Genre Conventions of Substack Confessionals
Trying to define an essay micro-genre.
Although genre fiction is often used as a light slur, to contrast a novel with true literary fiction, the term really should be treated as one of endearment. I’ve written obsessively about my love for the British naval novel, a mode of writing as tropey as the best of them. As with any genre, its constraints exist to make solid work achievable for the writer and legible to the reader. Some genres are incredibly well-constrained: see for example detective novels, for which you can find 10 Commandments from Raymond Chandler and S.S. Van Dine’s famed “20 Rules for Writing Detective Stories.” The detective novel, the British naval novel, and what I’d like to refer to as the Substack confessional are alike in this way: the constraints of genre make it quite hard to write a transcendent text, and relatively easy to write a solid one.
You’ve read one or many Substack confessionals already, I suspect, and I think it’s worth trying to describe their features, if in slightly less rigor than Cline’s detective rules (“11. A servant must not be chosen by the author as the culprit”).
What are the genre conventions of the Substack confessional?
Most concretely, these essays take a personal insight of the writer (almost exclusively a 20-something working in tech) and use it to reflect on the psychology of humans or on human nature writ large. Texts are usually in first person, although they can slip into second person in occasional personal narratives. They are straightforward, with little artifice, aside from the kind of summary Didionisms that are endemic to Internet writing, like “consider this,” “here’s what I am trying to say,” or “this is the point:”. Extended metaphor isn’t rewarded, and flourishes or similes are typically confined to the sentence level. And they’re comfortably internet-native, which means their register is loose, flitting from serious to memey in the same paragraph.
The Substack confessional offers therapeutic guidance: if not didactic, it’s straightforwardly moral. The emphasis is on personal growth, in a reflective mode. What did I think then, and what do I think now? How do I feel now, and (sometimes) what does it tell all of us humans, reader and writer alike?
At its best, the Substack confessional describes a fundamental human truth and allows us to see it anew. At its genre-conventional worst, it risks being fodder for the writer’s rumination, rather than reflection.
My friend Peter researches the relationships Substack writers have with their subscribers [You can read his excellent thesis here]: how they mirror or don’t mirror traditional media relationships, how parasocial dynamics change what writers write, and so on. He suggested I further investigate the political economy of the Substack confessional. On reflection, it seems to grow out of the “first-person industrial complex” decried by Slate writer Laura Bennett in 2015. Bennett and others argued that managers and editors at these media companies were desperate for clickable content, and the most clickable content was valuable for being a real piece of someone, something raw. So interns and editorial assistants were encouraged to bare their souls for content, and every so often one of them would go viral, as often from hate-reading as from enjoyment, and got eaten alive in ensuing discourse firestorms. The industry relied on farming the naive or the venal, and we ate it up (see Cat Person). This older genre became so obvious and overdone that Jia Tolentino had to inform us, two years later, that “the personal essay is over.” Those mid-decade essays, she suggested, “were too personal: the topics seemed insignificant, or else too important to be aired for an audience of strangers.”1
This dynamic isn’t happening in the Substack confessional. No one is making the author write: she’s (typically) making a living from a day job. Instead the confessional serves as a vessel for the therapeutic process. To write for the confessional writer is to both move through a personal pain and to turn it into something valuable for readers. As a result, the genre takes on some of the features of contemporary discussions of therapy. Despite airing to a more private audience than its parents in ThoughtCatalog or Jezebel, it’s more restrained, less showy. Vulnerability is required, but typically not in a puking or ugly-crying way. Reflections on work encounters are appropriate. So are romantic experiences or family pain, if they happened a while ago or are shrouded in vagueness. But these confessionals aren’t diary entries: they’re crafted for public consumption.
Philip Rieff and Jezebel aren’t the only predecessors of the confessional mode. The other tonal influence I spy is founder/investor Paul Graham, whose essays form the canon of techie reading. The confessionals and Graham’s essays tend toward the same flat style, and an uncannily similar universalism of lessons; the confessional writers aim to be the Paul Grahams of emotion. I ask Brunella (
) what she makes of the parallel. She tells me “I do think that the Substack personal essay is influenced by tech’s values, just because Substack was first adopted by techies often in direct opposition to the media ecosystem.”There’s something to this, I think – the demographics of Substack confessional authors put most at formative ages when Graham’s stuff peaked. The same demographic grew up watching the mass media personal essayists get eaten alive, and learned from the culture war that objective, impersonal stances in journalism are always a pose. Writing to an audience of friendly subscribers reduces the risk of being cannibalized, and writing about the self avoids the problems of trying to say something concrete and true about an object in contention.
Operating within the genre strictures of the Substack confessional minimizes one’s attack area, because fulfilling the conventions also means staying on one’s own feet, discussing the internal emotions one knows better than anyone. “Write what you know.” The risk seems to be that in avoiding contention by remaining in an untouchable place, surprising or challenging the reader becomes increasingly difficult.
In the background of the personal essay trendcasting of the last decade, there’s been a writhing debate over the death and life and death of literary autofiction, see for example 2014: The Death of the Postmodern Novel and the Rise of Autofiction or Lorentzen last year. I don’t like many of these novels and therefore don’t know enough to unpack. For good contemporary fiction (auto?) maybe you read Sympathetic Opposition's
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