Mal on Substack

Don’t create the content you think people want to consume, create the content you want to consume. If it interests you, you’ll make it interesting to others.

I don’t like being seen as a content creator. In fact, I don’t believe content creation or writing is an occupation, because it denotes that creating or writing is a thing we do, instead of something we embody naturally.

For me, writing is not what I do , it’s who I am.

I do not try.

Creating/writing comes out of me the way I sweat during a workout:... See more

“You can’t second-guess your own taste for what someone else is going to like. It won’t be good. We’re not smart enough to know what someone else will like. To make something and say, ‘well, I don’t really like it but I think this group of people will like it’, I think [that approach] is a bad way to play the game of music or art.

Do what’s personal... See more

If you write to please others, you are selling out. You are in the process of audience capture. This way of talking, which is how the fear in me talks, is common—as if writing for an audience and writing for yourself are at odds with each other. I really used to feel like that.

But I no longer think that it is quite right. The relationship between c... See more