Here Are the Reasons Why You Are About to Give Up Writing on Medium

They have nothing to do with the latest changes.

The backstory

I have started writing and publishing on Medium on April 30 of 2020. So, I am on board for a little over half a year.

This is my one hundred-and-fifty-seventh article here. And I will submit it as soon as I finished writing and revising it. Scary! And fun. But more on this a little later.

Within this half a year, I was both optimistic and dragging my feet when writing on Medium. I thought of giving up a couple of times. Encouraging articles by Itxy Lopez, Jessica Lynn, and other writers I admire and follow here helped to become aware that I didn’t want to give up.

I started wondering why those thoughts appeared both of giving and not giving up.

I wondered if watching some of the authors leave Medium for other platforms because, as they claimed, the latest changes here also ignited this wish for me.

But it didn’t take me to contemplate long that at least for me, it was not the case because of the two reasons.

First, I contemplated giving up also before the latest changes. So the latest changes could only act as a trigger for my “loaded gun” of worry and anxiety, if at all.

Here is where I first read about this enlightening analogy of the “loaded gun”:

“Many people have anger and annoyance on tap. They mistakenly think that someone or something caused their upset. But what they don’t realize is that they are pre-charged and any disturbance can set off an explosion. It’s similar to a gun. It is reasonable to expect that if you pull the trigger on a loaded gun the gun will fire. But if there is no gunpowder in the cartridge then no matter how many times you pull the trigger there won’t be any resulting ‘bang.’ The better you get at saying Yes to what is happening, the less likely you are to have flare-ups when life doesn’t go the way you want.” — Ariel & Shya Kane, Practical Enlightenment

So I was “pre-charged” with some other reasons before these changes on Medium occurred.

Besides, I actually thought these latest changes were great. Maybe apart from the logo, grin, which lately I got used to and didn’t mind anymore. So again, even the resistance to the logo had most reasons from inside than outside.

I liked the fact that Medium update their game here and make changes. Reading about their frequent changes reminded me of the courage to try something new to up the game. So, all in all, I appreciated the changes and was looking forward to seeing how the writing landscape on Medium would change because of them.

They might have played a role in making the reasons for my lows while writing here more visible, but they were definitely not the reasons for those times when I wanted to give up.

The true reasons were two of them, and they have to do with only me, my preferences, and how I treated myself. No one else influenced that. And it was also me who helped myself to see the light and motivate myself to keep writing.

I hope they can help you, too, when you find yourself feeling low in your writing game on Medium.

Here is what I discovered.

Approaching the writing process on Medium in the same way for far too long

Being a newbie on Medium, I eagerly learned from masters. I started writing and publishing as often as I could. The books I published before starting writing on Medium helped with the content. And the excerpts I published here have drawn attention to my books, and I got a few book sales out of it. Double win. Wonderful!

I discovered the benefits of prescheduling and started putting articles on my dashboard a week or even more before they appeared. In July, no one noticed that I had a three-week summer vacation because I prescheduled five articles for each week for four weeks beforehand. So, when I was back to work, I had a week to write and prepare content for the following week.

But recently, I started lagging with my prescheduling rhythm.

My other commitments were only marginal reasons, if at all, for managing less than five articles and often forcing myself to write and post those I did. For this week, I only managed to preschedule one article, the one that came out yesterday. For today, I had no prescheduled article. And I will submit this one as soon as I finished writing and revising it—no prescheduling for now.

As mentioned above, this is scary but also exciting.

So the reason number one is:

If you are about to give up writing on Medium (or anywhere else), then you are not excited about the writing process — the game — anymore.

I turn my life into games deliberately for almost five years now, and one of the lessons learned was that I should adjust my self-motivational games often to keep myself engaged, having fun, and excited.

I realize now that I forced myself to stick with just one approach to writing here. I thought that I must preschedule the articles to ensure that I was often published here to increase the probability of one of the articles going viral.

But I forgot to have fun in the process. And I also forgot that,

“The destiny of games is to become boring, not to be fun.” — Raph Koster, Theory of Fun for Game Design

I forgot that as soon as I played the game of one approach to writing long enough, it became boring for me, and I yearned to play another game, or the same game but with a modified design.

And this brings us to the second reason.

Forbidding myself to do what I wanted

I didn’t notice immediately the yearning to do something different, but I see it clearly now.

As a player or my writing game, I had a clear idea of what I wanted to do — both in terms of the process and what to write about. But as the designer of that game, I resisted these wishes.

In the past several weeks, I noticed several times how I wished to press the button “Publish now” instead of the usual “Schedule for later.” But I forbade myself to do that because it was not after the rules I set for myself here.

As a designer of the self-motivational games, I forgot for some time to look at what my player, myself, wanted and needed, and instead tried to force myself to act the way I thought I should be doing it.

Prescheduling worked for me before, and many successful writers on Medium recommended it, so I had to do it.

But I forgot that I could do both. Preschedule and publish/submit right away whenever I had an appetite for it, or rather, whenever my intuition gave me a hint towards one or another.

The changes both on Medium and on publications I contributed to helped make this necessity to modify my writing game design visible. I loved that I got an external nudge to change something. Because the changes in my game designs were long overdue. I yearned them as a player in my writing on Medium game.

And here is another wish I denied myself and surrendered to it with this article.

I didn’t dare to write about Medium because these articles wouldn’t be curated. That would mean fewer people would see my stories, and I would be losing in this game.

But again, that was just the self-motivational game designer’s wish to make their game successful along with some hypothetic criteria and not with the wishes of the actual player, themselves.

Even if I heard that articles about Medium were popular, loved reading those myself, and wanted to share my joy of writing here, I still didn’t dare write them because I hoped to get my stories curated.

I don’t know whether it is due to Medium's latest changes or me being in “curation jail,” but I got my last curation on September 15 and not a single one after.

So, the player in me started wondering recently and asking the designer ever so quietly, “If our stories don’t get curated anyway, maybe we can start writing about Medium? I really want to do that! I love being here and want to share my experience with others. So what do you say?”

Wow! The stubborn designer in me started seeing that that was yet another wish I denied myself regarding Medium. There were many others I refused myself in other areas of my life, and seeing and respecting this one helped me see and surrender to other wishes as well.

It helped me also see that I could take care of all the other commitments I had and still do what I wanted. I didn’t have to earn a certain amount of money first before writing about Medium. Why should I put such a tough rule on the game I so much enjoy? I might never earn what others do here. And it really doesn’t matter. Because getting paid for my writing — however little — is only one of the many reasons I love hanging out here.

That would be a topic for another article. But here is a quick summary. Thanks to Medium, I didn’t feel isolated during the lockdown. Even if I couldn’t meet my fellow writers in the local writer’s club in person, I interacted with many writers here on Medium every day. I felt and do now like a part of this beautiful community of writers and readers. The claps, highlights, and responses showed me that what I wrote was appreciated and brought value. And I read so many inspiring, enlightening, fantastic, and fun stories by others here.

Words in conclusion

If anything, the newest changes on Medium and the lack of curation helped me see those two things I wanted to do but forbade myself because I was afraid that it would be wrong and that I would be only losing in this writing game. But as long as I wrote and was excited about it, then I was already winning.

Thus, if you have thoughts about giving up writing on Medium, anywhere else, or at all, don’t blame the changes on that platform for these thoughts. They are just the trigger. Go and see what your gunpowder might be. Look at those suppressed wishes to do something new and even unconventional, either for yourself or also others.

Study yourself anthropologically and become aware of your wishes. Is there a different way you want to approach writing and publishing/submitting your pieces? Do you want to write on a new topic, which you didn’t dare to touch, but are reading so much about?

Then adjust your game design for now, not forever, and continue creating the most exciting self-motivational games for your player, yourself, also, here on Medium.

P.S. The big correction → My yesterday’s and other stories published after September 15 got curated

Before sending out this piece, I decided to refresh my knowledge of the “curation jail.” I followed the steps outlined by Casey Botticello in his article “Medium Curation Jail” and went to see the detail of my latest, yesterday’s article.

To my greatest surprise, I found the following statement below the title:

“Chosen for further distribution.”

Clicking on the “Details” of several other recently published stories revealed the same statement.

It means my stories continued to get curated after September 15, even if I didn’t get a notification about that per e-mail.

And I must say I am glad about that. Because waiting for those e-mails and fretting that as many of my stories as possible got curated took away from the pleasure I have playing this beautiful writing game and sharing my pieces with you.

Thank you for reading!

If you enjoyed this article, then in addition to those referred to above, you might also enjoy these:

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