages to start it as a newsletter with a bid to support her work and then seamlessly moves into a personal-essay-esque opening—
“I was supposed to have jury duty this week. I cleared my schedule in anticipation. Then I showed up day one and was dismissed — which meant that I had a full week of largely unscheduled time….time to fill with Bama RushTok.”—
and then evolves into a deeply researched (and fascinating) feature on Bama RushTok. Seamless. She’s in total control of her genres.
And we have to be too.
What is a genre?
The answer may be obvious. Genres are categories, groupings of any kind.
What’s less obvious is that writing in them makes life much easier and allows our subscribers to quickly connect to what we’ve written. Even if readers don’t know the names of particular genres, they know what to expect from a thriller, memoir, personal essay, feature, etc.
For those of you bristling because you think genres will stifle your creativity or stuff you into some literary marketplace meat grinder, know this:
Genres shouldn’t be prescriptive; they offer a map.
Yes, you can experiment and redefine genres but not if you don’t know them first.