Am I a Content Creator?

Thoughts on this newsletter and the evolution of one-man projects

Readers: This week marks the one-year anniversary of this newsletter! I’m offering an anniversary discount, in case you’ve been on the fence about upgrading to a paid subscription. Thank you for your support, whether reading, sharing, or subscribing. Here’s to another year of The Deleted Scenes!

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Since I wrote a piece back in February about blogging—musing about abandoned blogs and how publications “die”—I’ve been thinking about what exactly a blogger is, and what exactly I am.

I’m also thinking about this because, as you know, this week is the one-year anniversary of this newsletter! I started this on a whim, and on the suggestion of a few friends and peers, after I left my last job. I initially promised two or three posts a week, but I quickly found that I enjoyed the rhythm of posting every day, and that the process itself helped me to come up with and refine ideas.

I take publishing myself seriously, and it requires discipline and can be a little scary sometimes. You get to write your own headlines, but you don’t have an editor to stop you from saying something stupid. Based, however, on the growth of the audience here, it looks like I’m doing something right. Consider signing up or upgrading your free subscription with this week’s discount!

Anyway, blogs, and particularly what the industry calls “newsletters” (i.e. this publication), are interesting. They’re somewhere between magazines/publications, where you’re an editor/writer/publisher and get paid, and platforms where you’re a “content creator” “monetizing” your work.

I don’t exactly think of myself as a “content creator”—I don’t care for that term. (I object to “content” far more than “creator.”) I think of this newsletter more like a very small-scale magazine that happens to have one editor and writer. On the occasions when someone else writes a post here (rarely, but I’d like to do it more!) I think of it as “commissioning a piece,” not as “doing a collab.”

I’ve worked in magazines for basically my whole career thus far, so it feels natural to apply that body of experience to this publication. The whole routine—planning out pieces for the week, writing headlines and subheads, choosing images, linking related stories, scheduling pieces, promoting them on social media—is comfortable and familiar to me. Substack allows a single person to create that kind of content and publication, with whatever kind of rhythm and level of quality you can muster.

Interestingly, I’ve found that a lot of people in blogging/newsletter writing approach it more like “creators” than “editors of their own publications.” For example, I’ve heard during Substack workshops the sentiment that there’s something “icky” or uncomfortable about promoting your own work, that it somehow cheapens the art and the creativity. At a more detailed level, I’ve also found that my strategy of paywalling previous pieces and thus creating an archive that paying subscribers can unlock is not common among Substack writers, even though it’s how many subscription-based magazines and newspapers work.

I’m writing this piece, though, because despite not exactly seeing myself as a “content creator,” I’ve noticed that I’ve begun to pay more attention to the strategy and rhythm and evolution of other creators (two of whom happen to be YouTubers). I have a better understand of the process and the hustle that it takes to keep these kinds of projects going.

One of my favorites is Guga, a steak enthusiast who runs two YouTube channels, Guga Foods and Sous Vide Everything. (The latter channel is a big reason my wife and I ended up with a sous vide cooker ourselves.) The other is Techmoan, whose retro-tech videos I’ve featured or talked about several times here. Before I was doing my own version of this kind of thing here on Substack, I never really thought about the process that went into these long-running one-man projects: how to find material for new videos month after month, year after year; the tension between familiar elements (music, catchphrases, etc.) and introducing new ones; stuff like that.

The other day, when I was thinking about this new attention I was paying to these projects, I looked up some Reddit threads about Guga Foods, and I found the comments very interesting. A lot of them felt the videos had become too formulaic and familiar—that each one was basically the same, with a couple of original minutes for whatever that episode’s food was. (If you don’t really like steak, I guess they start to kind of all bleed into each other.) Many of the videos are some kind of experiment—dry-aging a steak in seaweed sheets, freeze-drying a steak and reconstituting it with different liquids, injecting beef tallow into a tough, lean cut. I find them entertaining most of the time, and sometimes useful for my own cooking, which I like to do.

I also, in disagreement with some commenters, like the fact that every episode features some of the same phrases and music. There’s a particularly common bit that plays during grilling/searing scenes, for example. It doesn’t get old for me—the longer I follow the channel, the more memories it encapsulates. I like the sense of familiarity, like the show is building its own little culture and body of continuous work. I’m the kind of person who almost never likes it when a company updates a logo. It feels like a common touchstone and mental landmark is being taken away unilaterally. One of the things I like about following a creator for a long time is watching this “brand” come together.

Techmoan is a totally different kind of channel, but there are the same bits of continuity and brand-building. There are a few rotating episode types—deep dives into history, demonstrations, repair walkthroughs. There’s consistent intro and outro music, and occasional sketches that viewers look forward to. All of that over time makes watching a new episode almost like a ritual. I never get tired of his end sequence, a montage of old audio/video mechanisms operating, set to a calming bit of license-free music. It’s so neat to me that you can assemble these bits and pieces and turn them into something new and meaningful.

Of course, anyone who creates content, from an old-school columnist to a radio host to a YouTuber to a blogger, sometimes ends up writing or assembling the same thing. At some point the imperative to create material can take over. Some of the Guga episodes, for example, do feel like the product of trying hard to come up with an idea to fill a slot. Having a formula and a “brand” can end up morphing from something you’ve made into a kind of cage, a set of expectations your audience gets tired of but also demands. I think this is where a lot of clickbait comes from, as well as lot of what looks like people (especially in politics) going off the deep end. At some point you’re playing a role, maybe without even realizing it.

However, I mention these two YouTubers because I think they’ve both done a very good job building up a brand without cheapening it over the years. They also show—like this newsletter does—that it’s possible to build an enthusiastic and relatively large audience around a niche topic. Sometimes I really dislike the internet and the cultural fracturing it seems to produce, but it’s really amazing how much space it creates for individuals with quirky areas of knowledge to share it and even make money at it.

And while it can be constraining or encourage boring duplication, forcing yourself to keep a schedule and a set of themes or topics can also channel and sharpen creativity. Formula can provide the limits within which creativity can flourish. So far, I’ve found that to be the case for myself, and I’m really looking forward to what my work will look like after another year of this discipline.

I remember my father told me a story, from back when he was in college. He was interested in film, specifically screenwriting, and he took a book out of the library on the subject. I don’t remember the details, but it basically laid out the standard formula for a screenplay and movie plot. At first he thought there was no way most movies could possibly follow a formula like that. Yet he watched a few with the formula in mind, and was shocked to notice that yes, pretty much every one of them featured the same structure: a certain number of acts a certain number of minutes apart, a plot twist X minutes in, etc. That relatively similar structure was a sort of scaffolding for so much creativity and originality.

I’m realizing something like that operates with content creation projects. Guga’s steak channel or Techmoan’s old-technology channel couldn’t be more different from my urbanism newsletter, yet being a creator myself opens up a different kind of perception. I can see the parallels between my work and these other creators in very different topics and media. You can see the evolution of themes and production quality, as the project figures itself out, takes feedback into account, and does a lot of learning by doing. The end result may be something a little more formulaic and less quirky than it once was, but with an expert level of production that is really enjoyable, especially when you can see that evolution over the years.

This is all stuff I’ve been wanting to put on the page for awhile, but I also have some questions for you.

What “features” do you like about this newsletter? What familiar themes do you like to see in the rotation? What gives you a sense of continuity, or a sense that everything here is part of an ongoing story or body of work? What do you see as part of its character or brand? Maybe you’re better at seeing that than I am. I’m curious!

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Related Reading:

The Screen Where You Started

Forgotten But Not Gone

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