Two Types of Writer

Artist and Designer

“There are two types of people in the world: Those who put people into types and those who don’t.” - Someone somewhere

WRITERS MAY RECOGNISE two familiar loops:

One day, you feel on top of the world, full of confidence, full of ideas, connecting the dots—you feel invincible. You don't care about money. You don't care about subscribers. You don’t care about anyone. You’re just writing, lost in the world of imagination and ideas and it’s almost like you’re on drugs, euphorically hooked to the point where nothing else matters. You stop to punch notes into your phone so you don't forget them, you interrupt people mid-conversation to put more notes in your phone.

Then, the next day, it’s, “I'm not getting any new subscribers. I'm not earning any money. Everyone else is crushing it. What do I have to do to make a living with this thing? Why can’t I find ‘the others’? Why can't I write a good bio? Why do I clam-up when people ask me what I do? Why do I feel bored shitless every time people point out that I need to promote my work and build a following? Something’s not right, in my writing, in me. I’m missing something. Out of step. Stupid. Deluded. Irrelevant. Boring.”

You could call these two loops—these two imposters—Flow and Ebb. Having been yanked around by them many times now, I think I’ve finally figured out what’s going on. Or, at least, I’ve found a new lens to look at the problem with. The ebb struggles that I personally have as a writer—working to briefs, distributing my work and earning an income—stem from the fact that I’m failing to embrace both the writer-artist and the writer-designer.

Artists and designers have a different purpose, different craft and a different posture towards their readers, all of which give different outcomes. The trick is to know which one is dominant in you but to integrate them both; to maintain an awareness of their challenges and opportunities and know when and how to flex between the two.

Writer-designers

Lenny Rachitsky¹ writes a successful Substack newsletter. With almost 600,000 subscribers, many of them paying, he's a poster boy example of how you can make a stupendous impact by sharing your writing online.

Lenny’s background is in product management, which is the birthplace of the Jobs to be Done (JTBD) framework: a proven model for ensuring you build something people want. JTBD helps you understand customer needs, focusing on the “job” a product or service is built to provide. It's not about the product itself, but the need it fulfils, be that functional, emotional or social.

For example, Spotify users aren't just listening to music; they're discovering new tunes, enjoying their bus ride or creating the right mood. Similarly, Uber riders aren’t just getting from A to B; they want safety, or convenience, or time-saving. JTBD helps businesses innovate by aligning their offerings with these deeper, often unspoken needs.

It’s no surprise Lenny approaches his newsletter with the JTBD mindset when, as a product manager, he was so user-oriented and solution-focused. Lenny conceives his essays by seeking to answer a question from his readers, a question about building products or developing their career. Then he crowdsources answers from standout PMs, CEOs and others who can credibly answer it and synthesises the learnings for his readers to use in their jobs.

The “job” people hire Lenny’s Newsletter for is a combination of research, pattern-matching, synthesising data and teaching actionable frameworks. It’s very obvious why so many people are eager to subscribe.

There's a clear contract between readers and writer-designers; writer-designers create content we pay for because it solves our problems. We see no fog, no confusion or mystery surrounding the writer-designer's motives. It interlocks smoothly with the market.

Writer-artists

Designers solve problems for other people while artists solve problems for themselves.

As a writer of poems, stories, memoir and other experimental prose, I explore my emotions, try to express the inexplicable and discover new possibilities and meaningfulness in my life. There is no market-driven JTBD; it’s whatever I deem interesting or fun. I've written about selfishness, about losing my friend Tom, about washing the pots like a boss.

A friend who writes about computer programming told me he sometimes wants to write about “irrelevant stuff,” like “how certain things seem to come in dozens,” for example—and when he told me that, a fire roared in my belly and I wanted to scream at him, “DO IT! IT’S A MEMO FROM YOUR SOUL!”

The artistic genius flourishes when it ignores material and ego concerns, when it stops trying to be “relevant” and when it avoids trying to instrumentalise itself to achieve other aims. Art is made (or comes through you) precisely in those rare moments when you’re not thinking about making money, when you’re not thinking about new subscribers, when you’re not thinking about pleasing people at all.

Art comes from intuition and feeling, which are intensely personal. But since we share similar base needs with each other, art is endlessly relatable and interpretational—and it often happens that art can touch another person without the artist even intending it. But that’s incidental. The exception, not the rule. If you aim at this, you are sure to fail. And if you expect your art to find ready buyers without the designer’s intervention, then you’ll be waiting a long time.

Design has goals, consumers and fixed outcomes. Art resists—and even flatly rejects—all of this. Art is hard to explain and hard to justify because it’s often slippery, self-serving and can’t easily be “put to use.”

It means that writer-artists are in their element when producing novel work, but have a tough job making a living from it (if that's what they want) because the contract between artist and consumer contains a lot more fog. The artist never set out to serve the consumer in the first place and this should be obvious. Any attempt to pretend, after the fact, that the art was made for others is bound to come across as disingenuous and this is why it often feels so hard to promote it.

Challenges

The moment I begin to think about satisfying someone else’s wants, my magic mindset and deep creative reservoir dries up like a mouthful of sand. Time no longer flies but starts to drag. Words no longer fall out but have to be pulled—becoming disfigured on their way out. Or they come out dead or not at all.

When this happens, the only way to get back on track is to stop flexing like a designer and continue honouring my selfish artistic impulses. It’s the only way to get to the gold.

But this writer-artist inclination leads me to struggle with the design side of my practice: with knowing who my audience is, with doing what other people expect of me, with turning my art into threads and frameworks that do well on social media and with writing things that serve readers in a utilitarian and saleable way.

Natural writer-designers have an easier time with this. But they have a different set of problems. When writer David Perell asked Lenny during a podcast how he approaches the craft of writing, Lenny said he doesn't think of himself as a writer at all! It slows him down and makes his process difficult. Unlike writer-artists who write to provoke, comfort, challenge, amuse—in other words, entertain—with prose, Lenny knows it's not the prose that people want from him; it’s the actionable stories, lessons and insights they can use.

An important part of Lenny’s practice is therefore to hold back the writer-artist inclination. He connects most effectively with his solution-hungry readers by dispensing with the aura of art altogether and especially with his own personal feelings.

But, Lenny also admits that he struggles to write introductions. This is telling because intros are one component of a newsletter that need to do several ineffable things: create an emotional connection, spark curiosity, make a promise to be delivered later, create unusually high stakes and do it all in a way that tickles and tempts us to stick and not twist. These are the skills of the artist, not the designer, hence why they push Lenny to flex beyond his comfort zone.

Interplay

The fact that a lot of the formalities in the work Lenny and I do are the same (ie, we both write non-fiction, we both publish weekly, we both use the Substack platform) has lured me into a false belief that my slow growth is because I’m doing something wrong, when, it turns out, we are just playing different games.

It’s helpful to know what the dominant urge is that’s driving our long-term creative pursuits—the urge to serve ourselves? or the urge to serve others?—so that we can emulate the right role models and have realistic expectations about how to define success, how long it will take us and the challenges and opportunities we'll encounter along the way.

Art and design can never be isolated from one another since they both grow from the same creative gene pool and hold hands in a thousand inexplicable ways. This piece of writing now, for example, possesses both. It began with me feeling shit about my slow growth compared to Lenny’s and trying to understand it better (solve my own problem) through the craft of writing. That’s my art. It helped me discover these distinctions and write them up in a way that I’ve found helpful. And I got to experience the magic of art in the process, seeing some of the sentences reveal themselves on the screen. “Did I really write that?!”

I’ve dabbled here as a writer-designer too in the sense that I’ve tried to hone it so that you can understand it. But it’s mostly still art in the sense that it’s served my needs, it’s written how I want it to be written and I've taken it as far as I need to go in order to learn what I needed to learn—and now I'm moving on to the next problem, the next shiny dime, the next essay.

That being said, I also want what Lenny has—a readership, an influence, an income. So, to increase the likelihood of finding more subscribers, I’ll have to flex into the writer-designer’s domain, despite finding it dull and laborious.

I’ll have to think about how I can make this piece more useful for others and how I can promote it more widely and more clearly—perhaps with a checklist or infographic, a working diagram or questionnaire, a Notion template or interviews with writers, a paid ad or social media campaign.

If I set out to do that first, though, I wouldn’t have made anything at all. And that’s the mysterious sequencing—the magical interplay—of art and design. It’s as if design is the time for polishing the rough diamonds we find when making art.

My writing loops are surely a lifelong flex that I expect to manage rather than solve. Perhaps every artist becomes a designer when they know what they want to make. And perhaps every designer becomes an artist when they’re dreaming of what should be.

Design ——————-Art
Outward—---------Inward
Logical—---------- Zany
Closed—-----------Open
Convergent—------Divergent
Useful———————Useless
Collective—--------Individualistic
Easy to sell————-Hard to sell
Trustworthy————Suspicious
Clear———————-Mysterious
Pleases others———Pleases you
Life giving—--------Life affirming
Solves problems—--Creates opportunities
Gives answers———-Asks questions

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Another idea you might like: Washing the pots just got serious →

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Thank you Becky at Beck At It, Lavinia at Lavinia’s Substack,

Leo Hepis

and

Josh Knox

for reading drafts of this.

1. Here is

Lenny Rachitsky

on Substack.