Daniel Piper on Substack
substack.com
Daniel Piper on Substack
“There was a day when I looked up and realised that I had become someone who professionally replied to email, and who wrote as a hobby. I started answering fewer emails, and was relieved to find I was writing much more.”
Austin Kleon • Show Your Work!: 10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered (Austin Kleon)
Times are changing for writers. There’s been a recent wave who’ve stopped contributing to outlets and moved to newsletters like this, such as myself. To give some insight into what’s happening, the following is a postmortem of my decade-long career writing nonfiction for well-known media outlets like The Atlantic or The Daily Beast.
Erik Hoel • Writing for outlets isn't worth it anymore
(‘good’ is a relative concept),
John Yorke • Into The Woods: How Stories Work and Why We Tell Them
And where is the line that separates (a) matching my writing to my audience from (b) telling people what they want to hear so that I can get into the pages of an influential magazine? I didn’t know where the line was—I still don’t know where the line is—but I know it exists.
Alan Jacobs • How to Think: A Survival Guide for a World at Odds
Given the above, you might be surprised to learn that until about a year ago I didn’t primarily think of myself as a writer. I thought of myself as a founder who liked to write. About a year ago, I decided to flip that: I started to think of myself as a writer who also builds things.
Dan Shipper • Every’s Master Plan
I know what kind of work it takes to complete a book manuscript, and I want to do that work, but to arrive at the end of it and learn that what I should have been doing instead is flooding the zone on Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok? That is fundamentally demoralizing.
Collin Brooke • Unfluence
Example I: "Duncan Sabien is a teacher and a writer."
This is a true sentence. People who know me very, very well, upon hearing this sentence, will nod. It's a good fit, retrospectively, for the data.
However, if you are attempting to give someone a sense of me up-front, saying "Duncan Sabien is a teacher and a writer" is an unusually ba
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