11 Comments
User's avatar
Aanya Dawkins's avatar

Really good examples. I like how you undermined a lot of the ‘easy’ advice.

Expand full comment
Michael Woudenberg's avatar

Thanks. Glad you enjoyed it.

Expand full comment
Annie3000's avatar

You should retitle this article: rules that don’t work for me personally based in my personal experience.

Expand full comment
Michael Woudenberg's avatar

Too long, not clickbait enough 🤣

Expand full comment
Jared Heymann's avatar

Exactly what i needed to read today. I've been writing for a while, only recently sharing on Substack, and one of my biggest struggles is the "find your niche" trope. My process has been very similar, with at least 8 google docs open at all times, though I've been trying to focus a bit more on my (first?) book recently.

Thanks for sharing, confirming I'm not crazy, or at least not alone. Cheers.

Expand full comment
Michael Woudenberg's avatar

Yeah, can't confirm crazy but I'm there with you! Glad it resonated.

Expand full comment
Jesse C. McEntee's avatar

I agree with all of these; reading them as you’ve written them down here is helpful. It serves as a shortcut to organizing a jumble of thoughts in my own mind about writing in general … and on this platform.

Expand full comment
Michael Woudenberg's avatar

Awesome. It was therapeutic for me to do the same to capture what bugs me about much if the advice.

Expand full comment
Jesse C. McEntee's avatar

I’ll be re-reading it later this week for a similar reason (therapeutic).

Expand full comment
Ron Parks's avatar

A pleasure to read, as it speaks the reality and truth to me and resonates with my years of dabbling with the craft and a career with my struggles to be in the balance and flow between my personal narratives and contrived reality and the larger unknowable, to move with grace and wonderment. Thanks and appreciation. Foregive me for the run on sentance, but it does seem kind of cool and maybe poetic, at least from my fleeting momentary perspective.

Expand full comment
Michael Woudenberg's avatar

Nice. It's funny how we end up landing in a similar space.

Expand full comment