Substack Overwhelm...

and the beauty of (an occasional) blank page.

I have a confession. And it will probably do me a disservice. But I think I might be suffering from Substack overwhelm.

Every week my inbox is filled up- largely on a Sunday but Friday and Saturday are getting heavy too- with a host of newsletters. Because I have hand chosen what I receive, the bulk of the writing is exceptional. It is written by erudite writers who have honed their craft for long enough, or have the gift of amazing curation, and I am enthralled by it all. But it is also true that it has got to a point where I follow so many said writers, writing on a host of fascinating subjects with both authority and eloquence, writers that I want to pay for the privilege of reading their efforts, that I don’t now have the time. I have reached peak input. I simply can’t read as much as I have signed up for.

But it seems I can’t write as much as I have signed up for either. I have spent the whole day so far trying to write to you all, so that I could send my weekly Monday post, as promised and planned. I started, as I usually do, at dawn. I have worked on three separate possible posts. I even got a good way along with one of them in particular, but then hit the writing wall that I had already found with the previous two.

Sometimes that is a sign to just keep going.

There is an amazing story told by Elizabeth Gilbert about an encounter she had with a poet Ruth Stone, who she met when she was in her 90s. According to Gilbert’s story ( and if I remember it right) Ruth grew up in rural Virginia, and worked the fields each day. Often whilst she was working, she would start to feel a rumbling coming at her from across the prairie, building up in intensity much like a storm. When Ruth would feel the stirring, deep in her bones and body, she would start to run. And she would run back to the house as fast as her legs would carry her in the hope that she would beat the the poem that she saw and felt coming, in time to get a pen and paper. In most cases she would make it in time, and would write the poem down as it came past her. She would catch it, she explained. Occasionally though, a poem would manage to outrun her, and it would fly past before she got to have a pen in hand and she would have to let it go. Accepting, she said, that it was off to find another poet. But on several occasions- and these she said were the poems she most easily remembered- a poem would near get past her but she would grab it with an outstretched hand, by the tail. And then she would write it down, but it would come to her entirely backwards, perfectly written from the very the last word to the first.

It is a story I am captivated by because it so evocatively captures my experience of writing- that there are times when the words come out in fully formed sentences, as though already written elsewhere. As though it is not being written by you but through you. Written by a hand other than your own. On those occasions you simply feel, like the poet Ruth Stone did, that you are a vessel that has been tasked with catching something important.

But just as often writing, and just as good writing, can take harder work. Just as often - maybe even more so- you can start with only the very kernel of an idea, hack away at it for hours until it eventually turns into something more, and then spend as many more editting it back down to something else. But for all its 'in the process’ agony, writing like that can be just as good.

In my experience, there is no single formula for writing. And the only solution when you hit a wall, is to work away at it and see what happens. Which is what I dutifully did today, for a good six hours, until it dawned on me that there can be a third option - which is that sometimes there isn’t anything to say.

Which is the very problem with writing to an imposed schedule. Because not only does it mean readers get bombarded with relentless writing, week in and week out, but writers feel a compulsion to produce the work, even when they have nothing to write about. And so the airwaves, and the news channels, the magazines and the papers, and now Substack too, becomes a veritable tsunami of content- much of it good, but much of it also less so - because so much is written to avoid a void.

Which today, if I had had the courage, should have been exactly what I sent you all. Not writing but a respite from it. A gloriously empty page that you could have opened and then rested within. Some much needed space in a sphere of plenty. Like an empty day. Or a gloriously cancelled plan.

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Zoom Yoga Class is ON tomorrow….

....when I will have things to say, about awakening our senses. Join me for an hour of soulful asana and breath work, with a little meditation and poetry thrown in for good measure, exploring the sense of sound and the fine art of listening in to the Spring

Tuesday 25th March 9-10am

Spring Via the Senses: SOUND

Book here to join tomorrow’s session live and/or to receive the recording, which will last a week.

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