Optimizing Myself into the Perfect Writer

I can’t keep going like this. Something has to give.

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Photo by Miguel Bruna on Unsplash

Dear Fam ✨,

I’m not going to sugarcoat this: my engagement numbers have been dropping. 📉 😰 As a writer, I have always been focused on the numbers, which are so clearly more important than the letters. 🔢 So it is shocking and disappointing to see my engagement metrics dipping. 😓

What’s a girl to do? Well, I can always rationalize my pathetic numbers, like so many writers on Substack do: “It’s not about the numbers! It’s about the writing!” But if engaging an audience isn’t actually important, I don’t know why these writers post their stuff instead of just throwing it in the trash can once they’re done. 🤷‍♀️

I’m not going to rationalize or make excuses. I am here to transform my passion into money. I’m going to take action. 🚦

Legendary guru Kevin Kelly has written that, in order to succeed, all an artist needs to do is to earn 1,000 true fans—1,000 people who will buy anything you produce. (1,000 suckers, in other words. 💅) Well, right now, I have 34 Substack sucker-subscribers, and I’m willing to bet that not a single one of you is willing to purchase my bathwater. So we’ve got a long, long way to go. 😐

The truth of the matter is that, if I don’t make some big changes, I am simply not going to make it in the creator economy. And if I don’t make it in the creator economy, I don’t know what I’m going to do.

So I am going to optimize myself. 🤩 I am going to become the best writer—the writer that the Internet knows I can be. I am going to fashion myself, through sheer tyranny of will, into the writer best suited for the online freelance writing landscape of today.

What is this überwriter? ✍️ Who is it that is built to conquer the writing landscape of today? Well, I need to do more research and experimentation to find out. But just based on my readings online, I’ve reached a few preliminary conclusions. 🤓

1. She is a productivity machine. 🤖

People call writing one of the “humanities,” but the truth is, to make it in today’s competitive landscape, you need to be more machine than human. ⚙️ I am going to optimize myself to be a flawlessly productive content creation machine. I will no longer see food as something to be enjoyed or shared with friends or family. Instead, it is writing fuel. ⛽️ Exercise and good health will no longer be self-evident goods—they will be an opportunity to write fitness tips and guides while clearing my brain to write even more content. I will no longer see my life as something to be experienced. Instead, I will see it as the raw material out of which content, and therefore a career, may be constructed. I will plumb the depths of my childhood traumas, my ruined relationships, my commute, everything. 🌎 My family—all of them—will become main characters in the Emmeleigh show. It can all be turned into content. Life experience is nothing more than that which has not yet been transformed into content. ☺️

2. She is outrageous and provocative. 💩

I’ve honestly tried my best to be dismissive, mean-spirited, and disgusting, but I need to turn it up a notch. You see, the best way to get a career in the media is still to inhabit the elusive, swirling brown eye of the shit-storm. 🚽 I post horrible, disgusting content, and people laugh at it—they seem to think that it’s some kind of joke. I need to get so blisteringly annoying that the reply-guys of the world simply can’t help but engage with my content. 😋 I need to race-bait and gender-bait. I need to take a position on hormone blockers that everyonehates. (I’m thinking: any nonwhite child should be allowed to take hormone blockers, no matter how young, but no blockers for the whites.) Every take I post should make my readers’ brains itch—and the only way to scratch that itch is to denounce me. 🤬

3. She builds “real” “relationships.” 💆

There is plenty of writing and content in the world. That much is clear. There are more books than can ever be read, more movies than can ever be watched. You know what there isn’t enough of? Human connection, that’s what. Americans, and people worldwide, are lonelier than we have ever been. We spend our evenings in dark apartments, faces lit by the blue glare of a phone, watching people share their lives with us as if we were their friends. 📱

I can’t just make good content that brings people value. 💵 I need to trick people into thinking that I am their friend. 🤝 I need them to become invested in me, not just my writing. I need to become the product—not my writing. Because, let’s face it: nobody really cares about my thoughts and ideas. What they really care about? Is feeling seen, acknowledged, attended to. 🥰

The trick to becoming a successful writer is not writing better sentences. 🙅‍♀️ It is finding out how to produce the feeling of being cared for at scale. It is making people feel like they are part of a “real” “community.” I don’t know how to do this yet, especially while being as annoying as possible. But once I crack the code, you had better believe that it will be game over for all of you bitches.

Conclusion

 So, over the next few weeks, I am planning to journal my experiences transforming myself into the ideal writer for the content age. I’m going to try all of the techniques, hacks, and tricks I can get my hands on. I’m going to build the fuck out of a “community.” You’re all going to feel so simultaneously nurtured and annoyed that you will have a stroke. I will become

Your best friend, ✨

Emmeleigh