I haven’t been able to publish anything on here in two months. And this isn’t for lack of ideas or even written word. I currently have 18 drafts, two of them are ready to be published. Another two are nearly ready. However, I am overwhelmed by their sheer presence.
These day, my routine for when I can bear the weight of it all and open my Substack drafts is the same—spending hours on end writing more and editing more already completed pieces of work because I convince myself they’re half-baked. In my mind, these essays need to be 4,000 words long with 10 different citations to be considered proper. They must be 15 minute long reads, imitating the excellence of The New Yorker. This has stunted me creatively and intellectually. I no longer know where my argument begins and ends because by the time I am satisfied with the length of the essay, I have forgotten what it was I was arguing about in the first place.
What a terrible thing for a writer and editor to realize that they ramble on too much. But I know that it doesn’t do to dwell or wonder where this habit came from. It’s too obvious. My time in undergrad made me obsessed with numbers. I knew I had to flesh out my argument to meet up with the word count so I took my time to write it all out, overexplaining wherever I felt like. My time writing and editing for The Republic made me appreciate research and thickening my work with the published theories of others, bouncing ideas until I understood exactly what the conclusion was.
But somewhere in making this newsletter, I got it confused. I began to write and overwrite for the sake of sounding smart. I needed the validation of external minds to link to and give my argument more credibility. I’m not ashamed to say this because better to realize now rather than later.
The most important breakthrough out of all this is that I realize I can publish a lot more frequently than I originally convinced myself I could. Because I obsessed with the argument and the word count, I would spend weeks on the same article. Now, to break out from this, I’m determined to publish an essay every week this month. This sounds especially fair since this is my birth month.
Now, can I accomplish this? I hope so. But if not, I hope you won’t hold it against me. Afterall, I’m trying.