Why You Should Think About Writing Online

My thoughts a year after enrolling in Write of Passage

Extract from a conversation between Write of Passage’s David Perell and the Cultural Tutor

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I felt like a stuck record. It was one year ago and I was chewing many an ear off with my thoughts about how Damian Willemse may well become the best Springbok we’ll ever watch. I felt conviction in these words, and merely saying them around a braai did not feel sufficient. So I sat down to write. And instead of writing about the player who was making me fall in love with the game once more, I started writing about my dad.

I had dabbled in writing online before, but on 2 September 2022, I published A True Champion. I’ve teased my grandfather here before about his stories within stories. It turns out that I too am incapable of talking about a rugby match from last weekend without also telling you a story about watching the 2009 J&B Met. I blame genetics.

There was something in that process that made me want to do it again. So I enrolled in a writing course. I dialled into live session after live session at ungodly hours with a couple of hundred people dotted across the globe and published five essays. Write of Passage is a five-week course that showed me the true value of using my words — yet I still fall short of finding the superlatives to describe it.

I took the course shortly after Thomas was born, so admittedly there is a bigger force at play, but there was something about the experience that changed me. If you’re familiar with the Memory Palace memorisation technique, the analogy I use to describe this Substack is that it’s my Idea Palace of sorts.

Knowing that I have a little Idea Palace — an imaginarium where I get to contrive and file some of my thoughts, tales and aspirations — has oddly chilled me out a bit more. I feel less inclined these days to try and get the final word in around the dinner table (braais are different), as I know if I have a point of view I’d really like to share, I may write something about it.

Last weekend, I was in Amsterdam, and I met up with Rik van der Berge, a Write of Passage alumni and Dutch native whom I’d only ever met over Zoom. We sat at Cafe Wildschut in De Pijp and yarned for hours about the surprising ways that writing online has enriched our lives, spitballed essay ideas and discussed another common interest we share— our first 11 months of parenting (Thomas is one week younger than Rik’s daughter, Blom).

My friend in Amsterdam, Rumpus Dale, said it was awesome that I would make a plan to meet up with someone I’d never met before to talk about writing. It would have felt like a great loss to go into the backyard of someone I admired and not look them up.

The idea of taking a conversation from around the fire and turning it into a piece of writing is indeed one of the core principles of Write of Passage. If you’re feeling increasingly impassioned about a topic, it may be worth starting a Substack and spending some time trying to distil those ideas into a few hundred words — and you may well surprise yourself with the outcome.

The course runs twice a year, and I’ve been involved in the last two cohorts. I joined the most recent cohort as an editor. This meant I edited over a dozen essays a week for the duration of the program. Each essay gets edited by at least three people (one Write of Passage editor and at least two other students), and one thing I’ve learnt is that the quality of a piece increases exponentially with some quality peer feedback. 

If the idea of sharing your thoughts on your own Substack appeals to you, then Write of Passage is certainly worth considering. There are three free workshops running in September that you may want to check out. These workshops are jam-packed with tactics and tools to help you sharpen your ideas and grow your audience online.

• Grow Your Audience with the Cultural Tutor (6 September - 20:00 SA Time) Register

• How to Start Writing Online (13 Sept, 01:00 SA Time) Register

• Test Drive Write of Passage (21 Sept, 18:00 SA Time) Register

I have an offer for you: If you sign up for and attend any of these three workshops at the links above and want to publish online, I’ll give you my editing services for the first essay on your Substack at no cost. Simply drop me a line and we’ll set up a call.

Let me know if you have any questions, and please feel free to forward this to anyone who you think could benefit from writing online. As my friend,

John Nicholas

says, which I agree with, “Everyone has a writer in them”.