What I’ve learned writing on Medium with absolutely no professional experience.
I’m 18 and in college. I go to class, study every day, and get good grades. I’m also a writer; I’ve been writing since I was little whether it was a short story about anything I found remotely interesting, poetry about my thoughts, or research papers on topics I cared about.
As much as I love to write, I was never the best writer in my school. Everything I write can use some improvement. But this wasn’t going to stop me from continuing to write. Currently, I am a full-time freshman with five classes in total. I sometimes don’t have time to write every single day, despite that being the one way to improve my writing, according to famous writers on Medium. But, I had to find a way to force myself to write no matter what my schedule looked like. I knew about Medium for a couple of years now, and debating writing on the platform since I was a junior in high school. My thoughts went back and forth telling me that I wasn’t good enough, or I wasn’t going to have enough time, or that people would hate what I write.
I know now that all of those things are pretty true, but I don’t say this to be self-deprecating. I’m not a good writer. Not yet. I’m not going to have enough time. But I can make time if I love doing it. People will hate what I write. But I can ignore those people.
And that’s how I eventually ended up here on Medium as a young writer. I started reading more articles by writers who shared their tips for becoming successful. I made a plan and added at least an hour of writing into my daily college schedule. I set days when I would upload posts to my page and it felt invigorating. I finally felt like I had made a good decision for my writing career and I knew this would, in time, help to make me a better writer. I’ve now been writing regularly on Medium for about three weeks now and let’s just say it’s been interesting.
It’s not easy
I’m sure anyone could tell you this. I am not an expert at writing right now, but I definitely can tell anyone on this site that getting yourself to write every day is hard. Everyone has responsibilities and crazy schedules, but even with that controlling my life, I was able to put most of it aside just to get at least 30 minutes of undisturbed writing into my day.
It’s even harder to hit the publish button when you know you don’t have as much experience as other writers on Medium. I always get the feeling after writing a post that I shouldn’t hit publish because it’s not good enough. This is where I told myself to trust the process. I learned to be confident in what you write and accept that there needs to be bad articles before there are good ones.
Making time to write is everything
As I mentioned before, I had to force time into my schedule to write every day if I wanted to take this seriously. I have a 9 AM class every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and all the days in between I have mid-day classes. I knew I couldn’t write at night because I would be doing all my homework for those classes. So, I was able to designate an hour in the morning from 8 to 9 AM as my writing time. It didn’t have to be writing for Medium, just as long as it was writing. And, so far, I have been able to keep up with this routine and have something new written every day. Routine is crucial. If you read any other advice for writers, they will almost always tell you this. Now, as a young writer, I can also advocate for this.
Your income will be close to 0 for a while
I wrote two posts in July, one being an article and the other being a poem. I forgot about my Medium page for months after that and was not very active. When I started to think more in-depth about writing on Medium again, I checked my stats out of the blue and saw that I had made $0.02 off of my poem in July. Now, is 2 cents really a big deal? Not really. But I definitely made it a big deal because it was the first time I had ever made money off of something I wrote and it was enough motivation for me to continue writing on Medium. Even so, I know I am probably not going to make hundreds of dollars for many, many months, and that’s ok. Just because you make nothing off of your articles, doesn’t mean you’re a bad writer. If you’re a young writer like me, you know that making money would be nice, but you’re also here to improve your art.
Take any chance of feedback you can get
When I posted my most recent article, Do you have a right to life?, I did a little shameless self-promotion to my friends. When I brought it up to my neighbor in the dorm hall, he seemed repulsed by the title and I was dead sure he wasn’t going to read it. He came to my door the next day, however, and we had a meaningful conversation about the content and inspiration for the piece. He told me things that confused him in the article and the things he really liked. Although he wasn’t another content writer on Medium, I valued the feedback he gave me about my article.
You’re probably going to go quite a few months without any meaningful comments on Medium. And that’s ok. Even if it’s your mom or best friend telling you that they liked/disliked your article, always pay attention to it. Feedback is feedback and it’s the one thing that keeps our writing moving forward.
The bottom line is that it’s going to be difficult starting a writing career from scratch. You’ll have days where you think your writing is the worst thing to exist and there will be days when you feel good about hitting that “publish” button. But, the point of me saying any of this as an inexperienced kid is that you don’t need a professional or a novice like me to tell you that you can be a good writer. Anyone can write words on paper. And anyone can work hard to become a good writer if they dedicate the time effort to it.
