There are cracks forming in the stacks about what ’stack is and what it ain’t. Now that I started my lede as slowly and boring as I possibly could and lost half my reading audience, let’s talk about this.
Gather ’round, my pretties.
I hate labels and titles and such. I don’t want to know if I influenced1 anyone to do, say or feel anything. It makes me feel… icky, for lack of a better word, to know I wrote something that made someone act on something. It’s ok if I did, but I don’t want to know about it.
Compliments makes me tense up and feel generally uncomfortable and then I get self-conscious and I don’t know what to do with my hands, including writing another piece. What do I do with this new-found superpower? I can’t risk it influencing stuff that isn’t … good.
I long for the days when we used to write something and never knew for sure how the it affected the reader. Maybe they would write a letter to the editor or call the desk and scream at my editor, but rarely these things got passed along. If you got to keep writing stuff, in journalism or commercial copy or literature, etm… you knew you were doing ok.
Comments killed off that culture. Now, too many writers chase influence, attention and engagement and sadly the people who write the checks think that equates to good writing or content or whatever the hell anyone wants to call the stuff between the first line of the lede and the last line of the kicker.
In my lifetime so far, I estimate conservatively that I have eaten 66,240 meals. Only about four are memorable. Ok, maybe six and they all involved dessert.
Meals are like content created for the internet, always churned through and barely memorable. I collected essays written from the past ten years into a book recently, There were about 900 essay scattered across four platforms. In the end, I whittled it down to ninety-two essays and my ruthless editor cut that to an even fifty. Then, she re-ordered everything to form a narrative arc from then to now. My next “legacy memoir” will probably only span five years because I’m getting older and fate will not be tempted.2
Everything is content but not everything is writing or art or photos or… whatever the artifacts that get published. If ink gets smashed into paper, it’s now no longer content; it is Stuff®
This newsletter, essay, blog post, screed—whatever you wish to call it—is simply content. It deserves only to be pooped out of my brain into your eyeballs, but it’s not ever gonna reach the status of ink. It will always and forever be content, lost to the annals of time when the power to the pixels go poof.
I am creating a hierarchy because that is how we make sense of a chaotic world hellbent on driving us all into the insanity of entropy. We straighten up our bookshelves, make our beds, order words into sentences, sentences into paragraphs, paragraphs into chapters that we top with title and interiors wrapped with covers that we adorn with indexes of numbers to stave of insanity and mortality. We consume faster than we create but also create at a pace faster than the collective humanity can consume. In the time I took me to create this paragraph, 4,635,9813 books were published, most of them merely content, some are Stuff®, even fewer will be read after they have been purchased, stolen or borrowed.
But let’s get back to the narrative, the point I am trying to make as I wade through the content. Maybe the good writing, the writing that is more than just words glued together, the writing we write home about, we call Stuff® instead of content.
Write more Stuff®
This post was influenced by
by me saying this on her newsletter/post/story/Stuff® Don’t tell her she influenced me; I’m not altogether sure that is a good thing and anyway, I don’t want to know. You should read and subscribe if you don’t already.
I started collecting blog posts, essays and poems with a goal of publishing a book about every ten years. My first book, Monkey with a Loaded Typewriter, spans 2004-2014. The second book, A Million Pieces in a Thousand Places, spans 2015-2024. You don’t have to buy them; I mostly write them to have something to leave in case anyone wanted to know who I really was.
I made that number up. I don’t know how many books were published, but I know it’s a lot.
i'm with you brother, but our analog, 21st century, have something to say before you say it sensibility don't play is digital peoria. the gate keepers had a purpose maybe and now we are left to sort through squawking. words by the ton. i dig the tarnished pennies ethos. say on my description that my stack is piggy bank to hold my dirty pennies. must be some old man/little kid Kool aid we both drank.
This: I long for the days when we used to write something and never knew for sure how it affected the reader. Comments killed off that culture.
I come from writing via the blogging world where there were always comments from day one, so I don't know what that feels like. I guess it would be similar to art where we didn't compare ourselves with the whole world or whatever our follower count is. Our circle of influencers (😬) and audiences used to be small. The world was a lot smaller pre-internet. That wasn't such a bad thing.