Tuesday, March 18, 2025

This is the second installment of West Wind, your daily drop of thoughts, ideas, and info for this Season.

Yesterday I hinted at something that’s been on my mind for a while, which is not only the pressure that writers have to constantly create, but also to create something important, meaningful, thought-provoking, etc., that will change their reader’s hearts and minds and make them remember their words for years to come. While that’s definitely possible, I don’t think it something worth obsessing about. You can’t expect to hit a home run every time you have the puck, to use a sportsball analogy.

The above quote comes from Substack’s own policies, and while the context is about the platform not being used for email marketing purposes, like a writer sending out sales and coupons about their books every day, it also implies that there’s some sort of quality standard that writers need to live up to in order to be part of the platform. That’s a lot of pressure, though. What if my content is only mediocre quality? What if I don’t have anything important enough to contribute to the “…world-class reading, watching, and listening experience” of this website, and to connect “…with the world’s smartest readers…?” Now the pressure is on you all, not only do I have to write great stuff but you have to be smart enough to figure it all out! No wonder people struggle with this whole thing.

So instead, I’m committing to giving you an at-least-mediocre, neighborhood-class experience in this newsletter. I’m probably not going to write something that completely changes your worldview, but that’s not what I set out to do in the first place. Above everything else, I’m a storyteller, so I want to tell stories. I realized the other day that I have nearly 40 years of life experiences to weave into stories, some of which will be plotted and printed as books, others will be read out loud, and others still will just be rambling diatribes. But all stories are important, and all deserve to be told.

So, if you’re a writer, have you felt the pressure to be important and thought-provoking? And if you’re a reader only here for the fun, how do you decide who to follow?

Thanks for reading, more tomorrow.