Procrastination: Why I left Substack for one week

📍Leh, Ladakh, India (Issue 194)

Aug 08, 2024

This was originally posted elsewhere, but it went into your spam folder, so I've updated it and am sharing here. Enjoy! x

“Only put off until tomorrow what you are willing to die having left undone.”— Pablo Picasso

Writers like their notebooks. And in their search, they visit the frowsy stationery shops in dark alleys beside high streets in every small town in India. I've visited a dozen: glass-fronted, dingy, close little rooms lined with books and selling self-help and How To Get Rich volumes that make no one happier, nor healthier, and ensure everyone is at least 700 rupees worse off. The sort of place that sells ball-point pens that require violent shaking and reams of A4 paper as thin as loo roll. Of course, these places are devoid of logic, and nothing is alphabetised or sorted—nothing can be found immediately. The store itself can be dated to the earliest calendars found on the shelves, presumably waiting for a hopeless customer who believes it's still 2006 and the economy is ripping and the earth is flat. The attendants—there are always two—don't want to sell you anything, and your obsession with finding a good notebook, oh! something you can trust and stroke and cherish, appears absurd. There is one pendant bulb hanging from the ceiling. It's dreary and with so little help you're forever lost either on your elbows and knees or standing up on a stool. Nothing collects dust like decades of untouched calendars. Shaking these grubby books makes me dream of that thin fresh virgin Himalayan air that is locked just outside the dented, rarely opened, glass-panelled door.

Writers obsess when deciding which notebook to buy. Which to love and which to leave. What is the texture under the pen? Does my blue ink bleed? Do the sheets lay flat? Are the lines evenly spread? I'm always moving; does it fit in my pocket? When will the binding fail and fall apart? Can I throw it, lose it, find it and browse it—weeping—in thirty years? Essentially, I want to know whether I can live with it.

Our notebooks are important because they are where we record our best thoughts, among the bad ones.

Likewise, in 2024, we each have a digital notebook, which many call Substack. But recently, for me, Substack became too constraining. I felt homogenous, too much like the other writers there (many of whom are excellent)—trapped, somehow, by its white-margins and gasping for my freedom. My writing, as if by accident and via subconscious osmosis, captures the style and rhythm of others. My posts ended up the same length with a cute pic at the top and a title that's on the acceptable side of click-bait and a subtitle that says 'read more'.

It's also, god help us, become a social network.

I loved Substack because it wasn't Twitter. But with alarming rapidity, Substack, too, deteriorated into a place to tweet or share Notes. Granted, it appears more friendly because everyone agrees politically and presumably is, on average, nicer. Even when users disagree, the comment sections are easily ignored or paywalled (haters don't pay to hate). And on Substack Notes, it's prevalent to shout about how great (by implication, how tame) Substack is. This is a collective trait that betrays a deep insecurity. And this insecurity will remain so long as Substack continues to emulate Twitter and call itself Notes.

Of course, the slope of becoming an attention-grabbing social network is a slippery one. It's a trap that's captured the other networks. This first step has been boldly taken, and while 'eyeballs' are not yet monetised for advertising, companies (like people) are led by their incentives. In this case, the more time people spend on the Substack app, the better. Screen time is undoubtedly a tracked metric. Substack Notes portends the introduction of an advertising model. And though this section will mean nothing to many of you who just get my weekly emails and don't care for the medium more than the message, I kept finding myself on Substack Notes, a place I absolutely don't want to be—a bleak place of writing tips and listicles and re-shares. I want to be in the world: the one where the water is wet and fire is hot stuff, chatting to monks, sipping chai, or writing. I want to read books with an end, not a newsfeed with no bottom. Worst of all, Like-begging is common. Does it indicate value to others, or does it indicate that you've asked your readers to click 'like'? It's the latter, and I know because I've done such crude begging myself.

Anyway, notwithstanding the social-networkification of Substack, I was very happy for a while.

Then, like checking a cheap hotel room, I noticed cracks in the walls, the bedbugs, and the lack of a bathroom door. I wanted to use social networks on my terms, not have them encroach on my writing experience. I wanted to write at a digital home I could call my own, not one that felt like the terraced suburbia of other writers. Also, I noticed I had stopped experimenting with my writing. I had stopped trying new formats and lengths and styles. I want to write some fiction, why hasn't it happened yet? I put this all down to Substack: I blamed the platform I had used without complaint for four years. I scapegoated Substack.

So I left; I ran out the door.

Imagine a quiet corner of a British pub—The Bulls Head in Inkberrow, perhaps—with stone walls and salted peanuts and a door which swings directly into the filthy urinals. Benches, with little round dark wooden tables, sit beside an open orange fire. The landlady, warmhearted, broad-shouldered and toothless and serves us. I have a Heineken Zero and you order a pint of pale ale. There's a kitchen in the back; we can smell it, but we haven't yet ordered food. The fire smoulders, and smoke blows back into the room—a gale is on, says the landlady. It's cold out. The world is pretty inhospitable, and I'd like to stay in here. Rain streams down the Georgian windows and I'm certain there is still black ice on the road, though it's now early-afternoon. Still, we're safe in this quaint, thatched little pub.

Now, this is the kind of cosy atmosphere I'd like to create! A home for deep and long conversations. Somewhere to share peanuts and discuss the bloody weather.

I left Substack to notionally create this pub. I moved to WordPress, got the domain name hectoralexander.org and poured a pint.

Then I sent an email, and it scarcely got delivered: It went to SPAM as reliably as a homing pigeon. The writing I wanted to share with my friends didn't reach them. Worse, when it did, the formatting was a mess.

This, goddamnit, I hated!

So, irresistibly, I have returned to Substack. I’m back! Indeed it is a great text editor. The emails get delivered promptly, and they are easy to read. My grandmother can leave a comment. It works well, and I'm quite happy to have returned, for the time being.

So, I wonder why I felt such an urge to go?

For two reasons: The first is a legitimate need to create a better home for myself online. Somewhere, as I said, like The Bulls Head in Inkberrow. I will continue to do this at hectoralexander.org and experiment there. Still, I'll continue to send essays out on Substack because it just works.

The second reason, of course, is hopeless procrastination. Call it resistance, writer's block, or whatever you like; there is a bloody urge to stop any creative pursuit and fiddle around with the things that don't entirely matter. Is my writing better or worse in your inbox when it comes from @substack or @wordpress domains? It makes no difference. You don't care, do you? You don't even notice. But I—the 'artist'—think it's all important. In fact, for a time, I thought it was more important than art and writing, more important, even, than the ozone layer.

So, some people write in horrible notebooks. Big colourful leathery things with a picture of the Tweenies stitched onto the front. Or in tiny, pokey, tortuous little pamphlets that hold three sentences—perhaps a word a page. We have preferences; I have mine. But I have realised, in my goings and comings, that I sometimes spend too much time deciding which notebook to write in and not enough time doing the damn writing.