How to start on Substack if you're an absolute beginner (and you're struggling to start)
#1: Do that one thing nobody else seems to be doing
We live in a world full of blueprints.
Silver bullets.
Fast, creative solutions.
And best advice.
You can look up almost anything you struggle with, and you will find a smart way of dealing with it.
If it’s not on Google or YouTube — and AI doesn’t know about it — chances are it doesn’t exist.
Want to lose weight?
No problem — Google offers a wide variety of diets and workout regimes to choose from: Keto, OMAD, HIIT, low carb, you name it.
Want to design a website?
Awesome.
You can vibe-code pretty much any website in any style you want, and there’s a step-by-step guide for that. You can get an Apple-style website, with the same fonts, colour palettes and what not.
Whatever the new problem or trend may be, it’ll pop up in your social feed sooner or later, you’ll tap on it, and you’ll go for it. And you’ll find someone sharing or selling a detailed blueprint that takes you from zero to solved.
The more detailed the solution, and the more complex or painful the problem the prettier the penny you pay for it.
And my problem?
Bloody Substack.
Since I can remember I always loved to write as a kid. Starting from first letters and practising calligraphy, to putting words together into sentences — first in my native Polish, then in English, French and German.
If you talked to my Dad he would tell you that when I was a kid I’d take his books, open them up and flip pages for hours — even if these were dictionaries with no illustrations.
The world of words was simply fascinating to me. Maybe it’s because my parents were reading a lot of books to me since I can remember. (I even knew the whole Red Riding Hood kid’s book, verbatim by heart. Hard to believe, but that’s what my mum claims.)
I loved putting words together, reading and writing, and I really enjoyed grammar — especially English grammar. For me it was fun — like solving language puzzles. Fill in the gap with a word in the right tense, and so on. It was a fun challenge. Why? I have no idea. Go ahead and call me a weird kid — no offence taken.
Looking back, it surprises me I was never any good at school essays.
I reckon that’s because I have never been great at planning the arguments, and I hated the school reading lists. Reading and writing never seemed appealing to me if it was a school assignment. But I loved reading and writing about the stuff I was curious about. If I got interested in something new, it would become an obsession of mine for some time, and I would lose myself in it until it stopped being exciting.
And unfortunately, school didn’t give much freedom of choice over what I wanted to read and write about. There were a few exceptions, like Greek mythology. I loved the stories about Heracles, Hades, or Hermes.
Apart from that and a few others, school reading and writing assignments were a chore for me — a pain in the proverbial that I had to do, which distracted me from doing what I liked. Something I had to force myself to do — not something I would enjoy doing.
So, as you can see, it was a difficult relationship. On one hand I loved writing and reading; on the other, I couldn’t practise it the way I wanted. I had to do it in the form the school system prescribed — which I think is a shame.
I had to follow a plan, go with a topic that was imposed, while I liked to simply go with the flow and write how I felt it should be — natural, easy, relaxed — following my own rhythm. School focused on the outcome: the specific arguments, sticking to a prescribed type of writing and framework, that required a specific language and a given approach. Only then would it be praised by the teachers, rewarded with good grades, which naturally led to your parents being proud. If you’ve been to school, I’m sure you know the spiel.
And as time passed, with age, my interest in writing evolved into copywriting, direct-response copywriting, writing for the web, web design, typography, conversion optimisation. All of it out of my own interest and independent study. I jumped from one thing to the next naturally, following my own path of personal interests.
Quite a few of my interests — in general — originate from writing and communication, mixed with some other thing I got hooked on by simply following curiosity while I gained more life and work experience.
Since my early years, I had a little dream: to write a book. To become an author. But I never wrapped my head around getting it done.
First, I thought, let’s start a blog — when blogging was still a trending thing. I went into the blogging rabbit hole but got distracted by my blog design. I got romantic about the logo, rounded corners, blogging platforms, etc. I signed up for courses, devoured knowledge.
Instead of going for the first and easy one and starting to write, I started researching. Website themes. Blogging platforms. Various content management systems and what not.
And this is how I finally learned about WordPress and WordPress themes and self-hosted ones. That distraction led me into the design world. It was fascinating to learn how to create your logo. How to pair fonts and lay them out so the website is nice and easy to read. And there was a beauty in it — in the finished thing, once you’d pushed the site onto your own server under your own domain.
In the process I learned how people read online (they actually skim, not read) and how to make your content scannable. Then it was conversion optimisation, SEO, keywords — a never-ending story.
There was always something to learn before I’d be ready to start.
But I never started, because I was never ready.
And between all that, life stepped in. A beer in the pub. University. Work. Then girlfriend. Relationship. More work. More beers in the pub. Then kids. Fatherhood. Pandemic. Excess kilograms. Giving up smoking. Promotion. More work. Losing weight. Gaining it back. Giving up the ciggies again…
And the years passed by, while my little writing dream got swept under the carpet called “the treadmill of modern London life”.
Always chasing, never arriving.
And when I hit 40, and pressed a bit of a reset in my life, I decided to drag that little thing called love for writing out from under the rug, dust it off, and check if that love really still exists.
And because I’m 40, a professional, a precious metals trader, a part-time Dad, and I live a busy adult life like most people around my age mark nowadays, carving out time for writing has never been more difficult. But my heart tells me it’s the right thing to do now, so I decided to give it a shot and reconnect to one of the fun things I always loved as a kid: writing.
Why Substack?
I decided to start on Substack because it’s free. It’s pretty much ready to go the moment you’ve signed up, and it’s free of any distractions. All you have to do is sit down and write. You don’t have to mess around with designs and layouts. I mean, you have a few options, but not to the same degree as running your own website. You just register, fill in a few details, and off you go. Easy, right?
Well, not so much.
Substack is a bit of a problem for me.
In fact, it’s a big ass of a problem.
Writing vs. typing
Writing — where you hold a pen or pencil and write by hand in a notebook — feels so much different to typing for me.
Standard, old-school writing (as in journalling) feels calming and relaxing. It just goes. It’s just you and that piece of paper, and you can write freely.
Nobody is looking and nobody sees. You unload whatever’s on your mind and you stop whenever you feel like it.
I journalled for 100 days in a row as part of my reset experiment at 40, and I absolutely loved it. It’s part of my daily routine now — daily writing, just before sleep, when I’m in bed.
But typing?
And on Substack? For some reason that’s a different beast for me. A totally different one, to be honest.
When I open up Substack, it’s a completely different feeling. You have to come up with a title, a subtitle. A topic for your piece, a plan — the whole shebang.
Also, because the idea of Substack is that at the end of your writing you publish your thing, that changes everything.
It changes you from a writer into a performer. You put on the “professional”, wanna-sound-smart cloak. You’re forcing yourself to think too creative, too smart. You subconsciously become a wise-ass Substacker, which… I believe makes you sound artificial no matter how hard you try.
And that causes a lot of friction. It sets my ADHD mind racing, rather than calm.
And automatically, at this point, Substack starts to remind me of that school essay. The title. The planning. The structure. It changes from a nice, calm, flow-like activity into a damn chore.
Which brings me to another thing.
If you’re desperate to say something smart, you tend to focus on the outcome. You do additional research, looking for these smart ideas and good points, wise writing quotes, etc. And the internet is full of these.
But that’s a trap. Because you want to sound smart, like everyone else, like every writer out there. And it’s not only you on the lookout for wisdom — it’s thousands, if not millions, of people doing the same thing. And it all simply boils down to you and the rest of the writer bunch potentially regurgitating the same trendy ideas.
The most original ideas come from within you — from your own thoughts and feelings. But to find them, you need to be calm, relaxed, in the mood for reflection. And you’re doing the opposite: trying to find as much stuff as possible, sieving through all of it, piecing the good bits together. At the end of the day you burn out, you become overloaded, and the process stops bringing you that good feeling.
For me, writing means relax. It means something good. It’s not a chore. It offloads tension and pressure, and I release these onto the paper as I write.
At the end of the day, isn’t writing just expressing your feelings, translating them into words, and letting the reader feel what you feel? And see what you see — but through the eyes of their own soul and imagination?
That is the whole power of writing and communication. Good writing makes the reader feel you, in a way.
I believe that can only be achieved through what we call…
Free writing
The free writing concept isn’t mine. I didn’t invent it. The idea’s been around for decades.
Peter Elbow wrote about it in the 70s — keep the pen moving, don’t stop, don’t cross anything out, don’t judge1. Dorothea Brande was onto it in the 1930s — write first thing, before the critical part of your brain wakes up2. Julia Cameron calls her version Morning Pages: three pages, longhand, every morning, whatever comes3.
They all landed on the same trick — separate the writing from the editing.
When you try to do both at once, produce and judge in the same breath, you freeze. The judge kills the writer before the writer’s got a sentence out. So you split them. First you write — freely, no stopping. Then, later, you shape.
And there’s actually science under this.
A psychologist called James Pennebaker spent years studying what he called expressive writing — people writing about their feelings, fast, without worrying about grammar or spelling.
The ones who did it got measurably calmer and healthier4 — less anxiety, fewer doctor’s visits. The instruction was the same one I’m giving you: don’t worry how it reads, just get it out.
The not-so-obvious part isn’t the technique. It’s using it here — on Substack — as the thing you do instead of cracking the next blueprint. That’s the bit nobody’s selling. Because it’s too simple, and too obvious.
I believe that if you want to write a book, you need to become a writer first. And to become a writer, you need to write. You need to write, and the writing has to feel good in order to become second nature.
So why not simply neglect the topic? Neglect the framework. Neglect all the writing blueprints and the best advice the internet is full of, and practise some free writing?
How it works on Substack
You simply open up a new post, or a new note, and start with how you feel. Start with whatever comes to mind. With no title. Unload your thoughts — about anything and everything.
If you don’t know what to write about, and you’re experiencing a writer’s block, just start typing and have a heart-to-heart with your reader — as if you were talking to your best friend.
Tell them how it is you’re feeling right now. Explain what the problem is and why you think it became a problem for you. Then question these ideas.
Have you noticed anything surprising about them? What’s the source of these?
Tell the whole story. Don’t think about how to write it. Don’t think about punctuation or question marks — just let the words flow. The less you think about it, the better. And no — don’t go back re-reading or polishing. Once you feel you don’t have anything else to say, simply stop.
How did it make you feel? How was the experience?
And you know what?
For me, personally, the most fun part of writing is going back to read everything, from the very beginning, piecing together the imperfect flow of words and readjusting the whole thing, word by word, sentence by sentence, to make the text read and flow well.
I call it shaping — the writing’s already out; now you’re just shaping what’s there. You go back and sculpt the rough text into something that flows. You smooth the edges. You delete, you add. Then you read aloud to catch all the bits that don’t sound right, or that are difficult because they’re too long and you have to hold your breath.
That whole process makes me feel good. It makes me forget what time it is. It makes me feel the same way writing and drawing made me feel when I was a kid. It makes me smile. And the final effect makes me feel kinda proud.
Which brings me to another point.
Writing is human to human.
The power of writing is in the transfer of energy. Transfer of feelings. Transfer of “that little something” from you to the reader — the person, or the group of people, who feel that vibe of yours.
You can never achieve that by outsourcing your writing to AI, just as you’ll never feel it by outsourcing it to anyone else doing the writing for you — no matter if it’s a ghostwriter, a team of writers, or a machine — no matter how well trained they are, or how much of your writing they’ve studied, processed and digested.
When you write, you give a bit of yourself to your reader. You high-five them remotely. You meet in that common place where you’re both friends, where you both have similar enemies and problems, where you share jokes and exchange opinions and feelings. That part of the world where you meet cannot be taken away by anything or anyone. No matter if your reader is in prison, at home, or in outer space — you establish a connection.
And the fact that you can establish such a connection is powerful.
And it can outlive you.
Isn’t that amazing?
If you feel that outsourcing it to someone else is worth it — maybe you simply don’t like writing, and you don’t feel it, and writing doesn’t give you that special feeling. Maybe you see it only as a means to an end. As performance. And in that way, outsourcing makes absolute sense. But can you call yourself a writer then? Well… that’s a question you need to answer yourself.
So… going back to Substack.
How do you start growing on Substack in a way almost nobody's bothering to?
In a world full of marketers who break shit, a world of blueprints and solutions, forced creativity and regurgitated flop, I’m planning to practise free writing.
I’ll write how it feels right for me, for as long as I like, from my heart to yours — if only you’re feeling my vibe — without outsourcing it to AI, for as long as I want.
And where will it take me? I don’t know, and I don’t really care — it’ll be my little writing experiment, my daily therapy, my writing yoga.
One free writing session per day, one day at a time.
So… if you want to try this, here’s how it goes:
Open Substack.
Start writing — no topic, no framework, no plan.
If you have a block, write about how it makes you feel and why you feel what you feel.
Don’t stop until you feel like stopping.
Don’t re-read until you’re done.
Go back, delete, add, rephrase until it reads well aloud.
Publish, smile and let the pride sink in.
Rinse and repeat — until you love it so much you can’t stop, and don’t want to.
How does it feel to be a writer, huh?
If you try it, let me know how it feels. It should feel great — you’ve just published, and you’re one step ahead of the rest of the pack, who are still somewhere deep in the guts of the 17th YouTube video, cracking the next best Substack blueprint, analysing another method, instead of doing the obvious.
If you want to become a runner, watching running videos and reading about the best running shoes isn’t going to cut it. Pelé played football barefoot for ages before he became the Pelé we know. Humanity ran barefoot for hundreds of thousands of years.
The same goes for writing.
Write with your feelings. Stay human. And do your thing.
Take it easy,
Jack
Peter Elbow, Writing Without Teachers (Oxford University Press, 1973)
Dorothea Brande, Becoming a Writer (1934)
Julia Cameron, The Artist’s Way (1992)
Baikie & Wilhelm (2005), Emotional and physical health benefits of expressive writing: https://sparq.stanford.edu/sites/g/files/sbiybj19021/files/media/file/baikie_wilhelm_2005_-_emotional_and_physical_health_benefits_of_expressive_writing.pdf