The Four Pillars

When is Substack secret sauce not a secret sauce?

Listen to me, for this is the truth.

To stay the course, you must be a writer in your bones, stamped through like Blackpool rock.

I’ve been scribbling in notebooks since childhood. If writing was criminalised, I’d find a furtive way to do it.

I write because I am.

Gaining a genuine audience is the dream, to know your words have made an impact on your fellow scribes and questing human travellers—as opposed to follow-trains of desperados back patting one another to the beat of Sunshine, Lollipops and Rainbows—that’s why writers write.

Well, not quite, I write because I have to. Because it will not let loose its stranglehold on me.

But there is a huge satisfaction in finding comfort in being alone, together.

In your bones

When I was young, poems would write themselves in my head to the beat of my steps as I walked, spoken in my own voice by my invisible narrator; and when I was young I walked a lot.

If I’d neglected to bring a pen and paper when one of these poems emerged fully formed from the basement of my brain, I’d hurry to my destination, repeating the first couple of lines over and over, returning to the first line determinedly and never letting it unreel fully in my inner ear, or it would be vanished like a dream upon waking by the time I reached home, written into the ether, never to be whispered again.

In my youth, mind filled to overflowing with sparkling connections, I lost hundreds or more of these creations in this fashion.

But in another universe, those pieces have been written by other versions of me or my darkling cousins, using mirror words and languages I could not comprehend.

In an infinite universe, surely everything has been written that was meant to be.

Assuming you can write, you will find your predestined audience. So write something.

We know, you see, if you’re a writer - and we know if you merely write.

It’s safe to ignore most of what the brand promoters tell you (shudder) because they are people who (temporarily) write. They are not writers.

On the back of a recent article, Unimpressive Impressions, which caused much consternation amongst the skinless fraternity, I’ve been ruminating on what writers should do to gain a genuine audience, as opposed to what they should not.

If you’re the sort of person who reads articles advertising “How to gain followers & dollars by using my secret sauce recipe”, you’re going to hate this piece.

The four pillars

There are no tricks, no shortcuts, there are only four pillars.

Be authentic, be confident, be patient, and be habitual - turn up, and keep turning up.

Forever.

That’s it, that’s all there is. Assuming you can actually write, that’s the whole recipe; it’s as straightforward and as complicated as that.

For me, it’s particularly tricky, because there are six of us, which causes conflict with audiences who generally prefer a nice tidy label.

I’m working on a piece about Alison, Jodie, Pearl, Daisy, Legion and the Nameless One, and how they are all authentically me, and yet all quite distinct.

And no, I do not experience dissociative identity disorder—wouldn’t you ghouls love that though? That would be a tidy label with which to bind and silence the crazy lady.

And you will note I don’t claim those are the pillars of becoming wealthy - for every one creative who hits the jackpot there are a million who write their little hearts out for a few shekels here and there.

But if you want an audience, and you follow those deceptively simple steps, you will find one.

Confidence takes time to learn, so try to be courageous while you are learning your own worth.

I am prepared to speak honestly about the things that interest me, and throw my opinion around willy-nilly, not because I am brave, but because I have no choice. It is how I am wired.

Nevertheless.

Secret sauce

Finding your predestined audience is both deceptively simple and unexpectedly demanding, and if writing is merely a money making side hustle for you, you’re almost certainly doomed.

There is no secret sauce.

Are we, by the way, still using those ghastly phrases, side gig and side hustle? Since I gave up SEO/content/copy writing, I don’t keep abreast of what is fashionable in the world of verbal flexing by those who dream of being visionary trendsetters.

You can speed up the audience accumulation process a little with some authentic engagement. If you comment on pieces you genuinely love, boost articles you think are worth reading, write Notes you think might be interesting, and do so without expectation (again, authentically) the like minded will probably come and check you out.

I lack patience with low talent bloggers and political pundits, who account for much of the online landscape to a dismaying extent, so I only comment upon, like and restack a limited number of articles each week.

However, they’re always articles I’ve found worth in.

I have a few hundred followers here, which is a miniscule amount, particularly compared with audiences of platforms past. I have made, and squandered, audiences of many thousands on different platforms, because I could not stick to one of the four pillars.

Sometimes, you see, I cannot turn up. Sometimes, I don’t want to and I allow myself to dissolve and fade away.

But truthfully, an audience of several hundred who are genuinely interested in my words and have discovered me organically is far more valuable than ten thousand obtained on a conga-line of heart-for-heart grifters, prioritising vanity metrics in a frantic attempt to fauxppear influential.

And so, over the last 13 years or so, I’ve left behind 7,000 Twitter followers, my monetised blog Oculus Mundi, and several thousand Medium followers with regular (if not very exciting) earnings, and at least four other going concerns, because they stopped interesting me, or overwhelmed me or…

Perhaps that’s why I was completely unafraid of starting again start on Substack. I know there is always an audience.

There’s an audience for everything —except cowardice.

I yam what I yam

Throughout every step of my online evolution, being nicheless has never played well with marketing, algorithms and the other banes of my creative life.

Having six different personalities—again, this is not a disorder, stop salivating—all with their own particular disposition, is not to everyone’s taste.

Many seem to prefer a clarity of expectations, and since I might be chatting about death on Monday, hope on Wednesday, going mad on Friday and offering writing tips on Saturday, those expectations often go unmet.

I like to thing that my opinionated, gobby self is the unifying thread to my work. But one way or the other, Popeye and I have the same motto.

I probably could crush myself into a defined box, if I was willing to kill my creative joy and appease the fatherfuckers* for greater reach. But I’m not.

I don’t blame those of you who love my memoirs for finding my rants tiresome, or vice versa, and have considered making separate accounts for separate types of writing— but honestly who can be fucking bothered?

Write it, and they will come

In 2012 I put a tentative foot into online publishing and started a blog called Oculus Mundi.

In real life, I knew not one single soul who was blogging, I didn’t read any how to’s, or watch any videos, I simply read some blogs I liked and thought “Hmm, I could do that”.

So, after consulting with tech support—my teenage children—I found a simple cut and paste website, starting on Word Press and moving across to Weebly, and began posting my words to the echoing void.

I did post links to my work on Twitter, and a few of my followers turned up to have a sticky beak. Aside from that, I did no advertising. I wasn’t sure how to and I couldn’t really be arsed anyway.

But I wrote, and I kept writing, and the audience kept finding me, and growing, to the point where I was able to monetise the blog with advertising.

Mommy bloggers were all the rage then and though Oculus Mundi was very definitely not mommy blog or even a mummy blog—many of the bloggers connected with me, cross posted and I entered a little network of bloggers who boosted my work (and I boosted theirs in return when it was good, as it sometimes was).

If you write it, they will come.

The same thing happened on Tedium. The Grand High Poobahs of Medium vascillated between loathing me (mostly), throttling me (occasionally) and boosting me (rarely).

I just kept being my own gobby self and subscribers kept turning up, and the money grew each month, till I couldn’t stand the place another moment and left.

Write something worth reading. Be patient, be authentic, be confident and be habitual and they will find you.

And keep turning up. That’s it. That’s all of it.

That’s all there is.

***

*For some reason, fatherfuckers prefer motherfuckers as the term of choice. I disagree.