1 Year of Writing
On Substack, Statistics, and Sentimentality
If you write for one year on Substack, you enter the top 1% since almost everyone quits within a year. I choose to believe that this vaguely remembered factoid is true because 1) it flatters me and 2) I’m far too stuffed after the holidays to verify anything. Oh no, I’m potentially spreading fake news like 99% of the Internet. Sue me. This talking point is also a convenient launch pad for some self-indulgence: a one year reflection on writing, Substack statistics, and uncommon sentimentality from me aka giving thanks in the American turkey murder tradition. If you hate this sort of schlock, this meta “writers writing about writing” thing that admittedly can be rather cringe, then hit that UNSUBSCRIBE button. I never ask, “Huh, what if my audience hates it? I better stfu!” I don’t think about you guys at all. And let’s be real, you don’t think about me either. Over half of you might be dead actually, judging by my open rates.
Substack
What has writing on Substack for a year taught me? That I don’t love writing. In fact, I kinda hate it. Sometimes I want to die when I write (only a slight exaggeration). When I say writing, I don’t mean writing a newsletter or a blog—like this post. This post and others like it are easy peasy. I also don’t mean anything I write on Notes (Substack’s version of Twitter/X, for my blissfully ignorant email-only fans. OnlyFans?...I’m sorry). I can shitpost like this on Notes all day every day, lemon squeezy:
Even meatier posts on Notes don’t take much out of me e.g. tech observations on Nvidia and semiconductors or posts on personal finance, pornography, or plagiarism.
What I consider real writing—or more specifically, “real essays”1—consumes all my bandwidth. Examples include finding God again, rethinking being child-free, the erotic as an antidote to shame…maybe half my archive are “real essays.” These things overclock me big time; I’m fried the whole month I write one. I joke with friends that I’m always crying at my computer, but…it’s not a joke. I really do be cryin’ in da club. (All jokes contain a kernel of truth, remember that if you take away nothing else from this blogpost).
Writing “real essays” means doing excavation. I dig and dig, reliving or imagining experiences over and over so that I pluck the right words out of the soil. It’s not about beautiful prose or hamfisting metaphors—it’s about fidelity.2 The sentence can be ugly if it feels true. By the way, this is why people think they can’t draw or write; they’re not really looking. People think they’re drawing an eye, but they are actually drawing a symbol of an eye from their own mind, so it doesn’t turn out right. Likewise, people think they’re writing about an idea, but what they’re really writing about is their idea of the idea, you know what I mean? Apparently Henrik Karlsson said something similar about drawing and writing in a podcast, but I’ve been a painter for decades and came up with this analogy myself, so don’t bully me for plagiarism. It won’t work on me anyways, since I’m Chinese. Anyhow, the point is…it takes everything out of me to really look, which is why I hate writing. But you know what Marilyn Monroe said, if you can’t handle me at my shitposts, then you don’t deserve me at my nuanced neuroticism or whatever.
Statistics
There’s no fighting against my nature; I am a spreadsheet-cel.3 So soothing to make:
Since last November, I published 16 posts totaling ~34,700 words. The 7 “real essays” clocked in at ~18,700 words. I also wrote 2 secret pieces; neither are “real essays” and neither will be published. If I count them, then I wrote 18 posts totaling ~39,000 words.4 On average, I wrote ~2,200 words per post and ~2,700 words per “real essay.”
How were my published posts received?
Well, you already know that my open rate is fairly abysmal at ~34% average for the last few months’ posts. (Though I’m not sure what a good open rate is, so maybe I’m doing alright.) On average, each post was viewed 432 times with 30 likes and 12 comments. In total, my posts were viewed a total of ~8,400 times with ~500 likes and ~190 comments. Meanwhile, just one somewhat viral Note was viewed 12,365 times with 393 likes and 39 comments. For subscribers, I have 1 paid subscriber, 254 total subscribers (+204 YoY) and 437 followers (+383 YoY) on Notes—38 subscribers came from that one viral Note! Sometimes I wonder why I spend time on “real essays” when I can shoot off Notes…I aim to answer this at the end to entice you to keep reading. :)
Speaking of time spent: I saw a Note from Anu that no one shares how long it takes to write anything because of status signaling. Let me be upfront. A blogpost like this takes me between 5-10 hours. A “real essay” easily takes 30+ hours, probably 50+ hours for a really research intensive one. For reference, even the longest bile I spew on Notes takes 1-2 hours, with most of the medium-length thoughtful ones sitting in the 20-30min range. The vast majority of my Notes take <10 min.
Top 3 Viewed Essays
Now for a deep dive into my best performing essays. Each of these are “real essays” that I’m proud of.
Before the week of Nov’23, my essay about the underrated French philosopher Jacques Ellul was my 2nd most read. Now it’s my #1 thanks to both κρῠπτός and Rob Henderson—Kruptos drove an extra ~5-600 views in September, and a link from Rob drove ~500 views in just one day. The best part is the quality, not the quantity (though the quantity is impressive!). Because of the signal boosts, I’ve had great private conversations about Ellul’s critique of technology and propaganda.
A couple other observations: 1) writing it helped me apply/get into/complete a private course on the Information Metacrisis by Nate Hagens and 2) it is by far the most gender imbalanced thing I’ve ever written. At a glance, it’s probably 80%+ men liking, commenting, and restacking it. Women don’t like philosophy (good for them).
This David Foster Wallace dark humor essay used to be my #1 read prior to the Rob Henderson shoutout. A friend who doesn’t want to be quoted said it’s because the algorithm deliberately boosts your first post so that you’ll stick around after seeing Fake Big Numbers…sounds evil, so I choose to believe it’s true. The same friend said they sometimes forget my publication name, so they find me by typing “suicide” into the Substack search bar. Wow. Despite my best efforts, my brand really does seem to be suicide and PowerPoints, which is actually a very topical pairing if you think about it.
I still think this first essay is my funniest. You won’t find a better killer joke out there, which I say with total humility since I mostly synthesized the best jokes I heard about the uh, event. It’s also the essay that helped me bond the most with strangers—I’ve shared laughter and tears with people who’ve either suffered from suicidal ideation or lost someone to suicide. I even made a longterm Substack buddy from it. <3
The Charlie Kirk assassination and memorial may be a contender for the political event of the century. Since I live in Arizona, I simply had to take a shot at gonzo journalism in the vein of Hunter S. Thompson and David Foster Wallace. On the surface, I wrote about politics and propaganda, but I really wrote about how I can’t forgive my mom. Since publication, I’ve heard back from about equal amounts of Left and Rightwing readers, as well as men and women. To that end, I feel like I’ve done my job: written an essay that cuts through propaganda due to shared humanity.
While this one’s been shared around quite a bit, I’m not sure exactly who is sharing or reading it. But I heard through the grapevine that a senior Google Content Manager said it was “really good.” It might’ve just been “good,” since the manager is European and thus naturally effete with refined and restrained sensibilities. But to my American ears, I hear the compliment as “this is the best thing ever written, bar none. Pulitzer prize winning, as a matter of fact.”
Sentimentality
Last year, I wrote about graduating from David Perell’s last Write of Passage (WOP) cohort. At the time, I wasn’t sure if it was worth it. I had mixed experiences with the program and hedged the whole review in what I called critical gratitude, which really was just fancy cope for someone with my particular history and temperament.5 Gratitude can still feel like total malarkey and/or a scam sometimes. But by the end of the review, I had resolved: keep writing and keep editing other people, because that might actually be life changing.
Well, life has really changed these days. By a lot. Also, turns out I can easily feel gratitude as long as I’m around people I naturally get along with. When I reread my review, it’s astounding to see how much my desperation to belong was still leaking everywhere, so much so that I kept overlooking disrespectful behavior well into 2025. But I’ve redirected my energy and attention towards the right people now. I’m so thankful for so many new friends who I don’t want to embarrass by tagging—but suffice to say that I doubt I could’ve kept writing without them.
Now I can say WOP was worth it, and not just for the lifelong friends I’ve found for the first time in my adult life. The course taught us a useful concept called Head, Heart and Wallet (why didn’t David do Head, Heart and Hustle? Stay with the H’s man). I never wanted to write for the Hustle—which is why I don’t think about my audience—since I’ve hustled enough in my day job. Between the Head and Heart, I thought I was writing from the Heart. But remember what I said earlier, about not writing because you’re not really looking? By default, I write from the Head to hide from the Heart. I don’t want to look most of the time.
So why do I write, if I mostly hate it?6 It’s because writing from the Heart is the only way to really live. I have to look at my life and my thoughts and write the truth, not the better version of my life and thoughts I wish I had. Heartfelt truth is found by digging through some dark and painful stones. When I loosen them up, I have more room to breathe, to move, to live beyond old mental prisons. I can say now, without any critical gratitude cope, that I am grateful for my past—I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy, but it’s granted me a very different lens to view the world. It fuels some of my best writing; propaganda is a dark subject, made for a dark girl. I’m well-suited for writing about it, which I look forward to continuing in 2026. Perhaps if I keep looking from the Heart, I’ll one day be able to write well about the gentle and the mundane too, not just the shadows.
P.S. I’m sentimental about my upcoming December essay. It’s the most beautiful one I’ve written yet because it’s about love and my ex (our breakup was my main reason for joining WOP). Thrilled that it will be published in Magazine Non Grata by my friend Anthony Marigold, one of the best people I met through WOP.
Thanks for ideation and feedback: Michael Dean, Coco Liu, Promise Tewogbola, Davide Bruzzone, Malarkodi, Dolores Lucero
Michael Dean’s Essay Architecture 27 pattern criteria
I wrote this chatGPT-ass sentence all by myself, thank you very much
Malarkodi who is a master at graphics suggested I present this info as a funnel—great suggestion, but I got too lazy. If you want a funnel, knock yourself out on my process for grading essays in a scholarship contest. Also, I was debating whether to show the word count if I counted the footnotes since some of my essays are truly nonlinear/quite dependent on the footnotes, but that was too Nuanced Squared even for me
To be technically accurate, I published 15 posts totaling ~32,300 words since my 9/11 essay was written in 2022 (not ragebait despite the title). With the two secret pieces, I wrote 17 net new pieces totaling ~36,700 words
Big 5 personality test predicts inability to feel gratitude…my first actual Note was a restack of Rob Henderson. Life goes in circles sometimes.
And why not just write in private? For one, “writing is social” per WOP. And the public accountability helps a lot, otherwise I wouldn’t finish anything. I’ve managed to hold myself to a fake deadline every month.
One year post–WOP… YAY to us!! Congrats Lily, and don’t stop writing from the heart please 💛
I know everyone on here is unique, stories they bring and perspective. You are one of one. If there’s anyone out there writing like you do, as well as you do, with the down to the marrow level of honesty you bring, I have yet to see it.