An Entire Year Spent Naked in Public
A humorous review of my first year writing on Substack
Welcome from the CEO
Thank you to everyone who subscribed to, shared and read my work in FY 22-23.
I’m pleased to announce that gross and net revenue targets (both $0.00 AUD) were reached, though only just. Next year we will look to double, if not triple, that result, which will be a really positive trend (unlike the resurgence of flair jeans).
Last year was my first year publicly sharing my work. It was a daunting experience putting myself out there. I felt exposed to criticism, misinterpretation and ridicule. Less people read my work than I expected - than I hoped - and those that did often tried afterwards to punch my face.
Maybe some of you can relate. You have a passion. You wish you could devote more time to it, more energy. You wonder what would happen if only things like work were not in the way. You believe you have something to give and yearn for the time to give it. You #JustImagine
For a portion of this last year, I was fortunate enough to test that theory. I took an extended break from work to, among other things, write more and hopefully improve.
Did I improve? Would you improve? It’s not that simple.
Let’s begin.
The Departure Point
Before the year off, I wrote tales of dogs running and doing other things using mostly one syllable words. For my troubles I received a copyright lawsuit and a cease and desist. My children’s book, ‘See Spot Fuck’, and my vivid illustrations were confiscated, and I was placed on a register that severely limits employment opportunities.
I was starting from a low base.
Jokes aside, I enjoyed writing in private. I wrote long stories about men in disguises, and melting buildings, and consultants being beheaded by Al Qaeda due to poorly written contract clauses. I often thought: is there something here? Have I got a vibe, dare I say, a voice?
It’s quite a narcissistic and arrogant thing to believe: I am different from everyone else in an important way; I deserve the attention of others. Perhaps to some degree we all think this, but it remains harmless, dormant, until, like a naked man in a trench coat, you show it to the world.
Only then can the world look back and say, “Oh, you thought you’re pretty special - well, bad news, you’re not.”
The Realisation
Before releasing my first post on Substack, my plan was to draft fifteen new stories from Jan-Mar 2022. I wanted to create what some (mainly pilots) refer to as a ‘runway’. With this ‘runway’ intact, I could ‘land’ a story a week for roughly fifteen weeks (explained below).
1 x 15 = 15
Soon I was at cruising altitude (pilot speak). I had the fifteen new short stories and a jet-powered ego. It’s funny to look back now and think how easily I lied to myself for so long, and then how suddenly impossible it was to ignore the truth. I’ll explain:
The morning of my intended first release - that morning! - a quiet voice, distant like the crackling call from an air traffic control tower (pilot speak) chimed in: huh-hmmm.
“Yes? Over,” I asked.
“Well, it’s just… are we 100% sure these stories are good? Over.”
“What in Heaven do you mean? We have the dogs meeting and the fucking - human style - that’s a good joke, see, and then I drew the climax-”
“Not that story,” interrupted the voice. “These fifteen new stories. Are they… good? Over.”
By extension: Are you good? Are you worth reading? Do you have an original voice, or are you just a fraud - a charismatic, jacked and handsome fraud?
“How dare you! I’m no fraud,” I blurted out, sending chunks of raspberry/white chocolate muffin flying across my local cafe. That’s where I do all my thinking.
Unfortunately, one chunk landed in an attractive woman’s coffee, causing her to scowl in my direction, which I misinterpreted as flirting, winked back, was promptly bashed by her boyfriend, and later placed on another register.
Bruised but defiant, I reread my stories that night. I would prove I was no fraud.
I read them aloud and, like the slow man I am, followed each word with my chicken-greased index finger (KFC talk).
I had taken time off work based on a belief in my writing, myself. I had dumped a significant portion of my life, my energy, into this ‘hobby’. Surely that alone was enough. Unfortunately, no.
Most of what I had written (ever) was seriously flawed: the prose, stilted; the characters, flat; the structures lacked conflict, progress; the themes, trivial or unclear; the font, Windings.
Earlier, I suggested that some of you may have wondered what would happen if only you gave your passion the due time. In my case, all that time did initially was rob me of a warm delusion. My writing sucked.
The Past
When I was younger, I wanted to learn karate, so my lovely, hard-working parents took me to a lesson. The school was on the corner of Warrigal and North Road on Earth.
Inside, there were rows of kids in tight formation. They looked as disciplined as soldiers. They wore those cool karate costumes and belts from white to black. I was too afraid to enter.
From the safety of the doorway and my parent’s proximity, I locked eyes with a child. He stared at me, broke a cement slab with his pinky, and then called me a slur (this was a different time). In response, I ran outside and never went back.
I can still close my eyes (weird flex, as the kids say) and see that karate kid frozen in time, a clear reminder of what a coward I was at twenty-five years old. The horror…
The reason I share this anecdote (besides illustrating that I am a boring writer) is to foreshadow (I don’t think I’m using that correctly) my behaviour when I suck at something: I run.
Maybe you can relate. You want to be great but you can’t be seen as a beginner, so you don’t put yourself out there. If people ever saw how bad you are, then they will know what you know deep down. You tell yourself it’s prudent not to start, to try. Then the years pass, they pass by.
Take the karate as an example.
To this day (okay, yes, I can throw fists and would likely beat any man in a fight, and when I get in brawls I say sick things like, ‘You and what army, pal?’ but…) I am technically still a white belt. Yes, again, I have the capability of a black belt but technically I am still a white belt.
Why: Because I quit.
The Strange Triumph
Above, I tried to foreshadow (that can’t be the correct use?) my quitting. I was certain I would bury my bulbous head and return to beatboxing the Australian National Anthem for the Hilltop Hoods.
My rationalisation with that job was always, “Someone’s gotta do it,” but the truth is my job should not exist.
There is simply no need to beatbox the Australian National Anthem, and I, for one, am unsure why the Australian Beat-Boxing Union (ABU) kicked up such a fuss over the anthem’s changed lyric, given they don’t have to sing the words.
Anyway, perhaps it was this disdain for the dirty way I ‘made a living’ that helped me to persist with the writing. Perhaps it was dogged determination, stubbornness or love. My best guest, though, is sheer stupidity, with which I am well-endowed.
I am so well-endowed, in fact, that if it was possible to take pictures of my stupidity, I could post them on an OnlyFans account and retire. That’s how impressive it is, and veiny.
For whatever reason, stupidity or otherwise, I persisted. Instead of quitting, I identified as best I could what was wrong with my stories (my craft), prioritised what needed to improve, and got to work.
On 31 March 2022, I released my first piece, Dancing Rabbit. Even at the time I knew there were more things wrong with it than there were words in it, but that’s not the point.
The point is this: I overcame the fear of being seen to be bad. For once, I had chosen to be bold where I had previously been meek. It was a strange triumph: to know I was terrible and still feel proud.
Just Enough Nourishment
Much like how I can close my eyes (better than anyone alive!) and recall the karate lesson cowardice, I can also recall the triumph of releasing that story.
I was at a dumpling restaurant in the Alpha Quadrant - Collingwood, to be specific. The story was live on my Substack page. On my table were forty-eight piping hot dumplings.
The kitchen had been sent into a panic. Here, I deliberately employed the passive voice to avoid saying ‘I sent the kitchen into a panic…’ but the fact is, it was my fault.
Through the rice paper-thin walls (get over it) came the manager’s strained voice. She had phoned an employment agency to get emergency staff to cover my dumpling request. I had learned Cantonese from a translated David Attenburough documentary so I was able to follow.
She was screaming, “Whale. He ordered 1000 dumplings as prey. Whale. I distinguish herbivores and chickens' mating rituals at high-tide. Whale. My mother is half deer, half remember crab?”
Soon came the emergency staff and later the Guinness Book of World Records crew.
The conversation in the kitchen never left the subject of nature, which I appreciated because it was all I understood in Cantonese.
Then, about halfway through this succulent Chinese meal, I received a Facebook message from my aunt, Louise. Louise had read my story. She enjoyed it, she said.
Well, that comment alone, much like the twenty-five hundred pork and chive dumplings I consumed over the next six hours, were just enough nourishment to sustain me for the entire year.
If only I could bottle that feeling, I would put it on a meat pie and eat the meat pie, and then probably do that again a few times.
Unfortunately, I couldn’t, and that triumph was quickly replaced by a different emotion, one that, if turned into a sauce, would nearly ruin a meat pie.
Let’s continue.
The Dunning–Kruger Wipeout
In fiction writing, there are many elements to grapple with at once. I’ve seen ‘The Eight Elements of Fiction’, ‘The Seven Parts of Writing’, ‘The Ten Components…’ The five dot points (below) are just how I distil the craft, and I show them only to illustrate what happened next.
Character - the who
Sense of place - the where and how it feels
Prose - the raw materials: the words, devices, the style
Structure - how it is all arranged to deliver an effect
Theme - what it is all about, the message, and how it is expressed
After releasing my first story, I got lost trying to ‘improve’ these elements all at once, and like a man chasing two rabbits while trying to write short fiction, I wrote poorly but caught two rabbits.
I’ll use music to illustrate my point.
Imagine a guitar. Imagine that the headstock of that guitar (the end with the tuning pegs) has a pen strapped to it that is pointing parallel to the neck and away from the body. Now, point that end at a sheet of paper and try to write.
While you’re writing, try to create vivid, unique characters, while also building tension (internal, external, interpersonal) in a living world, while also saying something important in a novel way.
Though I have not yet practiced analogies, to me the above is analogous to writing.
The Dunning-Kruger effect (pictured above) is when a person with low ability, expertise, or experience overestimates their ability or knowledge. The more this person learns about the given skill or subject, the more they realise how little they know, hence the confidence drop.
That’s just learning, folks. The problem with writing and most creative pursuits, however, is that confidence has a quality all of its own.
You need to believe you are good otherwise you become timid. If you’re too critical, you’ll end up writing what you think people will accept, be fooled by and not hate, rather than trying to create something you, and others, can love.
In my case, I had built up the courage to put my work out there, but I lacked the confidence to follow my gut. I tried to sound like others to appear legitimate, more skilled, but that only helps you to develop if you want to become a forger.
The New Battle
At the bottom of that confidence curve, one becomes like a stammering Hugh Grant. You are more handsome than the average, but you are now acutely aware that you lack the raw charisma, rippling abs, large biceps and muscular thighs of, say, me.
I was at that low point with writing, and I would have given anything to get my confidence back.
In film, there is a genre called ‘war film’. These films often depict a thing called a ‘battle’. A battle is nothing more than a war film trope where armies of actors (often strangely with German accents?) fire prop guns at each other. These guns bring about the characters’ symbolic deaths.
Now, I’m not a cinephile (thankfully, I’m not on that register), but I believe these war films speak directly to something happening in the real world right now: namely, the ‘battle’ I as an artist was facing to find my own voice and trust it.
In the fantasy series, Band of Brothers, a group of men are sent to a mythical land called ‘Europe’. There, they engage in ‘battles’ with a sadistic and quite frankly unrealistic enemy.
As a writer of extremely serious literature, watching this fantasy I couldn’t help but think it was about me. I was the protagonist. I was Lieutenant Winters sprinting the grass opening alone, climbing the rise, spotting the unprepared platoon and opening fire.
Is he not, I put it to you, the archetype of the short story writer: a true warrior, alone at his or her laptop in a too-warm cafe, mowing down the enemies of self-doubt, cliche, and Germans?
What Right Looks Like
The riffing above does get to my point: finding and protecting the voice.
As a writer, you need a unique take, a worldview, an aesthetic, otherwise you’re just a cover artist, a forger. This probably transcends any artform and is true in life.
The preceding section, for those that can’t tell, was just a rip-off of Norm Macdonald, the comedian. It was not my voice. I was impersonating someone else. Today it was Norm, yesterday it was McCarthy/Faulkner, before that, Pynchon, and long before that, my dad.
Norm’s book, Based on a True Story: A Memoir, is hilarious, heart-felt, and thought-provoking. As a comedian, he was original, but it was not some divine gift. He was just a craftsman who did not pandar. He honed that unique comedic voice across decades and died having succeeded.
What ‘honing’ means in practice, I guess, is that he worked hard and was willing to bomb with his material. I, on the other hand, was not with mine. I learned it is one thing to have the courage to put work out there, but another entirely to have the courage to put your work out there.
Throughout the year, there were certain jokes I cut, details I omitted, sentence and paragraph forms I avoided. I baulked at phantom criticism. While in obscurity, I pandered. It was all quite embarrassing: to try and appease people who aren’t even listening.
For those of you with a passion who are considering pursuing it, this is my key point. You might face pressure (imagined or otherwise), and if you aren’t vigilant you might surrender without even being aware that you are. Then whatever chance you had of finding a voice is gone.
Again, I think this transcends any specific art. Many people live their lives this way, maybe most.
For me, this crisis culminated in my submission to The Paris Review of my disingenuous novella, ‘See Spot Pontificate on Weber’s Protestant Work Ethic in the Age of the Gig Economy.’
They loved it, of course, and claimed it was powerful, timely for such an ‘unprecedented age’, but I was ashamed. That work is not mine; the dog drawings were barely sexual at all.
In my grip, the Nobel Prize for Literature felt fake; the adulation, unearned; the beautiful women, still pretty cool. And that is where I am as of today: 21 March 2023.
On my mantle is the Nobel Prize, a reminder that I am still a writer without a voice.
The Second FY (FY meaning First Year, not Financial Year)
Thanks to those who made this reality a reality. In my second first year on Substack I want to:
be published somewhere else (the Profitron editor just keeps saying yes)
reach 300 subscribers (If you’re a reader, please share my page and encourage your friends to subscribe. If you’re a Substack writer, please recommend my page)
improve my technical craft (mainly around character)
be bold and keep honing my voice (most important)
Before signing off, it would be remiss of me to not say thank you to a few people:
Mum and Dad, for reading, sharing and encouraging my work
Shaun and Steph, for celebrating my (tiny) victories
Rumtin, for the old days at the David Street table and the ongoing encouragement
Chris M, for engaging with my work more than most people
Pat, for the Lyneham sessions, the edits and the chats
Jacques, for reading and chatting to me about writing and beatboxing
Greg M, for the warm supportive texts
MyWritersStudio, for the 5-6 Thursday nights that were helpful at the right time
Louise, for the initial grace
Avik, for sharing cool things and seeing my work in other videos and posts
Luke D, for being the kindest person I know and inspiring me to keep going
Most of all, Bill. Above all, my brother, Bill, my most important reader.
To anyone who needs to hear this: you will not regret trying. You will not regret learning to be okay with looking like a fool. You will not regret it. It doesn’t need to be big at first. Just take a chance. It will be transformative in some weird way, and:
You will not regret it.
I don't read your work yet, because I'm new here and just found you, but I really enjoyed this reading, make me laugh and it's captivating the way of writing. I hope that you keep going.
As a woman that has worked in my share of peculiar restaurants, I’m sure I’ll get a kick. Keeping eyes peeled 👀