Inside Baseball

the one and only time I will write about writing

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What Is A Writing Process?

A few days ago, on Substack Notes (Substack’s Twitter clone, where I sometimes drop into discussions and sometimes don’t), someone asked me to write about my writing process — and “the secret to my success.”

I’ve been asked about this before — more than a few times — and I’ve kept putting it off because I’m not sure I have anything all that valuable or interesting to say.

Writing about writing is ubiquitous. It’s like a coping mechanism for people who think their personality hinges on whether they use Scrivener. But people keep asking, so now I’ll have a link to drop them.

That’s all this post is: a look at how I write, across the different types of writing I do (including the stuff I don’t publish), and what I think is the reason enough people enjoy reading it that I’m actually making headway on my student loans.

I wish I had something more interesting to say, but below is the honest reality of my various writing “processes.”

Secret to My “Success”

Before I get into that, the person also asked me to explain “the secret to my success.”

I’ve thought about this a lot — because I still sometimes find myself staring at my Substack dashboard, struggling to believe that this many people are actually interested in my writing.

Here are the four things I’ve identified.

First, I’m really screwed up.

People who are only mildly or moderately screwed up are usually great at impression management — at controlling how much others can see the mess inside.

But I’m just messed up enough that things that seem really obvious to most people often don’t even occur to me. So things other people take as basic axioms just aren’t part of my worldview.

Example: I still need my friends to remind me it’s okay to stand up for myself. That just... doesn’t occur to me most of the time.

When I’m being mistreated, it often flies right over my head. It feels normal.

My therapist once had to stop me mid-sentence to say, “You’re describing a classic hostile work environment.”

And the voices in my head were like:

I also had very little exposure to normal American culture as a kid. A friend of mine — my therapist calls him my “cultural studies professor friend” — has been helping me catch up, and I’m constantly learning where this or that idiom, meme, or phrase comes from.

So yeah. My perspective is unusual. Maybe even unique.

Second, I grew up having to defend myself psychologically pretty much all the time. So I got good at weaving.

Ideas, metaphors, images, words — I learned to braid them together as a survival skill. When your internal world is the only place that makes sense, you spend a lot of time there. And when the external world feels dangerous or incomprehensible, you get really fast at building structures that help you process it — stories, arguments, patterns, connections.

So I don’t always know what I think right away. I mostly write to figure that out. But if I start writing, and keep writing, and follow the thread long enough, it turns into something. Something readable. Something people recognize.

I don’t know if it’s “talent,” exactly. It’s more like scaffolding I built to keep from collapsing. But it turns out, that scaffolding is useful for writing, too.

Third, I’m interested in a lot of different things.

Mathematics. Star Trek. PTSD. Deafness (which really is its own subculture in American life). Culture war hot takes. Personal stories from my odd little life here in the cobalt-blue People’s Republic of Vermont. Book reviews — everything from poetry to psychological thrillers, including memoirs (and more memoirs) and satires. And lately, both reviewing and writing fiction (next installment coming soon, by the way — it’s almost done).

So a lot of people who follow me are here for one of those things — and just skip the rest.

And I’m okay with that. I’d rather be interesting to a bunch of people for different reasons than be a specialist in a single lane I secretly hate.

Fourth and finally, I don’t need the money.

I deeply appreciate my paid subscribers — truly, I do — and I make a conscious effort to publish enough paid-only material to make the subscription worthwhile. My most recent math post, for example, has a link behind the paywall to a google colab wherein I’m solving the first 100 Project Euler problems — which is a very helpful resource for anyone learning, or helping a kid learn, math or coding.

But if the whole thing dried up tomorrow, I wouldn’t starve.

I’m a data scientist. My day job covers the bills. If Substack revenue vanished overnight, my timeline for paying off student loans and buying a house would get pushed back… but not scrapped. I wouldn’t be panhandling on Twitter by Thursday.

This means I’m immune to audience capture — and that’s a huge part of why I think people enjoy reading my thoughts. I can afford to say what I think. I can afford to let people get mad and cancel their subscriptions when I say, for example, that I support Israel and that I think Elon Musk is a dangerous manbaby with too much power.

Those are the two topics guaranteed to cause paid subs to drop, by the way. I notice. They also show that I have readers in both the left lunatic fringe and the dangerously-desirous-of-worshipping-a-god right lunatic fringe, which is kind of cool.

But the result is that what you see is always going to be what I actually think — not what I think you’ll pay me to say.

Which brings me to one last thing.

It also occurs to me that I’m fairly good at mockery. Not a trait I’m proud of, exactly — I don’t list it on my résumé under “soft skills” — but I do have a knack for it. I might as well own it.

And, awkwardly, my most successful post ever in terms of converting free readers into paid subscribers was this one — pure mockery, wall to wall.

Apparently people like it when I go full bitchy gremlin.

I’m not sure what that says about me. Or you. But here we are.

Essays: Personal

Most of my personal essays start as an emotional yearning to be understood, paired with a quiet suspicion that I’m not completely wrong in whatever I’m feeling.

If I’m pretty sure the feeling is rooted entirely in my own dysfunction, I don’t write about it. I either swallow it (bad), or I call

Josh Slocum

and rant (slightly better). But if there’s even a 10% chance I’m not crazy (this time), I might write.

When I do, the process usually looks like this: I put on brain.fm¹, take many deep breaths, visualize the emotional state I’m in, and start from that place. I write toward being understood. For example, in this one, I started from the shock of being hung up on — for allegedly being too assertive — when I’m the kind of person who needs regular reminders that standing up for myself is not actually against the law.

Then I tell the story of how I got to that feeling. I end with a stab at integration: what it means, how it fits into something broader, or what I think I’ve learned (if anything).

Every once in awhile, I channel some unusual amount of courage and go deeper into my real feelings and internal processes than I probably should. I don’t know what I think about pieces like this one, or this one, so I don’t write them often.

Nor do I know what to think about it when I write about something I still don’t understand, as I did here.

Sometimes I re-read them later and cringe. But more often, I find myself thinking: huh. That actually helped.

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Essays: Culture War Takes

Most of my essays on cultural topics begin with: I think I know what I think about this… but maybe not. So I write until I figure it out. Then I go back, cut out the parts where I was arguing with myself in public, and shape it into something coherent.

Sometimes, though — as in this one — I do know what I think. Those are more straightforward. Start with a hook, lay out the case, build it with logic or narrative, and loop back to the hook at the end if I can.

The challenge isn’t the thinking — it’s maintaining just enough goodwill that the reader doesn’t hate me by paragraph three.

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Essays: Hybrid

Sometimes, an essay is both personal and a culture war take. That’s when I’m both trying to understand myself and convince the reader I’m right. It’s as exhausting as it sounds.

These pieces usually begin when something won’t leave me alone — some uncomfortable moment or larger theme I can’t stop gnawing on. Then it’s a hybrid of the two processes: emotional honesty meets rhetorical effort.

When I pull it off, those are usually my best pieces. When I don’t, it reads like an argument between my inner child and a tired political columnist.

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Essays: Teaching or Explaining

In posts where I’m trying to explain something — like the math series, or this one explaining the basics of LLMs, or this one delving into claims of galactic-in-scale Social Security fraud— my only goal is clarity.

I try to clear the clutter out of my head and picture a smart, thoughtful, paying-attention twelve-year-old. Then I write so he gets it. Not some imaginary professor, not some imagined hater in the comments. Just that kid.

It’s oddly calming.

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Fiction

I’ve published very little fiction. What I’m publishing now feels “safe” only because the main character is a dark mirror of me — someone who’s discarded any concern with being good and operates solely out of self-interest. Weirdly, writing from that place feels less vulnerable than trying to portray someone even aspiring to be good.

The novel I’m working on is harder. The characters had normal-range childhoods. They speak human languages. They have believable motivations that aren't just “responding to trauma like a bat out of hell.” It’s terrifying.

So I work on it only when I’m procrastinating something else. Which makes it feel safe, because it’s less scary than whatever I’m avoiding. I’ve tricked myself into writing with reverse dread. It almost works.

(Now I remember why I avoided writing about writing. This is humiliating.)

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Personal Writing

I’m a big believer in Julia Cameron’s “morning pages” — three handwritten pages of pure brain-drain, no editing, no purpose, no audience.

It’s stream-of-consciousness meets self-therapy. Nobody ever sees it, which is probably for the best. But it works. It clears the static. If I go a few days without doing it, I start to get… glitchy.

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Poetry

I don’t write poetry often. When I do, it’s usually either:

• Magnetic Poetry, because my fridge is covered in little word tiles, and sometimes they jump into place in ways that feel true, or

• Voice-text poems dictated while driving through Vermont, because the natural scenery here is basically cheating.

I’ll catch a line or image, speak it into my phone, and copy it into a journal when I get home. That’s about as structured as it gets. Usually happens when I’ve been reading brilliant poetry.

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Letters

I only have one friend I know for sure loves getting letters. Around Christmas, I write her a whole bunch and mail them all together in a box. It’s one of my favorite rituals.

I picture her on a stressful day, pulling one out, taking ten minutes to escape into it. I try to write something that will make the version of her in my head either laugh or stop and think.

It’s low-stakes publishing. And it feels like magic.

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Book and Other Reviews

I don’t write negative reviews. Unless the book (or other thing) is peddling Woke nonsense, in which case: game on. But if the author’s trying to speak honestly and not preach an ideology, I never go negative. Period.

Why? Because writing is hard. Publishing takes guts. As Teddy Roosevelt put it, the credit belongs to the one in the arena — not the critic in the cheap seats.

Also: negative reviews are easy. So easy they feel masturbatory. I could win the sarcasm championship before breakfast. But it’s not satisfying.

Writing a positive review that’s thoughtful and engaging? That’s harder. And more useful. I want my reviews to make someone open a new tab and either buy the book or request it from their library. That’s the goal.

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Use of AI or LLMs

I do not use AI or LLMs to write or generate material. I also don’t use it to edit anymore, though I experimented with that for awhile — not by having it edit and produce edited copy, but having it do an old/new format, where it would pull out a sentence and show it to me, then propose an edited version.

When I was doing that, I usually integrated about half of its proposed edits.

I stopped because I realized that I wanted to preserve as much of my verbal intelligence as possible, and that I was probably hurting it.

Now, the only thing I will use it for is if I think that something I have written is close but not quite. For example, in this essay, “Systemic Misogyny: A Theorem Disproved,” I introduced the term “joysplaining,” which is cute and a little bit charming, but also clunky. So I asked an LLM to come up with ten other possibilities. None of them were better, so I didn’t use any of them and left “joysplaining” alone — but if it had done better, I’d have used its word for that.

One More “Success” Secret

I pay close attention to my Substack metrics — not because I’m obsessed with growth, but because I’m a data nerd.

And the pattern is clear: paid subscriptions drop when I don’t write for a while, and they go up when I publish frequently.

I don’t force it. I never sit down and try to manufacture content just to game the numbers. I write when I feel like I have something worth saying. But I do notice the pattern. And luckily, I enjoy writing — and I often have that unmistakable pressure-build feeling that means: okay, time to get this out of my system. So that helps.

Wrapping It Up

So is there a secret to my “success”? Maybe. If there is, it’s this:

I tell the truth as I see it — including when the truth is that I’m confused as fuck, or that I see both sides, including all the nasty trade-offs, of something, in those grim American dilemmas where you’re basically picking between different types of cancer. I don’t write to please an audience. I write to figure things out. To be understood. To share what I’ve learned. To mock what deserves mocking. And sometimes, just because a feeling won’t shut up until I drag it out of my chest and put it into words.

I’m a little weird. I’m a lot wounded. I like data and Star Trek and hard math problems and spiritual memoirs. Depending on the day, I write about any or all of it.

And because I don’t rely on this for rent money — because I don’t have to shape-shift into something more palatable or marketable — I get to be the full version of the parts of myself I’m willing to put online. Which is a lot. More than I probably should. But not everything.

That boundary helps. The haters and critics don’t get to chew on the whole animal. Which makes it more amusing when some of them think they know me better than I know myself — better than my close friends, better than my therapist.

I don’t try to be everyone’s cup of tea. I just try to be mine — strong, hot, a little bitter, and occasionally spiked.

Apparently, some people like that.

And I’m deeply grateful to them. To you.

Thanks for reading.

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