no gatekeeping
how do we create what comes next?
The response to the relaunch has been great. Thanks for that. But I just wanted to write a little—on this fine, freezing Thursday—about why I made the shift from ‘These are some essays that are stuck in my head, I guess’ to ‘This is a newsletter about stories, storytelling, and storytellers’.
I promised an interview a week and this one, well… It’s sort of with me?
But don’t worry, this’ll be a short essay. Not one of those fake Q&As where I pretend to argue with myself. Let’s leave that format well and truly in the past.
I wanted to call a weekly-ish series of interviews with various storytellers and creatives ‘No Gatekeeping’ because—despite no lesser a title than Vogue magazine claiming ‘gatekeeping’ as their word of the year in 2022—many paths remain hidden.
I wanted to show how some of the best creators, writers, strategists, and otherwise-artists around are making their work, and what lessons we might glean from them. You know, jimmy open the gates a little. See what we can see.
I’ve always been fascinated by listening to creatives of various strokes talk about The Craft. There’s a sense of embarrassment affected by many who talk about what they do and why, but if there’s anything I love more than making things, it’s thinking about making things. I’m not alone there.
But if you’ve ever had the pleasure of sharing even a few moments of airtime in the presence of a creative agency, you’ll have heard the word ‘iterative’ gets thrown around a lot. Essentially referring to the process of ‘coming up with an idea and then, based on feedback, continuously tweaking and honing it’, iteration is—despite its buzzword mouthfeel—an incredibly important concept to keep in mind. It’s also one too few of us are capable of holding.
As creatives, we want to get things right first time. If we don’t, then we inevitably take it to heart. The reason, it is obvious, why we did not slide from ideation to Academy Award, from hastily-typed midnight missive to Pulitzer in one slick, seamless arc is because we are shit. And not only shit, we are bad people. Bad for even suggesting that we might not be shit. As such—given our self-evident shitness/badness—we should pack up and move on. Stop kidding yourself, we say. Maybe it’s time to get a real job.
I want No Gatekeeping to be, if not a clarion call to get a real job, then certainly a reality check: I speak to a lot of people—young people, mostly, but also the not-young—looking to get into various creative (or adjacent) fields with no idea how to get there, and only the words of their rigid lecturers and veterans telling them The One True Way To Succeed to help them. But it’s clear there is no one way to do things: no one way to create a worthwhile story and have it exist in the world.
There are a few podcast series which have done a great job of allowing a peek into the lives of creatives. For magazine writing, I’ve loved Longform for a long time (although, I feel like the quality has drifted somewhat since their Vox takeover—my hot take!) and, for screenwriting, Al Horner’s “podcast about the first-draft secrets of great movies and TV shows” Script Apart.
But I hope what can set apart No Gatekeeping is its look at what we can learn from different storytellers operating in different mediums. (There has to be a way to make Instagram Reels that don’t feel like your brain is going to start pouring out of your nose when you watch them.) I hope a series like this can help inspire current and aspiring creatives to think differently about their work and the platforms they might exist in through ‘interdisciplinary shop talk’—an ungainly triplet which, now that I write these words in sequence, sounds like the dullest thing imaginable but let me explain my thinking:
The gates, for many, remain locked—or at least pretty fucking stiff. Yet there have never been more potential keys around. Every medium is a key. Every story is a key. But which key goes in which lock? Is the key you’ve had tied around your neck on a little bit of string the key that’ll open the gate you need to get where you want to go? Keys, man. Keys will drive you crazy, if you let them.
But let’s forget the gate-key metaphor for a moment. Let’s try reality again. Like the dusty lecturers extolling the virtues of how everything is fucked so you might as well not try anymore, you’ll hear absolutes thrown around with abandon:
Nobody reads books anymore. Nobody buys magazines anymore. Podcasts are dying. Websites are broken. Short-form vertical video is an insipid, invasive disease that is rotting our brains, burning your eyeballs, and leaving you parched and panting, wide-awake in the night, wishing you studied something useful that didn’t involve looking at your emails after 6pm.
I guess I choose to not feel defeated by all this and I choose to write about stuff that follows that route in kind. My own career shifts have careened from low-rent TV production to low-rent website content farming to slightly higher-rent website gubbins to a hobby magazine to a full-time job heading up content for a magazine-slash-agency staffed by all of my friends to a soupçon of a burnout-related breakdown to a happier, healthy space freelancing as a writer, strategist, and catch-all ideas man for brands, big and small, around the world. I’ve been lucky, no doubt, but also driven by a need to try things. Whenever I reached a ceiling or impasse at one job, I made sure to move before I was consumed by stasis.
Speaking to friends, I’m always encouraging of their pivots: writers who become podcasters, researchers, directors, producers; photographers who become filmmakers, artists, creative directors, screenwriters. My New Year’s Resolution was to collaborate more with people I love, with people I believe in. For me, it’s the only way through this mess.
All this led me back to the newsletter. A place where I at least had the illusion of controlling my course of travel. I’m still learning, we’re all still learning, and that’s a good thing. It’s the times when I stopped feeling the need to learn—in my life and in my career—that have left me feeling most hopeless and needing to commute. Growth requires tension. That’s how you get stronger. (I have been to the gym several times; I know this is how things work.) I am no longer nihilistic about the way creatives can move through our algorithm-strangled online spaces: where there’s a will, there’s a way. There has to be.
Plenty of the disastrous feelings many of us are experiencing around crumbling legacy publishers are legitimate. Most recently: Pitchfork is, as we once knew it, no more. But how do we create what comes next? By listening to each other, by learning from each other, by taking ownership of our journey, by learning how to make things ourselves. The idea that ‘creating your own work’ has to be at the expense of getting bills paid is neoliberal bollocks. There’s a reason why it’s discouraged: if enough of us create together, things will actually change.
And, look: some gates may remain locked forever—sorry, I’m back to ‘gates’ again. I don’t think ‘newspapers’ will ever be ‘back’. But other gateways we can open and keep on the latch, ready for those to follow in behind.
I promise not every piece in the ‘sletter will be this clumsy with metaphor. But I do want every interview to open up something in its reader: if not a gate opened, at least a window cracked. Because, it’s safe to say, we all need some air.
Hopefully I’ll see you there.