How publishing consistently on Substack forced me to stop performing and start writing honestly
Writing in Public Changed How I Write
I did not start writing in public to become a better writer.
I started because I wanted readers.
That was the honest reason. I had a novel coming out. I needed an audience. Substack felt like the right place to build one. So I showed up, published posts, engaged with the community, and hoped the subscribers would follow.
What I did not expect was what the process would do to the writing itself.
A year later, something has shifted. Not in my output or my schedule or my word count. In the writing itself. In the way I approach a sentence, a scene, a truth I am trying to put on a page.
Writing in public made me more honest. And less performative.
I did not see that coming.
The version of myself I used to write for
Before Substack, my writing had no deadline.
And no deadline meant no finish line.
I could revise indefinitely. I could sit with a draft for weeks, moving sentences around, convincing myself it was not ready, finding one more thing to fix before I could let it go. There was always a reason to wait a little longer. Always a version that felt slightly more ready than the one I had.
That habit was not discipline. It was avoidance dressed up as craft.
The moment I committed to a publishing schedule on Substack, something shifted immediately. Not because the writing got easier. But because the deadline made the decision for me. Ready or not, Friday evening was coming. The post had to exist by then.
That constraint, which felt uncomfortable at first, turned out to be one of the most useful things that ever happened to my writing.
The first time I published something that did not feel ready
The first time I hit publish on something I was not sure about, I spent the next two hours refreshing the page.
Not to see the numbers. To see if anyone had noticed the cracks I could still see in it.
It was not a bad piece. Looking back now it was probably fine. But it had gone out before I felt ready to send it, which at the time felt like a significant personal failure of process.
What happened instead was something I did not expect.
The response was warm. A few readers commented. Someone said it resonated. Nobody mentioned the paragraph I had wanted to rewrite one more time.
And I slowly understood something that took many more posts to fully absorb.
The gap between almost ready and ready is mostly invisible to the reader. It is enormous to the writer. But it lives almost entirely inside your own head.
The reader is not looking for perfection. They are looking for something true. And something true does not require one more revision. It requires the courage to let it go.
What the exposure actually did
Here is what I noticed happening slowly over weeks and then months.
I stopped writing sentences I did not mean.
Before Substack, my writing had a certain amount of filler in it. Not dishonest exactly, but not fully true either. Sentences that sounded like the kind of thing a writer should say. Observations that were technically accurate but emotionally safe. Paragraphs that moved the piece forward without actually saying anything that cost me anything.
Writing for a real audience, even a small one, made that kind of writing feel impossible to sustain.
Because a real reader can feel the difference. Not always consciously. But somewhere in the reading, a sentence that is performed rather than felt lands differently from one that is true. It does not stop them reading. But it creates a small distance. A slight cooling of whatever connection was building.
I felt that distance in my own writing the moment I started publishing publicly. I could see the performed sentences for what they were. And I could not keep writing them in the same way I had before.
So I stopped.
Not all at once. Slowly, over many drafts and many posts, I started stripping the performance out of the writing and replacing it with something closer to what I actually thought and felt and observed.
That shift changed everything.
What it did to the fiction
This surprised me most.
I expected writing honest non fiction publicly to change my essays and reflections. I did not expect it to reach into the fiction and change that too.
But it did.
I am currently eight chapters into Temple of Gods, a serialized historical thriller running every Friday on this newsletter. The story follows Andrew Garrick, a British archaeologist who hides inside the Brihadeeswarar Temple in Thanjavur after hours and emerges in 1010 AD, inside the same temple while it is still being built.
I expect the story to run for around 25 chapters. Which means that by the end of the run I will have the first draft of a complete novel. Something I can polish and release as an ebook, or shape into a manuscript and send to literary agents.
That is the unexpected double advantage of building in public. The audience and the book are being built at the same time. Each Friday episode is not just a post. It is a chapter. And every reader who shows up is not just a subscriber. They are a first reader for something that may one day sit on a shelf.
But the more interesting thing that has happened is what writing this story publicly week after week has done to the writing itself.
When I wrote the early chapters of Temple of Gods, I noticed something different in how I was approaching the scenes. I was less interested in writing the scene that sounded like a historical thriller and more interested in writing the scene that was true to the characters inside it.
Writing honestly in non fiction taught me to write honestly in fiction.
I did not plan that. But I am grateful for it.
The thing I still find hard
I want to be honest about this because writing about writing in public can easily become its own kind of performance.
The exposure still feels uncomfortable. Every post. Every episode. Every note published into a feed where it might land well or land quietly or not land at all.
I have not solved that. I have not found a way to make the vulnerability feel easy or natural or like something I have mastered.
What has changed is what I do with it.
I used to let the discomfort push me toward safer sentences. Toward the performed version of whatever I was trying to say. Because at least if I was performing, I could tell myself the real thing was still protected somewhere inside and had not been exposed to whatever response or silence was coming.
Now I let the discomfort point me toward the truest sentence instead.
Not because I am braver than I was. But because a year of feedback, both the comments that landed unexpectedly and the silences that taught me just as much, has shown me that the honest version always connects more than the safe one.
That is the thing writing in public taught me that no craft book ever did.
The reader does not want the version of you that has everything figured out.
They want the version that is still in the middle of it.
One question for you
If you write in public, I want to know this.
Has it changed how you write privately? Has the practice of publishing shifted something in the work you do when nobody is watching?
Share it in the comments. I have a feeling the answers to this one will be as honest as anything in this thread so far.