WRITING

100 Days of Writing: Day 50 — Back to the Basics

Getting better at writing

On Feb 1st, 2022, I embarked on a 100 days writing challenge, where I aimed to write one story per day on Medium.

I’ve decided to do a check-in every 10 days. The last one was here. And today, I will give you my progress on day 50.

50 articles written so far

This is article number 50 and I’m writing this on the 50th day of the challenge, which means I’m on track.

However, 2 of those 50 articles are still rough drafts, which means I’m running late. But I hope to catch up on this.

For me, the hardest day to write is Friday. On these days, I have to deploy all my willpower arsenal to motivate myself, and sometimes I get a hard time on this.

That being said, I’m halfway on the challenge, with no sign of burnout, which means I’m confident I will get to 100 articles in 100 days.

Back to the basics

This week, I’ve spent a sizeable chunk of hours improving my writing. For this, I’ve followed a popular course on Business Writing by Dr. Quentin McAndrew from University of Boulder, Colorado. I still haven’t finished this course, but I’ve enjoyed it so far.

The focus is mainly on writing clearly. McAndrew uses the metaphor of a windowpane for writing. When the windowpane is clean, you don’t see it, you only see what lies behind. This is good writing. Bad writing is when you can’t see clearly what lies behind because the windowpane is dirty.

Here are a couple of useful principles from the course:

Clarity above all: your writing needs to be like a transparent windowpane that reveals what you want to communicate.
Waste no time: don’t waste the reader’s time by using convoluted ways to explain your point.
Don’t sound smart, be smart: don’t use complicated vocabulary, keep things easy to digest for the reader.
Own your ideas: avoid wishy-washy words like might, think, maybe.

This is just a small extract, there are plenty of other great takeaways in the course.

Overall, I enjoyed this teacher’s approach. However, I keep in mind that writing for Medium is slightly different than business writing.

When you write on Medium, there is a lot of competition so you want to be extra compelling by using copywriting techniques such as story telling.

1000 views for a single article

In the last check-in, I was proud to announce that one of the articles I had submitted to the publication Better Humans was doing very well, causing a big spike in my statistics.

Back then, it had scored an impressive 600 views. And today it reached 1000 views, which is an exciting threshold to meet!

Since then, I have managed to publish 2 other articles on Better Human. But they have been less successful. Well, I guess you can’t win every time!

A trick to join the Medium Partner Program from an unsupported country

I already mentioned that I have been rejected from Medium Partnership Program. This is because I live in Mauritius, a country that is not part of the eligible countries for this program.

In the last check-in, I told you that I wrote them an email to try to negotiate. The main reason why they don’t accept some countries is that Medium pays using a payment system called Stripe.

While Stripe is not available in Mauritius, it is available in France. And I do have a bank account in France since I am French and I am working remotely for a company based in Paris. So there’s no technical challenge in accepting me as part of the Medium Partner Program.

Finally, I got an answer from Medium saying this:

If you are based in or trying to join with an IP address from an unsupported country, you will not be able to join the Partner Program. I encourage you to re-apply to the Partner Program when you are based in a supported location.

Basically, this means that I just need to apply to the Partner Program from a French IP. This can be done with a VPN or by asking a friend based in France to apply for me. And I’ll try this next Sunday.

My statistics

Now let’s see my statistics.

First, the story stats:

Since the last check-in, I increased my views from 3444 to 4974, a 44% increase. This is encouraging. But I think I could do better.

Sadly, I haven’t written many popular articles in the past 10 days. So I need to experiment further to find how to make my articles more compelling.

Let’s see if I can cross the 5000 threshold and get to 10,000 views by the end of the challenge!

Regarding my audience, the number of followers has increased by 33. Again, this is pretty disappointing.

The best way to work on this is to interact with many other writers. And I’ve had difficulties doing that because I spent my time on other critical activities such as taking the writing course described above.

I’ll try to improve on this measure by the next check-in, but I know it will be challenging.

My secret sauce

As usual, let’s check in on the habits I had in mind while starting this challenge:

Developing consistency and motivation

I will develop a habit of writing for one hour each morning when I wake up. Yes, I still do it. But as already mentioned, I prefer to finish the rough draft of my articles in the evening and edit in the morning.
I will do calls with my accountability partner to help me stay focused on my goals. I’m still in touch with my accountability partner. But sadly, he was too busy to attend the last check-in as he had an important exam. I’ll need to make sure we don’t miss the next one!
I will actively participate in various writers’ communities — currently, I’m part of the Write Useful Books and ILLUMINATION slack workspaces. Well, I lost this habit. I need to catch up on it :)
Other than that, as I said, I’m running late on a couple of articles that are still not fully edited. So my highest priority is to catch up on these this week, as this poses the biggest threat to my challenge.

Finding inspiration

I will read medium articles and follow interesting writers that I enjoy. I often do this thanks to the Medium app on my smartphone.
I will read a book each day for at least 30 minutes. I’m now reading The break out principle by Herbert Benson, but I think I’ll not finish it since it is too redundant and I already read the parts that I was most interested in. I’ll write an article on this book shortly.
I will do daily walks in nature. I still do this, not perfectly, but most of my days.
Other than that, I often read older articles that I wrote on my former French blog. Sometimes, it gives me ideas for new articles. Also, I tend to take notes of what I plan to write well in advance.

Avoiding burnout

I will do meditation or take a nap each morning after publishing my daily article. Yes, I still do that. Naps are especially critical when I need to recover from a short night.
I will do vigorous exercise during my walks in nature. Still doing it, but the mosquitoes are very annoying :o)
I will write articles in advance. On this point, I still use a just-in-time approach, writing my articles one by one each day. This could become a problem if I’m getting sick. But I hope it won’t happen!
Other than that, I’m still drinking a lot of water each day (3 liters) to help me reduce bad stress effects on my stomach, and I’ve written an article about it!

Ensuring I write quality articles

I will never publish an article the same day I wrote the first draft so that I can edit it properly. Still doing this. My writing is too raw if I don’t review the article after at least one day. I’ve especially noticed that on complex articles like the one on Glory Stones.
I will use Grammarly to spot my grammar mistakes. Still using it! Still using the basic Grammarly option.
I will practice writing exercises, such as studying my favorite authors and reusing their writing plans. While reading other writers, I do have noticed some nifty expressions that I like to reuse for my articles. For example, I like expressions that help the reader feel good about themselves.
Other than that, one thing I’m thinking more and more these times is to use Obsidian in a more efficient way to incubate my ideas for future articles.

The 10 posts I wrote since the last check-in

Lastly, here’s the list of stories I wrote since the last check-in in case you’ve missed them:

41. Learning Goals: How to Win Every Time (the title might change, not published yet) 42. Process Goals: Focus on Your Efforts, not the Outcome (not published yet) 43. Glory Stones: Building Your Personal Arc de Triomphe 44. The Rage to Succeed: How to Build Grit as a Shortcut to Greatness 45. 11 Mental Soothing Balms to Pull the Sting Out of Your Failures 46. Drinking 3 Liters of Water per Day: How I Cured Myself of Acute Stress 47. 5 Awareness Tools to Avoid the Boiling Frog Syndrome (not published yet, submitted to Better Humans) 48. Avoiding Disastrous Personal Crises with a Risk Register (not published yet) 49. Solitude + Goal = Big Magic (not published yet) 50. (this article)

In the last 10 days, I also published these 2 articles from my backlog:

And here are other articles from before that I still need to publish:

Friday Evening Hangover — How to Get Productive When You Don’t Feel Like It? (not accepted by publication “The Startup”)
Break Free From Procrastination by Washing Your Hands (not submitted)
Overcoming a Creativity Block With the Malkovich Principle (not published yet)
Deep Insights: 7 Books That Caused a Mini-Revolution in My Life (not published yet)

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I hope you enjoyed this article. As you can see, I try to work on different aspects of my challenge from one week to the other. That’s how I decided to try the course on Business Writing. I hope this inspires you on your writing journey 😀

On February 1st, 2022, I’ve embarked on a 100 days writing challenge. This is post number 50.