I think it's weird that we like quoted quotes so much.
a wobbly phone note on the Droste effect and how we share book passages on here! (10/14)
When driving to work yesterday, I rifled through about six hundred tiny different springboards of thought that I considered expanding upon, which is why I’m frequently baffled by writers who say they can never think of anything to write about. See: there’s plenty I don’t think I can write about well and that’s what people mean when they say it. That’s the gap speaking, and is different from a specific case of writer’s block. I write because I think too much and might otherwise drive myself up the wall by doing so.
There’s a ton I can elaborate upon, muse over, that crosses my mind and I need to externalize—even if just to a private audience of (1) my running text thread with my twin sister, or (0) embedded in a notebook somewhere for me, myself, and I. Whether or not that compulsion to iron out what crosses my mind is a good thing? Questionable.
But it does need to go outside the confines of my brain in some way—catharsis.1 Before you ask, yes, I did finally get an ADHD diagnosis and I am deeply grateful for how much Adderall helped ease my insomnia.
Some of this brain activity is absolutely jitters from getting book edits this Thursday—the cognitive equivalent of my knee bouncing in the waiting room. My brain feels like it exploded in 2025 in that I had so many different directions to go in once the book was turned in, whereas it probably benefited me—despite the many crushing aspects of tunnel vision—to filter lots of thought, inspiration, reads, recs, etc. through the singular lens of one particular project for so long. So maybe right now is my brain going “OH! You’re about to do that again. But what about all this extraneous—”
I would like to write shorter and more focused work, and I don’t yet.2 This week, I think this explosion of thought is just out of nervousness.
What will my filter look like? How much of my brainpower will my book demand this fall? From Why We Click by Kate Murphy:
Predictability puts us in our happy place because thinking is metabolically expensive. The brain takes up only 2 percent of our body weight yet consumes a whopping 20 percent of our calories. Since our survival has historically depended on judicious use of resources, we instinctively like anything that lets us cognitively coast. It’s also why we love being right and hate being wrong. Wrong means you need to stoke the cerebral furnace and try again.
I do love noodling in a note of some kind, thus the existence of the “phone notes” section that just goes to feed and not to email inboxes. Again: not well-written. Not edited. Far too long. But follow a thread with me, if you will.
Today I’m thinking about the meta-ness of ‘framing’ quotes and posts-within-posts
Anyway, I—like many—have a funny relationship with the “selling out” portion of Substack in that I would love to be funded for my work and sure as hell crave that orange checkbox, six-figure income, and ability to write and read whatever I want (with the condition that it pleases the algorithm gods.)
But I also, like many, rail against the very annoying features the system rewards. I am not a “hater” per se in that I can normally find something to like about just about anything, and consider myself a gentle and optimistic person. But I can feel myself being a hater about various bits of affectedness here (unoriginally.) It is just as unoriginal to be a cynic about the chronic unoriginality of the Internet as it is to be unoriginal on said Internet. Some people just got in early, so it’s an easy target to go “But they!!”
I strongly dislike people stealing tweets and viral posts. (I get that you grow, but I don’t understand why the platform appeals to you.) I hate that so many people just pull repins from Pinterest boards.
Most recently, I’ve been so curious about and/or annoyed by reposting reposts of reposts from classic books. (Literary fiction has its own buried annoyances around how it perceives prestige—the entire definition of the genre—but I’ve already talked about genre perception enough.)
Intellectualism/literary curiosity is net-positive (so I’m not trying to say that it isn’t), but I’m curious about the presentation and what makes it most palatable to us.
I find it annoying that many people will like a Note simply because it says Dostoevsky or C.S. Lewis or Didion or Patti Smith, but if you attached a different author name to the work then nobody would like that quote—at least not visibly on their feed. I hate that the structure is “[author name]…wow” or “that [author name] quote that goes like” and there are definitely some accounts that do this more than others.
I’m not so much talking about the strategy of that so much as how Substack falls victim to the strangeness of what most of us see elsewhere—that there almost needs to be a layer or buffer between the material itself and the trigger for us to engage (which goes along with this idea of our craving for mediated reality as seen in everything from our relationships to our phones to the terror of AI friendships?)
Anecdotally—people are more likely to like a quote of a quote!!! People are more likely to view it as intelligent! What does that say? Obviously, curation matters too, and if I were writing this more cohesively, I would speak about how “framing” has always existed but that I’m narrowing in on the specific 0.02 second gap of willingness between seeing a quote and pressing like rather than the process of liking something itself (an important granular difference I am too undercaffeinated to properly sketch.)
We might be just as subject to a horrifying need for validation and proof (my publishing-oriented brain just went to a connection to modern indie-to-trad acquisitions spiking after, say, 2022) that a quote has been properly vetted, validated, and oh yes, other people liked it so I will too. (Plus, some of them are deserving, stellar quotes.) Publishing knows this; Substack does too. There’s also a solid (light but informative) book called Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire by Luke Burgis that I read last year and liked. It is very hard to separate yourself out from what others like, even if your instinct is to be contrarian. (See also: Status Anxiety by Alain de Botton.)
“Every adult life could be said to be defined by two great love stories. The first—the story of our quest for sexual love—is well known and well charted, its vagaries form the staple of music and literature, it is socially accepted and celebrated. The second—the story of our quest for love from the world—is a more secret and shameful tale.” From Status Anxiety.
If you post Middlemarch or Wuthering Heights, the feed will push it. And obviously, they are great books, but I wondered whether they might be favored by Substack also for the same psychology of this frame-within-a-frame, beyond the fact that more people are reading East of Eden because more people are reading East of Eden and posting about it. (I love that.) I’m solely talking about format here, I suppose.
The classics are subject to this for good reason.
As I say, some classic books are classics because they’re fantastic and they’ve endured for quality. And some classic books are classics because they’re classics.
In the same way that best sellers sell the best because they’re best sellers.
The most meaningful comments now, that I’ve gotten across my lean into Substack and my lean into TikTok recently (lol, going where there’s traction because I’m trying to make this work) is that my book picks are refreshing because they’re a little different. I so appreciate this. It’s obnoxious feedback for me to share but I love it so much.
I do think why the distinction matters that I am originally a book blog crossposting on other platforms vs. having my content originate from a platform—and thus being inextricably shaped by it. Why I say Substack is still not blogging is that:
my blog is fully under my control and will not suffer meaningfully if an algorithm changes (idgaf about SEO, although I should)
I do think it matters that I have absolutely no idea who my audience on my blog is unless they specifically tell me on another platform that they read it. I might have a vague idea of who’s reading, but that’s entirely different from seeing the actual followers and subscribers—faces, names, interests, numbers—that I write to.3
For that reason (and more), I think that freedom is impossible to replicate anywhere, including Substack. But of course Substack has many, many benefits I appreciate.
My reach will suffer and Lord knows I earn no money from this (yet—hopefully), but it means I’m a little less in-the-loop overall, so I’m not yet shaped entirely by the market forces driving mentions of certain titles.
I did notice that right now, I’m getting a lot of flocking to McCarthy or Annie Dillard, so there’s a temptation to lean more into those than I have already; in fairness, the McCarthy effect happens in real life. Just last night, a man at the bar while I was working heard I was a reader and said his favorite was No Country for Old Men. In response, I made sure to post my review of The Invocations by Krystal Sutherland—because although classics made up a bulk of my reading list this year ([redacted book process] scared me out of reading modern work while I was being evaluated, and I’m still coming down from that), it’s not all I read and I don’t want to be pigeonholed on here either. Let me be a mystery! I resist classification!
Mostly, I think about the format shift of layering various curated material?
But I guess I just think a lot about the social proof of a “Note of a screenshot of a pin of a Note of a book passage” being the meta epitome of how Substack still shapes a sense of validation around what you read and how we engage with book taste at all on here. I would hope my picks are refreshing, and it’s also okay if they’re the same as everyone else’s. I can’t tell for sure if someone is posting a passage because they like it or because they think it will go further in an engine rewarding that sameness—just aligned with more intellectual markers of quality. We want to feel like we are smart and good decision-makers and arbiters of taste and all the rest. Perfectly natural.
I have so many questions and observations about this exact type of situation. We like a quote when it’s shrunk down into a mood board in a hero image of a Substack that’s been re-posted with an emoji that’s then been screenshotted to share on another platform, etc. etc. Repeating the image here for emphasis:
Granted, this creator shares a lot of these types of quotes, usually with a very similar caption. Did they pick Dostoevsky because he’s popular to quote? Did it actually strike them? (Cynical of me.)
Did they upload it to Pinterest? Or did the other person (Iconic, the username from Pinterest) do it?
I actually do have a Pinterest board of quotes I like which inspires my reading list, so I’m not against loving a tidbit first. (Some people have complained about that. Again, we don’t have enough time in the world to read all the books we want!)
Do we psychologically respond to seeing the number of likes on that quote?
What if we started sanding down author credits off quotes? In fairness, many of them—style, cadence, quality of a great quote already—are recognizable. But what would happen if we all just briefly agreed to not credit the author for a bit and see which quotes actually resonate? Thought experiment.
For the record, I also get very nervous about people sharing images without credit here, and I think that’s for good reason. If I hadn’t gone for the creative path, I would have gone to law school and worked with IP/creative copyright. I find it so interesting, and bet it would be incredible (but also very hard) now.
Basically: I have worked with publications before who have gotten sued because of using images—even with credit and links—that they didn’t have the rights to. There’s a reason all the big magazines have Getty subscriptions or have to pay their own photographers. Substack is nimble enough to skirt this for the sake of Notes, but it only takes one person to sue you for bad usage.
Obviously, this gets difficult to enforce nowadays, but I think it’s a matter of time before photographers, etc. start scouring Substack too. (My early book mood boards definitely don’t have images that I’ve credited or bought the rights to, so I need to do some adjustment.) You cannot just say “Photos from Pinterest” although I’m calling myself out on this one because I need to audit the blog for more images that aren’t mine. You’re only staying out of trouble for now because the photographers don’t know. Maybe you’ll get lucky. It’s very tempting to see how people grow and to want to copy the strategy, but maybe I’m too goody-two-shoes.
I also get very irritated with writers sharing articles that clearly have AI graphics, especially if those writers then complain about the dignity of their own jobs. I just find it hypocritical. You are….also…stealing peoples’ work? (Substack is not exempt from problems of plagiarism.)
Where is the line between sharing inspiration and sharing with an assumption it’s your own content? Is it when the repost of a repost goes far beyond the original credit, and you receive the monetization benefits? Is it when people cite it incorrectly to you? Does it not matter? Maybe nobody thinks about repost culture as much as I do.4
I do also think about the formula of it all. Certain visual trademarks do imply formula more to me.
And then within Substack, how many people have a formula that goes something like:
1 classic quote / 1 Baroque portrait image / 1 Carrie Bradshaw or cigarette meme per day
1 relatable tweet-type Note / 1 about reading + literature
I’m also a geek about word frequency within books, so I think a lot about word frequency as it appears on Substack, and how it pairs with certain image types.
I won’t use specific post examples because that feels mean (and this isn’t journalism—it’s a phone note) but surely y’all know the ones I’m referring to, and me referencing them is not a dig. Right now that’s like:
analog / autumn pair with dark academia aesthetic / leaves emoji / old sitcom character
Using certain media for your hero image still follows under the umbrella of meme culture, but it’s embedded in what’s acceptable for Substack—and what’s most likely for readers to click into, probably because it triggers that sort of similarity cascade I’ve been so fascinated by lately. (There are great books on Internet speak, its visual languages, etc. that probably address this exact psychology. My TBR list continues to grow.)
So in this case, I’m really not referring to originality. None of us are all that original, and concurrent creativity is a thing anyway. It’s not a problem that we’re all unoriginal, and it’s not a problem that we prefer this Droste effect-style framework on here too. I’m simply…riveted. And again, plenty of writers on here would love nothing more than to make a living, so treating yourself like a one-person media organization might really matter—and is not a bad thing whatsoever.
Marketers know this too; staged photography signals something different from UGC-style content, each with differing levels of trust and authority conveyed in first impression. So frame-within-frame quotes versus bare…?…quotes is not that different of a conversation.
One of the people I know who is most killing it on here has an aesthetic that 100 percent aligns with what pops off, and I do not doubt at all that they has a formula for how they dole out photos, texts, lists, and the like. That’s just good media strategy and business acumen. We see it on LinkedIn with the line breaks and the hourly schedules. It’s nothing new!
I thought about this format-wise in experimenting with lowercase and casual. I do like that I can be unpolished here (hence the rambling) and because I don’t send it to email, maybe five people will read it and maybe one person will comment. Someone will see it’s a 15-minute reading time for a post that’s not coherent or focused enough and skip it. But it feels good to iron out.5
Some of us who know influencers and big creators in real life also do have the disorienting experience sometime of knowing someone who is entirely different in person than their persona in-feed, which has never sat right with me entirely—but it’s also a business. I prefer my privacy too, for example, and often think about how whatever I’m posting is curated by the exact mood that makes me want to post—one very specific one—so that’s not my whole self.
Although I probably wouldn’t want “my whole self” to make it into my feed, I do think about how some people assume they know me based on my blog, online presence, etc. You do have to be cool with people getting you wrong or flattening you in order to grow, and that rubs up against my whole autonomy schtik—in this case, relating to control over the image of me being me.
The feed exists because we feed the monster anyway
My feed will also show me more of what I engage with or comment on, so it will likely feed me more of these because I wrote about it. I obviously can’t transfer over all my blog reviews at one time, so I’ve been triaging based on what I personally feel like working on, what I want to link to within Substack vs. on my external site, books that people have asked me about, etc.
But I’m policing myself here by hoping I don’t get caught up in only transferring over the books that will make me seem most sophisticated i.e. pleasing to the Brooklynites (love y’all.) I hope that I will share quotes from Jodi Lynn Anderson and Jandy Nelson and Marissa Meyer as freely as I love sharing John Steinbeck and Daniel Keyes and dear ol’ Cormac. I did this yesterday and thought about how my phrasing sounded so similar to the frame-within-a-frame I mention above, but I genuinely was thinking about this quote from Tiger Lily, so you know: splitting hairs about formula itself. The only person who knows for sure is the creator.
The thing is that I’m pretty sure I could do the formula if I wanted to “pop off” more, and maybe I should swallow my pride to do so because I don’t get paid enough yet for the work I do. This could be a path forward. A lot of people notice the formula, and it runs into the modern art problem of “Yeah, you could have painted that. But you didn’t. Someone else is executing.”6
Someone said something the other day about selling out via Canva graphics, and I totally did that too! And it wasn’t solely for the algorithm—it was because I’d posted it elsewhere and had the images on my phone—but yeah, they’re right too, hence the analysis of intent and media-within-media.
And this all relates to palatability of image vs. text?
This was me being a brat because I just read Susan Sontag’s Regarding the Pain of Others for several reasons including but not limited to “the military men here are killing me,” our desensitization to violence online and in reality, and having liked On Photography previously.
And the woman LOVEs talking about photography, what an image does, and how its format matters. And this observation marks the same problem as the post of screenshot of tweet above, but with an added layer: a lot of people are still more likely to read an essay or post in image form rather than the text itself, which is a fascinating discussion of format that greatly pleases both my writer and studio art student selves.
Aesthetics exist for a reason, our brains love predictability and cohesion, and we gravitate towards strong existing visual languages—including this one—over time too, which the feeds reward. Niching down does work, and that includes in Droste-ing.
It’s not just convenience, because it’s the difference between a click into an article and a swipe right to read more, but there is something about an image that feels more casual perhaps. Maybe less time-consuming? More sparkly. But it speaks to the same fragmented attention, social proof, frame-within-a-frame effect.
There are accounts here doing very well for quotes in graphics from their essays, and I don’t think the graphics themselves are much better than what Substack comes up with. Does it trick our brain into, at first, assuming the words come from someone else which thus makes us pay more attention? I’m not sure. Maybe that’s why it works and continues.
Anecdotally, the popularity of Substack also helps on other platforms too. People are familiar with the font and styling choices and seem more likely to read. So the same effect could be applied to the quoted quotes on here too—we recognize the old Twitter interface or Tumblr or whatever and feel more stirred to that. Maybe also a dash of a nostalgic rush for old content vs. less affection for the new? Which ties back into the classics/self-study desire too—proof of endurance i.e. quality.
For Substack, people are more likely to read Substack who wouldn’t necessarily read a blog, so the priming of that font, spacing, etc. primes the reader in a good way. If I post screenshots from my blog itself, which has different style choices, the response is lesser. So that also contributes to the framed-ness of everything. But I digress.
I would love to talk to my Art Since 1945 professor, Dr. Elliott King (the best) about the art history crossover. Or my icon of a drawing professor, Leigh Ann Beavers, who would have a lot of thoughts on art and social media at all, because she is basically the Mary Oliver of rural Virginia.
It’s just…food for thought. And I still think it’s silly to see people reposting popular posts from other social platforms of a decade ago as if it’s their own thought. Come up with your own!
Thinking about this specifically in regards to fiction: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2217511,
I do for editors and my professional career, obviously. But trying to carry that over more to my personal work too.
The literal definition of a social media feed vs. the blog (although blogs do have RSS options) is the presence of a specific trio of qualities:
Most recently, it wowed me that people were using others’ voiceovers of these intimate video diaries because I felt there was some implication in the cadence/speech/topic that the audio belonged to the creator shown unless it was a really obvious podcast vibe like Mel Robbins (which is a hilarious example for me to use here for many reasons.) I felt personally like we should let video diaries stay as a 1:1 post, but hey, we could go down a deep dive about collaging overall. Like I say repeatedly, a lot of people have great takes on conversations surrounding curation, collaging, what constitutes “yours,” etc. and you definitely could talk for hours about this. See: why I would have gone down the IP lawyer rabbit hole!!!
I try to call myself out on this too because I do end up posting things that cross my mind that are frankly unoriginal, and I’d like to think I’d notice if it became more of a specific cadence rewarded by eyes.
Part of why I haven’t tried consciously to buffer or be more formulaic—beyond what I like—is just that I’ve been filling my feed so much recently already with overflowing thoughts that there’s not a whole lot of room for much else. I would be so much more annoying in volume than I am already. Plus, the types of media I would want to share are bits like Bill Watterson’s Calvin and Hobbes, forever an obsession, and I’m very aware that Watterson didn’t actually like his comics being used in that way. I still sneak it in occasionally, but I feel guilty every time! Another reason, as stated above, is that for others—beyond the obvious grabs that are too widespread to really police—I do get nervous on the image rights in a way I think y’all should too. And I do end up stopping myself on a few quotes I’d otherwise share because of the sense that someone else has probably posted it, or will assume I’m like-farming, so policing supposed performativity is just as annoying too.
Well, you’ve inspired me to be unabashed!
See Doppelgänger by Naomi Klein. I haven’t read this yet but I bought it months ago!! As it seemed pertinent.