The Joy and Intimacy of the Personal Writing Outlet

In the spring of 2016, I did what everyone was doing, and started a Tinyletter. I had a book coming out, and I thought it would be a good resource for keeping people updated about that process. I imagined all of the milestones I’d document in my dispatches: a breathless cover reveal, a handful of favorable trade reviews, placement on a Most Anticipated list or two.

What I had failed to take into account was that those things don’t necessarily happen for everyone who publishes a book. And, also, that I was losing my mind.

That was the year that a lifetime of low-grade depression and anxiety blossomed into an unmanageable nightmare from which nothing—not therapy or yoga or quitting my job, or even half-tabs of Xanax popped once, twice, three times a day—could seem to wake me.

So I did what I always do when something is inside of me and I want to get it out: I wrote about it. I wrote about it in the Tinyletter, because I didn’t know where else it could go. I had a Tumblr, but the community of writers I’d first found there seemed to have migrated off the platform. Plus there was a sense of intimacy to sending emails: it felt just slightly less cry for help (and into the void) than making semi-ironic jokes about my unbalanced mind on Twitter.

Eventually a regular dose of Lexapro evened me out, but by then I’d fallen in love with the form. So I’ve kept using the Tinyletter ever since, sending a missive every other week, give or take, for the last year and a half. I write about whatever I need to get off my mind that day: what was running around my head during boxing lessons, or the moral calculus of Kesha’s song Praying, or my ritual of making regular pilgrimages west to swim at the beach in the summer.

Sometimes the Tinyletter nets me a paid gig—a small handful of editors have reached out to ask me to expand on something I wrote there, or to say I should think about pitching them pieces. But mostly it’s just a hobby, which is a funny thing to say, because writing is also my full-time job.

But then, I’m hardly alone in this: many of my favorite writers have side-blogs or Tinyletters (which some have begun to transition into paid work via subscription platforms like Substack). These projects sit at a fascinating intersection of our interests and our desires, our drives and our careers.

“These personal outlets allow us to write without having to claim professional expertise, or submit to professional editing; they encourage us to make for the fun of making.”

Especially in the internet era, where publications field underfunded freelance “staffs” and personal-project bloggers are in impossible abundance, writers have had to insist vocally and persistently on the professional and economic value of what we do. But that also hasn’t stopped us from simultaneously making space to do it for free, for ourselves.

Writers have been writing about whatever’s going on with them for time immemorial—it’s just that now the internet allows us to garner an audience for those personal musings, those quotidian keeps-track, as well as our professionally pitched and edited work. These personal outlets allow us to write without having to claim professional expertise, or submit to professional editing; they encourage us to make for the fun of making, to think as an exercise in which we allowed to explore widely, and conclude without a graceful kicker.

The number of people for whom writing is a job as well as a pastime underlines the tenuous nature of being a professional writer in the first place: almost none of us are ever quite able to separate the work of it from the personal pleasure we take in writing, which steered us toward the job in the first place. But this can also work against us, encouraging us to write near-constantly, at the expense of taking time away from our screens.

Jenna Wortham, a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine, is cautious about spreading herself too thin. “A lot of my impulses are met with refusal,” she says of her urge to write. “I’ve been cultivating that for the last few years. Observing when the feeling to write emerges, and then understanding it. How urgent does it seem? This is really a response to the never ending news cycle and the yearning bottomless appetite of social media—it’s easy to write all the time, about everything, non-stop, in all the formal and informal formats. I’m trying to be more conservative about where my energy goes, and invest it in meaningful work.”

But she does keep a Tinyletter called Fermentation & Formation, which is about natural approaches to health, both physical and spiritual, because for her it feels like “a public service.” Fermentation & Formation came out of a post-election sense of helplessness, and a desire to reach out to her community in a way that wouldn’t violate the traditional dictates that surround journalists and political engagement.

“[It] makes me feel active,” she says, “since as a journalist I can’t protest or raise money or donate money.” But there’s also the personal relationship the newsletter creates with readers who only know her from her Times columns: it can also be “a fun little way to show people . . . that I’m more than whatever they think I am.”

For Fran Hoepfner, personal writing offered the opposite: a way to worry less about what her audience thought of her. She started her Tinyletter Chomp Chomp to chronicle, as its description reads, “what I made, what I ate, what I fucked up.” Hoepfner is an Associate Video Director at The Onion, with regular freelance bylines at sites like The Awl and Bright Wall / Dark Room, covering topics that include classical music and film.

Hoepfner admits that “in general, I have a hard time with criticism of my writing and comments sections,” so when she’s publishes something professional, “I always just try to write pieces where I think I am least likely to be called an idiot.” In contrast, she appreciates that Tinyletter allows her to blog for a “small, self-selecting audience.”

“Aside from removing the threat of a hostile comment section, personal writing also offers an alternative to the omnipresent expectation that a writer justify the timeliness of her work.”

For Hoepfner, “It takes a long time for an interest to gestate before I pitch it as a piece for money,” so you might also think of Chomp Chomp as her personal farm team: a place for young interests to develop before she tries to make something out of them in the big leagues. She has written about food and cooking publicly a small handful of times, but to her it usually still feels “like I’m getting away with murder.”

Aside from removing the threat of a hostile comment section, personal writing also offers an alternative to the omnipresent expectation that a writer justify the timeliness of her work: what Hoepfner refers to as “a specific stunt or take” that distinguishes a pizza recipe from We Tried Tide Pod Pizza. In the same way that personal writing is done for purely for the sake of the writer’s own interest in her subject, sharing it with a limited audience allows her to assume that her work is interesting for its own sake—not because of a tenuous link to something happening right this second in popular culture.

Novelist Adrienne Celt, who has self-published a webcomic called Love Among the Lampreys since 2011, agrees that “a lot of what I consider “the work” of writing (i.e. the more frustrating stuff) is publishing related. I won’t say that I don’t crave publishing success—I’m very ambitious!—but I don’t feel accomplished in any given week just because I received external recognition for something I finished in the past.”

For her, feeling “like a writer” comes from a different form of productivity: “If I’m not making something new, I start feeling down. Partially out of a desire to be productive, but more so because that’s what leaves me most fulfilled.” Her desire to be making consistently means that she especially appreciates being able to toggle between novel writing and comics (as well as her day job as a copywriter for Google), which allow her to engage with different forms of creativity without getting burned out on any single one.

Because when you are burned out, getting back to work can be a very scary thing. Emily Gould’s essay collection And The Heart Says Whatever was, in her words, “REVILED” upon its publication in 2010, and for years she struggled to write anything at all in the first person. Ultimately, she eased herself back into the form with a Tumblr called Things That I Ate That I Love. “Writing captions on photos of my ice cream sundae felt like a low-stakes way of getting back into that kind of writing,” she says now.

It also provided a means for her to escape the identity that book, and the work that had preceded it, had established for her as A Woman Who Writes About Herself. “For a long time no one wanted my byline unless it was going to be something like What Is The Internet Doing To Me/Us?? because that’s what I was known for,” she explains. “And I didn’t want to do that, because it was totally boring. I just wanted to write about making gross Laurie Colwin recipes and accompany the post with bad phone photos.”

These days, Gould writes novels and does some freelancing; food is among her subjects. Now that she’s folded that into her professional life, she also keeps a Tinyletter of her own, called Can’t Complain, which is largely about parenting her toddler son.

That sense of escape from an established identity recurs among writers who make time and space for personal projects—especially when the writer’s professional beat has gotten wrapped up in a facet of her identity. Saira Khan is the director of social media for The New Yorker and an occasional freelancer, but her passion project is a newsletter called High-Strung, which she runs along with four other friends.

“When it comes to writing for publications and getting paid for it, as a woman of color, I’ve noticed that editors are only interested in the stories I have to tell about being South Asian,” she says. “And while being a brown woman is a essential part of my life, I do have stories to tell that don’t involve my race, religion, or culture. Starting High-Strung, for me, was a way to reclaim what I was writing about and when I was writing about it. Rather than feeling boxed into only writing about race and culture, it gives me the opportunity to express myself beyond that.”

“That sense of escape from an established identity recurs among writers who make time and space for personal projects—especially when the writer’s professional beat has gotten wrapped up in a facet of her identity.”

The creative possibilities that come with this kind of writing are necessarily very different than the polished work of professional pieces. We’re used to thinking of edited work as necessarily better than the unedited kind. Gould prefers to think of the distinction as more akin to that between raw and cooked food: both are styles of preparation of the material at hand, and each has its pros and cons.

As she wrote in a 2012 Emily Magazine post: “One of the terrifying things about writing is that sometimes the same techniques and strategies that can improve your work can destroy it, and it’s hard, as you work, to know what’s happening. Sometimes a long process of revision and outside editing can strengthen and clarify stories and make them worth reading; sometimes it can leave them as limp and lifeless as an oil-free steam-table vegan curry.”

Perhaps this is ultimately what we seek when we carve out these outlets for ourselves. Much is made of a writer “finding her voice,” but little is said of the work of refining it, of learning which of your sharp corners are style, and which are just affectation covering for inexperience. We test ourselves against all kinds of edges, and we rely on our editors to package us into something palatable for broad audiences. But that makes it all the more critical to check in once in a while, to hold up a hand to one ear and listen to nothing but ourselves, echoing. What do I sound like? Do I still recognize myself? What exactly is it that I want most of all to say?