Maya Solís has been writing online since 2018. She has a newsletter that sat at 400 subscribers for two years straight, posts that felt meaningful to her and got twelve likes, and one piece from last October that hit 34,000 readers and got her a speaking invite she still cannot explain. She did not change her writing. She changed one thing before she started writing. I asked her about it over a long call last Tuesday. She was direct, a little tired, and had clearly thought about this more than she wanted to admit.
Let's start with the obvious question. You wrote vulnerable stuff for years and it didn't land. What was actually going wrong?
I thought the problem was my writing. So I took courses. Studied structure. Read every personal essay in The Cut for six months. And the writing got technically better but the response stayed flat. What I finally figured out is that I was writing for myself and hoping it would land for other people. Those are two different activities. I kept asking "what do I want to say?" and never once asked "what does the person reading this at 11pm on their phone actually need right now?" That question sounds simple. It completely broke me open when I finally sat with it.
Okay, so "reader hunger" ... where does that phrase come from for you? And what does it actually mean in practice?
I stole it from a teacher I had briefly in 2021. She described it as the emotional posture someone brings to a piece of writing before they read a single word. Which is not the same as their interest in the topic. Someone can be interested in burnout and show up hungry for humor about it, or hungry for data, or hungry for someone to tell them they are not broken. Same topic. Three completely different hungers. If your piece lands wrong, it is almost never because the writing is bad. It is because you fed them the wrong meal. I think of it now in three buckets: entertainment, which is "distract me from my life," humor, which is "let me feel smart and light about something hard," and transformation, which is "I need to feel different when I finish this than when I started." Most of the time, creators write transformation pieces and launch them at entertainment audiences. That is the mismatch.
How do you actually figure out which hunger your reader has before you write?
Look, there is no perfect method. But here is what I do. I look at the context of where the piece will live first. A LinkedIn post at 9am on a Tuesday? That reader is probably in commute mode or procrastination mode. Entertainment or light humor. A newsletter that someone opted into after reading three of your more serious essays? They are probably in transformation mode. They chose you for a reason. Then I look at the emotional weather around the topic. If everyone is already exhausted by something, humor might be the kindest entry point. If something just happened that made people feel hopeless, transformation writing lands harder. I also just ask my list sometimes. "Are you reading this to feel better or to think differently?" The answers are always more honest than I expect.
The piece that hit 34,000 readers ... what was different about how you started it?
I wrote it three times. The first two drafts were transformation pieces. Earnest, structured, vulnerable in the way I had trained myself to be vulnerable. I sent a draft to two people I trust and both of them said it felt heavy in a way that was hard to describe. One of them said "I don't think people can receive this right now." It was October. Post-summer, pre-holiday. People were tired in a particular way. So I rewrote it as a humor piece. Same story, same real events, same honesty ... but I let myself be genuinely funny about how badly I had handled something. The shift was not cosmetic. I changed what I was asking the reader to feel. The transformation version asked them to sit with discomfort. The humor version let them laugh at mine. That is a very different emotional transaction. And the October audience wanted the second one badly.
Most creators are told to "be vulnerable" constantly. You seem a little skeptical of that advice.
I am not skeptical of vulnerability. I am skeptical of vulnerability as a strategy. There is a version of vulnerable writing that is actually just disclosure. Telling people hard things about yourself because you have been told that openness builds trust. And it can. But if the reader showed up hungry for entertainment and you hand them your emotional archaeology project, they are going to feel vaguely guilty and leave. The vulnerability did not fail. The context failed. Look at the NYT personal essays that go everywhere ... the ones people screenshot and send to seven friends. They are almost never the most painful or confessional pieces. They are the ones where the writer figured out exactly what the reader needed to feel, and then delivered it with precision. The vulnerability is in service of that. It is not the point itself.
Is there a mistake you still catch yourself making?
Writing for the version of my reader who is already convinced. I catch myself imagining someone who already cares about what I care about, who already trusts me, who is already in transformation mode. And sometimes that person is not who shows up. Especially on platforms like Instagram or Substack Notes where discovery is real and a lot of readers are cold. They do not know me. They owe me nothing. And they are scrolling fast. For that person, I need to earn the hunger before I can feed it. The first paragraph is not the setup. It is the invitation. I have to say something in the first three lines that makes them want to be in whatever emotional state this piece requires. That is still hard for me. I rewrite first paragraphs more than anything else.
Last thing. If someone is reading this and thinking "my writing feels genuine but it never lands" ... what is the one question they should ask themselves before their next post?
Here is the thing ... it is not "what do I want to say?" It is "how do I want my reader to feel when they close this tab?" And then the harder follow-up: "is that the feeling they showed up looking for, or the one I decided they needed?" Those two feelings are not always the same. When they are not, you have to choose. You can write toward what they need and try to bring them there, which is possible but requires real skill and a very specific kind of opening. Or you can write toward what they came hungry for and find the honest thing inside that register. Neither is wrong. But guessing they want transformation when they want to laugh ... that is the thing that keeps good writers invisible for years. I know because it kept me invisible for three of them.