Not Niching Down
Why I've decided to just let my Substack be what it is
When I started blogging over eleven years ago, I had a single goal in mind: I’m going to write about our home renovations.1
That singular goal quickly fell by the wayside. Two-thirds of the way through my graduate program, I discovered that I liked having a platform with a very small audience where I could write about more than literary analysis. It was public and easy to share; I enjoyed putting my writing out there into the universe and hoping that more people than my Facebook friends and family would see what I was writing.2
I moved to WordPress.com when we moved to Texas, and then moved to WordPress.org during the start of the pandemic when I decided that all of this time at home meant that I needed to start taking my writing more seriously.3
But my struggle was always that I didn’t want to be a blogger. I was a writer with a blog carving out a tiny part of the Internet for my hopes and fears, processing a messy world with a keyboard. I didn’t want to “niche down.” I wanted to be me.
And “me” is a lot of things. I’m a politically homeless Christian seeking to understand my place in a world that is increasingly hostile to my desire to disentangle my faith from politics. I’m a wife and mother discovering what it means to relate to my spouse in a marriage that has survived more than two decades, and trying to figure out how to parent two adolescents barreling toward young adulthood. I’m a teacher relearning how to love my profession while struggling with the outside forces that make my job harder with every passing year. I’m an explorer who wants to see and do it all and write about it along the way. I’m a citizen who wants to reclaim love for my country, with all of her faults and baggage. I’m a writer using my keyboard to make sense of all of this, working to form an online community with those willing to journey with me through the mess.
As I look toward 2024, a year to which I have assigned the word “Intentional,” I’ve decided to lean into who I am as a writer. Sure, there are times when niche matters. When I produce work for writers, most of my friends and family have no interest in what I have to say. When I write a special series, like what it was like to live in Texas as a lifelong Midwesterner, some might find it occasionally interesting but they don’t have a desire to follow it every step of the way.
But if you are sticking with me, if you are here to journey with me as I reflect on this one wild and precious life, then I’m going to trust that you are with me for most of what I share. I’m going to trust that you are willing to invite me in at least once a week to share with you where life is taking me at a given moment.
And thank you for giving me a chance.
Programming note: I have three travel posts planned during the remainder of 2023 because I am wrapping up my summer vacation posts and Campsgiving. Then there will be a long break from travel until we head back out to camp and explore some more in the spring. So bear with me! I have a lot of life reflections coming your way to get us through the winter months.
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Feel free to read that original Blogger account, but be warned: I’m a much better writer now 😂
So that first blog often covered the sometimes good and usually ugly parts about buying a foreclosure…and the husband of the couple who bought it found the blog and read it! He read about the frequent mouse problem, the creatures that got into the attic, the wallpaper issues, the face drawing that we kept trying to paint over in the guest room that never went away. And they still bought it.
Note, moving to WordPress.org did not increase my readership. It would take finding a writing community here at Substack before I would start to see any real readership growth.
I wrote about this a couple of weeks ago. Not just about Substack, but relating to my entire career. Why are we expected to produce a single wavelength? Humans are a spectrum. We can be good at and care about more than one thing. So why is it generally frowned upon to present ourselves as multifaceted in our exchange with the world? It depends how we’re writing our story, I suppose. If, for example, you’re mainly writing about politics and then randomly start talking about endangered species, there should be some tie-in, somehow. But I think you have the correct idea to just be your whole self. 🖤
Multiple identities make for more subjects to write about. My own substack focuses on writing and publishing, but that can include a lot, especially since I've published in so many different genres. Happy Holidays!