HOW TO WRITE A NON-FICTION SUBSTACK ESSAY

Sub-header that suggests an unexpected twist on the title, creating curiosity.

“This is a quote from either a historical figure everyone has heard of, or nobody has heard of.” - Some Dead Fucker

Webster’s dictionary defines a standard essay open, after the softening quote, as defining or describing something even the children of uncontacted tribes would be familiar with in way, way too much detail.
While grammatical tricks like line-breaks, tabs, capitalization, etc. are typically used by competent writers to ease the reading experience, you can expect the standard substack essay to be a monolithic paragraph, and should strive to replicate this. As a reader if you’re seeing even basic grammatical conventions followed, you ought feel yourself lucky, but also a different type of damned, as the non-fiction substack writer who can use even grade school grammatical conventions can be expected to be a long-winded sanctimonious jackass with a lexicon anchored in a childhood book report.
If your opening is borderline hostile in its inflammatory rhetoric, you’re doing it correctly.

You’ve reached the second paragraph of your non-fiction substack essay, so now you should prepare to add a block-quote that feels weirdly out-of-synch with the flow of the rest of the essay, and doesn’t actually highlight anything of importance. At this point you’re aiming to wow with an essay that is somehow both over and under researched, simultaneously. Non-standard beliefs about science, medicine, sociopolitics or even daily life are casually hand-waved with a sentence or two, while a statement that most roads have at least one lane will feature multiple cited graphs from the Department of Transportation.

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“You’ve reached the second paragraph of your non-fiction substack essay, so now you should expect a block-quote that feels weirdly out-of-synch with the flow of the rest of the essay, and doesn’t actually highlight anything of importance.”

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At the approximately 300-500 word point, your non-fiction substack essay comes to an important fork in the road: Should you abruptly conclude, without meaningfully driving forwards a conclusion?
Or, god help us all, shall you turn this in to four thousand words that steal irreplaceable time and fuel to accomplish as much as the 300-500 words essay?¹

It’s usually best to save tangential political diatribes for the mid-point of the essay, as the sunk-cost fallacy is pretty default in most humans, so rather than doing the sane thing and groaning and closing your screed and moving on with their lives, the poor, poor reader will muddle through, and even just glide past the glaring internal inconsistencies in your world view.

Now that you’ve lost your reader’s respect, and wasted their time, you can get back to the point you were (poorly) making, which is itself tangential to your actual point you set out to write about. You’ll realize the previous fact at about this point in your essay, and, as yet another victim of the sunk-cost fallacy, you’ll maybe edit in a footnote or two² to try to tie your point further together.

This rarely works.

Your reader. Photo by Alexander Grey on Unsplash

With an image sprinkled in for a little pizaz, and to break up the flow of text with some color, you’re also just at about the half-way point, as you write by word count, rather than by what’s needed to express and say what needs saying.
This is fine, everyone does it, writing is a job and all the real ones know that.

You’re gonna flounder a bit, realizing that you’re only half way to a thousand words, maybe you’ll throw in another block quote that somehow muddles the point further, forcing your reader to ask “why are they highlighting THIS”, but you don’t know either, as you just picked a line that felt punchy.

You can’t immediately sprinkle in the blockquote, so you’ll meander further, and really at this point nothing you’re saying has much to do with anything, but, haha word count go brrrrrr and nobody really reads these anyways, and the people that do do so because they need to, they need to be able to give that book report perfectly to the class and get that oh-so-earned A+, so unless you violate a rule taught to them by an Authority, they won’t dare question a damn thing you do, as to look or feel stupid is a far worse fate than even death.

You’re gonna pull through it though, as if you did it right you’re near the home stretch. If you’re smart, you’ve saved your punchy and clever conclusion for near the end, and if you search your soul you’ll realize that that last paragraph is about the only thing worth saying in this entire essay, and really the whole fucking thing probably should’ve just been a note, but, notes don’t get you prestige, they don’t make you a writer, and get you a cushy columnist job you can do in a cardigan in your home office while sipping a fair trade tea.

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“This is fine, everyone does it, writing is a job and all the real ones know that.”

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Eight hundred and sixteen words. You say fuck it, you’ll clinch it in the high 800s, nobody will notice or care, it’ll feel like a thousand words.

Actually maybe one more picture, try a little harder to make this one related. Photo by bruce mars on Unsplash

In your last paragraph, you gotta bring it home quickly, and really since this last bit will actually feel cogent it’ll be the emotional memory most people retain in their long term memory from reading your peace.
The most important part of writing a non-fiction substack essay is to use as many words as possible to say not a single goddamn fucking thing.

1. Nothing. Absolutely fucking nothing.

2. Hopefully just two.