Little Lessons from Writing Newsletters

Happy New Year, everyone. (It’s mid-January. Can we still say that?) Do you have any new year’s resolutions related to writing? Maybe one of them is to get back in touch with your creative practice? Or to learn how to write more succinctly? Or to simply write for yourself, for the pleasure of it? Consider starting a newsletter.

Yes, for sure, everyone and their grandmother has a newsletter these days. And for good reason! There’s lots to be gained and explored by creating a low-stakes, short-form, serial writing project. To mine some lessons out of the lettering, Catapult posed this question to a few writers: How have your writing skills evolved/changed by writing a newsletter? The answers were a mix of expected and surprising answers, inspiring in every way.

Read on to glean what others have learned, and perhaps your path to those lessons too will be writ in an email inbox. (Responses have been edited for clarity.)

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“My newsletter helped me write a memoir. I have a small but engaged audience for my newsletter, and over the years, I cultivated a relationship with readers. It gave me a voice, which paid off when it came time to meld reported journalism with an intimate first-person narrative.”

— Erika Bolstad, author of the newsletter The Windfall Dispatch and the book Windfall

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“Writing a newsletter taught me not to be so precious about putting things out in the world! Sometimes you just need to claw out a few paragraphs on the page and hit publish, or revisit it later. Writing what was originally just a daily newsletter to my friends was the perfect training ground for this—just extremely low stakes, where the whole point was to have fun with it. It was honestly ideal circumstances because I think 99% of the agony of writer life is figuring out how to get past your own head games. Those never quite disappear, but that newsletter discipline is a most helpful muscle.”

— Delia Cai, author of the book Central Places and the newsletter Deez Links, and senior Vanities correspondent at Vanity Fair

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“I mostly curate other writers’ work (instead of doing my own writing). It’s helped me hold myself accountable by making sure I read lots of writing by immigrants, led me to new writers, and made me feel like part of a community. And I love the opportunity to uplift immigrant writers.”

— Vesna Jaksic Lowe, author of the newsletter Immigrant Strong

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“Interestingly, it’s shaping a lot of my personal style of writing! Since I also write for a living—which involves writing within parameters and ensuring things are SEO-friendly—my newsletter serves as my outlet for writing without rules or restrictions. My newsletter is my space to explore and play around with writing. So I go long or short, but mostly long (I’m a journalist/digital content producer writing for the web, which means the currency is short and sweet). I take up space, rather than make things punchy.”

— Jane Bracher, author of the newsletter Curious Rabbit

“My newsletter is my space to explore and play around with writing.”

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“I've started to tighten up my copy significantly by linking out for context, rather than adding that additional info in the text. People will click if interested, will skim over if not.”

— Annie Johnson, audience editor at Digg

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“I publish three newsletters. Oldster Magazine and Memoir Monday mostly feature other people’s writing. But Adventures in ‘Journalism’ is all me. I launched it when I was essays editor at Longreads. With so much submissions-reading and essay-editing, I was neglecting myself as a writer, so I was rusty. The newsletter gave me a low-stakes place to try out new material and further develop my voice. Addressing a small audience in letter format reminded me of my own “Dear David Writing Method,” through which I’d often made blank pages less scary by pretending I was writing a letter to a camp friend who’s been my pen-pal since the summer of ’79. It made writing fun again! Bonus: As I was writing my memoir-in-essays, And You May Find Yourself…, I found myself polishing some of my posts for the book.”

— Sari Botton, author of the book And You May Find Yourself… and the newsletters Adventures in ‘Journalism’, Oldster Magazine, and Memoir Monday

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“I love a newsletter. I've had so many through the years: Mailchimp, Tiny Letter, Substack, and now Ghost for my new travel media company Those Who Soar, which was created with the Black woman traveler in mind. Writing newsletters has helped me to hone my writing voice and write about interiority (and in narrative voice) succinctly.”

— Nneka M. Okona, author of the books Self-Care for Grief and The Little Book of Self-Healing

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“I began my newsletter, Creative Practice, to find my way back to what the title describes. It’s my hope that having a space in which to write short, casual, low-pressure dispatches will reconnect me with my writing voice and writing habit, both of which I lost touch with during the labor of book promotion. I’ve only just started it, so the newsletter may reveal other, unforeseen effects on my work and voice, but for now, the goal is to establish regularity and authenticity and, in doing so, take back some of the control over my artistic presence in the world.”

— Tajja Isen, author of the book Some of My Best Friends: Essays on Lip Service and the newsletter Creative Practice, and editor in chief of Catapult magazine

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