When Writing No Longer Boils the Pot
Why write when making a living by writing is so unlikely?
I’m still working out how to use Substack. A lot of the Substacks I look at concern politics, but most of my political thoughts pretty much mirror what I read. (This reminds me: Take a look at our friend Harvey Robins’s latest article in City Limits on how New York City Mayor Mamdani can succeed– https://citylimits.org/opinion-how-zohran-mamdani-can-avoid-a-pyrrhic-victory/). I also have a newsletter of ideas for what to read from me and others: Books for Readers.
And while I’m doing informal commercials, I should mention that I’m teaching Novel Writing by Zoom at NYU in a few week at NYU’s School of Professional Studies. Wednesdays, February 4 - April 15, 2026 6:30p.m. to 8:50 p.m. For information, click here: Novel Writing WRIT1-CE9357
Voyaging out into 2026, I’ve decided to do a series of Substacks about writing in a time when publishing– let alone making a living or achieving fame and fortune– is harder and harder. No one paid Samuel Johnson for his famous 18th century bon mot “Only a blockhead writes for anything but money.” This was a clever comment made to entertain his friends through the medium of conversation and recorded by his biographer James Boswell.
Many of us writers and poets make a living by teaching literature or composition. I presently teach novel writing, and I think a lot about the process of writing. I also read a lot and review books–and write books. And short stories and journal entries and minutes of meetings and letters-to-the-editor. Literature has been central to my life since I was old enough to want to participate in the world of stories by making my own stapled books and filling them with pictures and words.
At the time I went to college, literature was a major cultural activity–highly respected and drawing many clever and profound thinkers. Over my lifetime, however, the practice of literature has faded from the foreground. Stories, of course, are always with us–in film and streaming online, in graphic novels and video games as well as in conversation, audio books, electronic readers, and old fashioned print books. A large part of the reason that novels and short stories don’t boil as many pots is simply the competition today for the entertainment dollar. People in the past didn’t have radio or television or the Internet. In the 19th and first half of the 20th centuries people read pretty much anything in their search for entertainment– books of sermons and powerful novels and dashed-off pulp fiction. They gobbled it all. Think of, in the first half of the 20th century, the publishing of cheap paperback classics and the short stories in The Saturday Evening Post. There were genre magazines for westerns and science fiction. In the 19th century there was a sweet spot when many more people could read the various Western languages and had the leisure to read–or be read to. Picture a family sewing and doing other small chores around a table while one person read aloud the latest installment of a Dickens or George Eliot novel.
Today–an amazing paradox to me–as fewer people read for pleasure, it has become easy and affordable to publish your own writing. You can publish your memoir or novel or poetry for a few hundred dollars, or you can join a community of like-minded people writing spinoff stories of your favorite TV show or fantasy novel series– for free, as long as you have access to the internet.
Most people tend to think of writing as its product–the book or printed piece–but writing is also its process. I say to classes I teach, “If you don’t get something out of writing other than the hope of commercial success, you’re probably wasting your time.” It seems to me that writing is first a practice, as meditation is a practice.
The next few of these Substack entries are going to be about that–what we can get from the writing itself. I’ll be touching on entertaining yourself and interacting with other writers and their ideas. I want to explore writers’ peer groups and classes where the intimacy of human conversation becomes part of the process. There is also of course the struggle and delight of making clear, sharp yet sinuous sentences. There is the exploration of other possible lives and worlds through “what-iffing.”
The practice of writing, when it goes well, takes us to a very deep place.