I’ve recently started noticing a disturbing trend that would’ve sounded completely nuts just a couple of years ago. Writers are actively admitting they’re deliberately leaving typos, awkward sentences, or obvious mistakes in their articles because they’re worried sounding too polished will make people think they used AI. Some even say they stop themselves fixing paragraphs they know they could improve, just in case the finished version looks “too perfect.”

Just the other morning, I stumbled across one of those discussions in the comments section of an article. One writer suggested leaving a couple of spelling mistakes in every sentence. Another recommended avoiding smooth transitions because they “feel too ChatGPTish.” A third argued that if a draft reads too cleanly, the writer has probably edited it too much.

I still can’t quite believe we’ve ended up here because writers have rewritten weak sentences, cut unnecessary words, smoothed rough transitions, and fixed mistakes before anyone else saw them.

Imagine explaining to an editor of writing tutor twenty years ago that you deliberately left a few spelling mistakes because the corrected version looked “too polished.” They’d probably assume you were joking, or “taking the mickey” as we say in Scotland.

But somehow, the conversation about sacrificing quality to prove authenticity actually exists now… and people are having it with completely straight faces.

For hundreds of years, if someone wanted a realistic image of themselves, they needed a painter. A portrait could take weeks or months to complete, and the quality of the final result depended on the artist’s skill, patience, and ability to capture the person sitting in front of them.

Then photography arrived.

Suddenly, a camera could create a detailed image of someone’s face in a fraction of the time. Newspapers and critics started asking what would happen to portrait painting. If a machine could produce a more accurate likeness faster and cheaper, what reason did anyone have to pay someone to paint one?

And honestly, it’s hard to argue with that question.

If you were a portrait painter watching this happen in the 1800s, you probably wondered whether your entire profession was about to disappear. You had spent years learning how to create realistic images, and then a new invention arrived that could do that one specific task better than you could.

Some painters stopped working in portraiture altogether. Others kept painting and started exploring different ways to use the medium. A few generations later, the idea that photography replaced painting sounds strange. People still buy paintings. Museums are still filled with portraits, landscapes, and abstract works. Artists still spend enormous amounts of time creating pieces that have value because of the person who made them.

The camera solved one problem.

Painting continued solving another.

I keep thinking about that because every time a new technology appears, people immediately start asking whether the old skill has become useless. But often, the better question is what people were actually trying to do in the first place.

Let’s run a little thought experiment together.

Imagine enough writers actually start following this stupid advice to make their writing worse. Now switch places and pretend you’re a reader looking for the best explanation of a topic on Google. Two articles appear in your search results. One is clean, well edited, and easy to follow. The other has distracting mistakes, clunky sentences, and rough transitions the author deliberately chose not to fix.

A writer can spend an hour making a paragraph clearer, tighter, and easier to read, look at the finished version, and think, “I’d better make this slightly worse or somebody’s going to accuse me of using ChatGPT.”

Think about how insane that is.

For centuries, polished prose was the goal. Writers chased the perfect sentence, editors spent their careers cutting unnecessary words, and publishers rejected manuscripts because paragraphs weren’t strong enough. People dedicated entire lifetimes to making written communication better.

Now we’ve created a situation where a writer can produce a clear, well-edited article and immediately wonder whether they should mess it up before publishing. Maybe add a typo. Maybe leave the clunky sentence. Maybe keep the paragraph that clearly needed another rewrite. After all, nothing says “human creativity” quite like intentionally publishing work you know is poorly written. And then writers bicker on social media, wondering why millions of people think AI can write better than people.

Geez… of course they do.

They’re comparing AI’s cleanest work against human writing that was deliberately made worse to survive the latest AI witch hunt. Readers never see the cleaner draft and they never know the awkward paragraph was a choice. Instead, they just keep reading article after article until polished writing starts feeling like something AI does and poor-quality and typo-ridden writing starts feeling like something people do all the damn time.

So let me ask you this…

What exactly did we think was going to happen?

We’ve spent centuries telling writers to polish their work. But now, because of AI witch hunts by people who have no idea what they’re talking about, we’re teaching them to hide the polish. Then, we’ll wonder why the public starts associating clarity, precision, and polished prose with AI instead of the species that invented all three.

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Every week, I’ll chat to someone who’s convinced the reason they aren’t getting more views on their writing is because they haven’t found their niche. Often, they’re trying to decide whether they should become “the productivity writer,” “the history writer,” or “the memoir writer.” Some even have half a dozen drafts sitting untouched because they’re worried the topic doesn’t fit the personal brand they’re trying to build.

Just the other day, I was reading through a group chat on Slack, and saw someone ask whether it was okay to publish an article outside his niche of leadership. One reply suggested creating an entirely separate account. Another warned it could “confuse the algorithm.” A third said readers only follow specialists now, so writing about anything else was basically wasting time.

Crazy, right?

Probably why I had to read some of the comments twice. Because for most of publishing history, writers weren’t sitting around trying to squeeze their creativity into o…

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My dad once told me people are surprisingly good at taking something completely unrelated and turning it into a signal that it’s time to work. Professional athletes wear the same socks, students swear they can only study in one particular chair, and some people can’t start the day without a certain coffee mug or playlist.

Guilty as charged.

Writers have been doing this for a long time. Ernest Hemingway wrote standing up. Truman Capote said some of his best work happened lying on a couch with a cup of coffee nearby. Charles Dickens walked for miles every day. Looking back, it almost feels like every famous writer eventually came up with one strange little rule and decided not to mess with it.

I don’t think that’s a coincidence.

Your brain spends the whole day making decisions. So when it finds a routine that seems to lead somewhere useful, it hangs onto the whole thing. Write enough articles while drinking the same coffee …

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I was making breakfast one morning when I put on a podcast interview with a New York Times bestselling author. About halfway through, the host asked a question I’d probably heard a hundred times before.

“What advice would you give to writers?”

I remember looking up for a second because I thought... maybe this would be different.

I don’t know.

Maybe this would finally be the interview where someone said something I’d never heard before. Or maybe it wasn’t even a habit. Maybe there was just... some way of thinking that explained why some writers kept producing books year after year while everyone else seemed to spend more time talking about writing than actually doing it.

“Write every day, read more, and finish what you start.”

I remember thinking, “that can’t be it.”

Surely… not?

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I’ve lost count of how many conversations I’ve had with aspiring writers over the years.

The questions are almost always the same.

What app do you use? Do you write every day? How many words do you aim for? Is there a best time to be creative?

Every now and then, I wonder what those same people would ask if they actually spent a morning watching me work.

Probably none of those.

They’d see a document that never seems to stay the same. Paragraphs getting cut. New ones appearing. Me reading the same sentence over and over because I can’t decide if one word is better than another. Half the time I’d just be staring at the screen, thinking.

There’s not much to photograph.

And definitely not much that would make a convincing productivity video.

I don’t really blame people for asking those questions. Most people only ever see the finished article, so of course they’re curious about the routine behind it. But after seven years of doing this, I think we’ve becom…

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When people tell me they’re “trying to get through” a book, I don’t think they realize how strange that sounds.

Books aren’t medicine. Nor chores. And they’re certainly not something you grit your teeth through just to say you finished.

And yet, plenty of adults treat reading that way.

They sit down at night, already tired, open a book they don’t enjoy, read the same page twice, then blame themselves for losing focus.

That isn’t a discipline problem.

It’s a mismatch.

Most people don’t have much reading time. A few pages before bed. A chapter on a train. Ten minutes while something else loads.

That’s it.

So when a book doesn’t pull you in, it doesn’t just waste that time. It burns the desire to come back tomorrow.

We often like to pretend boredom is part of becoming well read. And that if a book feels like work, it must be doing something important and of a certain intellectual caliber.

But most of the time, it’s just boring.

The average…

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Someone at a town hall meeting asked why the city still invested in public libraries.

“People can Google anything now,” he said. “Why keep paying for buildings?”

The librarian answered, “Because not everyone has WiFi, and not every kid has a table to work at.”

No one had a reply.

“Some people come here to print forms they can’t do at home,” the librarian continued. “Some parents bring their kids here after school because they don’t have anyone else to watch them. Some students study here because their house is too crowded.”

A few people nodded.

Because libraries aren’t outdated.

Rather, they’re a critical lifeline for the people everyone else forgets.

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Almost 8 years ago, I joined another writing platform called Medium. Like everyone else, I started with zero followers and wanted to build an audience.

In my first month, I got 27 subscribers. My second, I grew my audience to a whopping 33 subscribers. And for over 12 months, my subscriber count hovered below 100.

Why aren’t people subscribing to me?

Am I terrible writer?

Or are the overlords in Silicon Valley throttling my work in the algorithm?

All of those thoughts went through my head. But eventually, I realized that I wasn’t engaging with other people’s work, and thus I wasn’t giving my work the opportunity to be seen.

So I started leaving comments.

“Nice post. Check out my work.”

You know, the usual spammy stuff you see from people who have no idea how to market their work effectively. And perhaps unsurprisingly, nobody paid attention. That is, unless they left me a note saying to stop self-promoting on their article.

So I tried a different tactic.

Every single day, I commented on (at least) 20 articles. It was often something thoughtful. eg. A few sentences on why I enjoyed reading it, and how the piece made me think about the topic in a new way.

What happened next sent chills down my spine.

My subscriber count began to increase. Not quickly. But consistently enough that I felt the countless hours spent leaving meaningful comments on people’s work was actually worthwhile. And so, over a 12 month period in 2019, I grew my following from approximately 100 people to 2,938.

The compounding growth didn’t stop there.

In 2020, my following grew to 13,000+ during the calendar year. And as a result, I was able to build a full-time income solely from writing long-form articles.

Now let’s circle back to Substack.

Various bestselling authors (including myself) have had to moderate comments and chat threads because of people spamming their article link without offering anything in return.

And I get it.

For several months, I thought that was the best way to promote my work. And if I could post the link in as many people’s comments as possible, I’d get thousands of eyeballs on my articles in a matter of days.

Except that’s not what happens.

Almost ever.

Practically everyone I’ve ever spoken to hates it when authors spam their article/book link in a comment or chat thread. After all, it feels like no effort was made to establish a relationship with the person who’s audience the spammer is trying to hijack.

So what growth strategy works on Substack instead?

Crossing your fingers and hoping for the best? Or being best friends with several New York Times bestselling authors and asking them to give you a shoutout?

Nope.

There’s a much simpler way to grow from 0 to 13,000 subscribers on Substack. And in the rest of this newsletter, I’m going to show you exactly how.

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The bestselling author Gary Paulsen once told a room full of teachers that a librarian saved his life.

He explained that home wasn’t safe. His parents drank, they fought, and he spent hours in the woods instead, hunting, fishing, and sleeping outside when he could.

But winters in Minnesota were harsh. The cold pushed him to look for shelter. One afternoon, he noticed a building lit from the inside. He opened the door.

It was the local library.

At first, he only went inside the library to get warm. A chair by the heat and four walls. And the librarian didn’t press him, nor tell him to leave. Then one day, she gave him a card. Told him he could borrow books. Later, she began recommending titles, one after another.

Paulsen said his life improved shortly after. He started reading and he kept coming back. And what stuck with him wasn’t only the books, but the fact that someone noticed him and cared without asking for anything in return.

Years later, those books inspired him to write stories of his own. And when people asked how he became a writer, he always gave the same answer.

“A librarian saved my life.”

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I don’t have a story as memorable or inspiring as Paulsen’s, but I know what he meant.

My family often couldn’t afford to buy new books, so we went to the library instead. Mom parked the car out front, and I ran straight to the children’s section. Plastic covers on every book, barcodes taped to the spines.

Most weekends we did the same thing. I’d grab a chair and sit for hours. Nobody asked what I was working on. Nobody told me to leave.

That was the difference compared to everywhere else.

In school, I was told to sit on the sidelines. In shops, I had to keep my hands in my pockets so I didn’t break anything because of my dyspraxic tendency to be clumsy. At home, there were chores waiting. But in the library, I could just sit and get lost in my imagination.

My parents divorced when I was young, and we moved every two or three years after that. New houses & rules to figure out. Nothing stayed the same for long. So, for a while, that library card in my pocket was the only thing with my name on it that felt permanent.

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I went into my local library on a Tuesday afternoon. Every table was full. A group of teenagers traded graphic novels at one end. A man in a work jacket typed on a public computer.

I walked past the new releases section and saw a row of books with names I knew. Writers who once sat at the same kind of desk I was sitting at, trying to get a draft right. Their work was being picked up by strangers who didn’t have to spend a penny to read it.

Here’s the part most people miss…

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My goal was to become a better writer.

So I kept a little notebook in my pocket, the cheap kind with thin paper, and I wrote in it whenever I wanted to capture a moment. eg. A kid sitting on the curb after school, tracing circles in the dirt with his shoe. Or, a man in a cafe was pushing the chairs back into place… even though he wasn’t the one who moved them.

Didn’t think much of this habit at first. Just lines, really. Half thoughts. Things I didn’t want to forget but didn’t know what to do with either. Filled a few pages, then more, started noticing how my thoughts had become a little clearer.

One night, I typed one of those notes up, just to see how it looked in another format, and posted it on Substack. Thought nothing of it. Closed the laptop. Went to bed. By morning, there were thousands of likes. By the end of the week, one of those notes had passed fifty thousand likes.

Another one followed.

Then another.

Strange how the smallest thi…

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I recently studied the downfall of National Novel Writing Month, better known as NaNoWriMo. The challenge encouraged aspiring authors to write a 50,000-word novel in the month of November, which worked out to roughly 1,667 words every day.

Progress updates started showing up from thousands of people almost immediately. About missed targets, unfinished chapters, and evenings spent squeezing in a few hundred words before bed. Some writers fell behind during the first week. Others spent entire weekends trying to catch up. But by then, many had already written more words than they normally managed in months.

NaNoWriMo isn’t around anymore. After years of financial difficulties, declining trust within parts of the writing community, and a series of controversies that damaged its reputation, the organization eventually shut down.

It’s a shame.

For a long time, the challenge gave writers a reason to open a document and start typing.…

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I was ten when Mom let me visit the library by myself.

“Stay here where it’s warm,” she said. “I’ll be back when the church bells ring.”

I wandered between the shelves, breathing in paper and polish. Not sure where to start.

A woman behind the counter looked up. “Need any help?”

I almost said no. Then stopped. “I don’t know what to read.”

Her glasses slipped down her nose mid-smile. “What do you like?”

“Stories with someone like me.”

She pointed toward the back. “Try there.”

So I did.

I sat on the carpet, opened a book, and started reading before I even checked what it was. By the time Mom came to pick me up, three books were stacked beside me. I’d already read half of one. She laughed. Said we should only take one. Then, helped me carry all of them home.

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I used to have a pretty idealistic vision of what becoming a full-time writer would look like. There were book signings in exotic cities, coffee chats with bestselling authors, and invitations to literary festivals. And for a while, I assumed that was roughly what professional writing careers looked like.

But a few months after going full time, I started realizing how different the reality was as most days looked almost identical. I was usually writing in the mornings, editing in the afternoons, answering a few emails somewhere in the middle, and trying to figure out why a headline that worked perfectly yesterday suddenly looked terrible today.

The place where I spend most of my time is an IKEA desk in my bedroom. Or occasionally, I’ll spice things up and type on the living room floor. If you took a photograph of my apartment, nobody would mistake it for the headquarters of a thriving media business. There’s …

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I read a news story about a library director in Wyoming who was told to pull LGBTQ+ books from the shelves. She refused. The county fired her a week later.

Reporters asked if she regretted it.

“Absolutely not,” the library director said.

Then she took the county to court.

Last month, they settled for $700k. Reporters called it a costly mistake. Locals called it justice served. And now, other librarians are watching. Some out of fear. Some out of respect. But everyone understands what it means to stand their ground.

Because censorship has a price tag.

And so does courage.

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I’ve spent enough time online to notice people becoming confident about their ability to spot AI writing on sight, which probably explains why every few days somebody publishes a thread exposing fraudsters. One person focuses on punctuation. Another gets suspicious of articles that sound too structured. And lately, I’ve seen more people treating completely normal literary techniques like evidence somebody secretly opened ChatGPT halfway through writing.

Earlier this morning, I ended up reading one of those articles out of curiosity. The examples were all over the place. One section pointed to similes as an obvious AI tell. Another warned readers to watch out for metaphors and descriptive qualifiers. Which would’ve been surprising news to basically every novelist, essayist, and columnist from the last hundred years.

Then things got even more ridiculous.

The author started breaking down phrases like “slightly confusing” or “remarkab…

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I was scrolling through Substack and noticed some of the strongest writers were in their forties, fifties, and beyond.

One woman wrote about losing her job at fifty-two and starting over with a borrowed laptop. Another described publishing her first essay after raising three kids and twenty years of self-doubt. A man in his sixties wrote about leaving corporate life and finding peace in writing again.

And maybe that’s the real secret.

The writers who outlast everyone don’t write to keep up. They write because, after everything else, there’s something they need to say.

Toni Morrison published her first novel at thirty-nine. Frank McCourt was sixty-six when Angela’s Ashes came out. Laura Ingalls Wilder started writing about her childhood in her sixties. I used to think that meant they were late to the party. Now, I think everyone else was just early.

Before Morrison was a novelist, she was an editor. Two kids, one paycheck, mornings before sunrise. She wrote The Bluest Eye while the rest of the house slept. McCourt spent half his life teaching high school English. He told stories about growing up poor in Ireland between grading papers and breaking up fights. Wilder wrote for farm journals, describing the fields, the weather, the people next door.

None of it looked like a career.

But it was all practice.

When their books came out, people acted surprised. As if good writing belonged to youth. As if time makes people less competent instead of more. But those pages came from years of life experience, seeing things fall apart, and learning how to start again.

Morrison, McCourt, Wilder. Those are three writers who didn’t wait for approval. And there are countless other examples I could list off. All of them just kept going. And that’s what I keep thinking about. How the world celebrates speed, but time is what gives stories their edge.

Anyone can write early.

Few have the patience to live first.

When I first started writing, I was impatient. I used to check my stats every few hours (or minutes), refreshing like the screen might finally tell me something new. As if proof of progress lived in a graph, or a line climbing upward.

But patience isn’t waiting. Rather, I think it’s working without applause. It’s the drafts that never see daylight, the ones that sound fine at 11pm and useless by morning. It’s watching someone else blow up overnight, and pretending you don’t care. It’s learning how to keep writing when there’s nothing left to prove except that you still have something to say… and are going to damn well say it.

Every bestselling author I know had years that didn’t look like much. Months where the inbox stayed empty. Seasons of low earnings. Back-to-back years where they questioned if it was still worth it. But they kept showing up. Not because it was fun, but because writing was made them feel alive. As Maya Angelou so eloquently put it in I Know Why The Cage Bird Sings:

Here’s the part no one wants to hear…

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I paid a professional editor to go through one of my drafts before publication. I’d already rewritten the piece several times myself, fixed the grammar, tightened sections, and convinced myself it was probably ready. But when her notes came back, almost every paragraph had comments.

Some pointed out repeated sentence patterns. Others flagged sections that sounded forced or overexplained. One paragraph had so many changes that it barely resembled what I’d originally submitted. And honestly, seeing that the first time stung a bit.

“You’re explaining the point before the reader has had a chance to feel it,” one comment said. Another section simply had: “This sounds like you’re trying too hard to sound insightful.”

At first, I kept reopening the document hoping I’d overreacted. But after a couple of days, I realized she was right about most of it. A lot of the lines I’d been proud of were doing too much. And some of the parts …

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I hadn’t heard of Gabrielle Zevin until Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow started showing up everywhere. I saw people reading it on trains, posting photos beside their coffee cups, and saying it changed the way they saw love.

She had written other books before. But those were ones that didn’t seem to reach this kind of attention. Then Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow took off and suddenly she was on every bestseller list. Awards, interviews, a movie deal. And almost everywhere I looked, people said Gabrielle’s success came out of nowhere, like she had been discovered overnight.

Last night, I thought about how success often looks from the outside. How it always seems sudden until you see the years behind it. So, I closed my laptop and looked out the window. Somewhere, a writer was celebrating the best week of their life. Somewhere else, another was wondering if it would ever be their turn.

Gabrielle Zevin didn’t come out of nowhere.

She published her first book in 2005, a young adult novel called Elsewhere. It sold enough to keep her writing. A few years later came The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry, which found readers who loved books about books. Then she kept going. More stories, more years, more trying. Seventeen years of work before Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow changed everything.

That’s what people miss when they call someone an overnight success. They see the headlines, not the long stretch of days when nothing happens. They see the moment it all clicks, not the drafts that never felt good enough to publish.

Here’s something a bestselling author once told me…

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There’s this thing that often happens when a post flops.

You click publish, maybe around 8am or 2pm, depending on what you’ve been told works best. Then you sit back, maybe refresh your inbox once or twice, and tell yourself not to care about how many views the article gets.

But you do.

I’ve been writing full-time for seven years now. And it still happens. I put something out there I actually like, and it just goes out into the void… never to be seen again. So, I open up the stats page and think maybe something’s broken.

“Maybe my article didn’t send properly. Maybe it’s stuck in spam. Or, maybe there’s a glitch.”

99% of the time, it wasn’t.

It’s just that what I wrote wasn’t interesting enough for my audience to read it.

A few years ago I published an article I really believed in.

I’d spent dozens of hours on it and had rewritten the piece 4 times. So, when I pressed publish and put it out into the world, I naturally expected big things.

Here’s what actually happened…

The article got 11 views in the first few hours.

One heart.

No comments.

That happened again when I spent hours on an article. And again. So I started thinking of excuses. It must be the algorithm. I posted at the wrong time of day. Substack and Medium are shadow banning me. And everyone, but me, is responsible for my article flopping. But eventually, I had to admit the obvious.

People just didn’t connect with what I had to say.

I’ve had articles get 100,000+ views.

I’ve also had articles get 1 view and a comment from my fiancée saying, “Well done Matt, I’m proud of you.”

Thanks Marie. I love you lots.

But after several years of writing and publishing online, here’s something I wish someone told me sooner…

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There’s a fascinating interview with Emma Chamberlain about building a following of millions online. She talked about how easy it is for creators to chase whatever’s already performing instead of trusting their own instincts, especially when platforms constantly reward repetition, trends, and fast reactions. But even after becoming massively successful, she said the pieces with the most longevity are normally about things that bring her joy.

“What’s really exciting is there are truly no rules,” Emma said. “If it came from your heart, you’re excited about it, and you’re passionate about it, it’s a good idea even if it fails. It might not be this explosive viral growth that we all dream of. But it’s how you build something that means something and has longevity.”

We’re in a strange era. But what’s stranger is how many people now assume success automatically requires becoming more exaggerated, reactive, and emotionally manipulati…

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