Almost two years since starting this Substack page, I’m about to publish my fiftieth essay. I’m glad to have written these Night Thoughts, to have explored this platform. Like most online spaces, Substack has limits and flaws. But it’s pointed me to some writing for which I am truly grateful. Essays of diverse kinds of brilliance: clarifying, entertaining, reassuring, sometimes electrifying.

I’ve written about several topics – the city at night, tech culture, contemporary fiction, the war in Ukraine – and am proud of my work. It’s improved my writing, and if it’s true that writing and thinking are not as separable as we’re led to believe, it’s invigorated my thinking too.

A small number of readers and a tiny number of subscribers: without them I wouldn’t have stuck with it. If they read this, they should consider themselves thanked. I haven’t nailed, it’s fair to say, the ‘building an audience’ assignment. This might be because my work sucks. But I think it’s also because I am bad at posting in the short-form, unceasing, dialogic rhythm which online attention-attracting activity demands in the algorithmic age.

For a while I felt self-conscious about this. But things clicked into place when I read Kate Wagner’s essay ‘The Own-Work Woodshed’. KW learned to write on what she calls the ‘middle-internet’ that existed in the mid-2000s, user-friendly but still unenclosed by social media and uncolonized by the giants. On the middle-internet, before the days of monetization and virality, anonymity was considered normal and safe: it gave writers the ‘freedom to have a unique identity… and therefore the freedom to be someone different, to perform without the risks’.

What this created, Wagner says, is a culture of writerly practice: of writing for the sake of writing, serving no particular utilitarian end other than the learning of a craft. From today’s perspective, in a process-phobic age cringingly obsessed with end product and instant results, practice is pleasingly – radically, even – circular and ‘tautological’. ‘I learned to write’, Wagner says, ‘in order to write, and in order to write better, I have to keep writing, which is the only way to get better at writing’.

That’s how I’ve used Substack, I think, even though the days of anonymity are behind us: as practice. You need an audience to keep writing, to turn the pressure to communicate into the structuring work of form, and to avoid the solipsism of writing to yourself. But a small audience lets you stay invisible, anonymous for all intents and purposes. So on Monday – having broken the cardinal rule of Substack, which is not to write about Substack – I’ll get back to practising.