How I Stay Motivated to Write

About awakening a sleeping passion.

Writing has always been my creative outlet of choice.

When I was 11 years old, I started my first blog about guineapigs and sadly, I think it was the peak of my online blogging career so far. I didn’t make any money from it, nor did I get sponsorship deals, but I had tons of traffic from grown-up people asking me for advice on how to take care of their pets.

I had no idea, as I was never the best guinea pig keeper myself. I usually just googled the answer and then presented it to my readers in a friendly kid manner.

Through my blog, I also made my first online friends (who I really hope weren’t actually 40-something years old furries) and my guinea pigs Julia, Sara, and Bison were regularly winning the “best guinea pig” photo contests on their blogs. Oh, the innocent days of the early internet.

But I digress. The point I was trying to make is the fact that I liked blogging about guinea pigs more than I liked the actual animals. And I have always maintained some form of online presence related to writing ever since the guinea pig days.

My last “major” platform was Instagram

But I never quite “made it” there.

I ran an account focused on my travels, trying to inspire other people in different areas of travel. I enjoyed the part where I was forced to create visually appealing content, but my main focus and strength was in the captions, where I detailed my thoughts on different issues.

Instagram is not a very written-content-friendly platform though. Instagram is mostly for facetuned butt pics. I still like to take pictures of my travels (my butt isn’t that nice — is that why I never got popular?), but as I realized that trying to be a travel influencer wasn’t really for me, I stopped making an effort to post, deleted most of my lengthy captions, switched my profile back to personal and needed to jump to another platform to overshare and chase attention.

That’s how I discovered Medium.

The idea of being compensated for people reading your work seemed amazing to me. The fact that here I can do what I’ve always done in some form or the other anyways and possibly make money off of it is honestly game-changing.

Finally, I found a perfect excuse to return to my old hobby and also a great outlet for my opinions and thoughts without any character count limitations.

I am not trying to be a guru in any specific topic. I don’t have it all figured out that well, so you will probably never read articles such as “3 Mindsets That Lead to Ultimate Happiness” or “10 Lifechanging Budget Travel Hacks” because writing about those things bores me and I don’t feel as if I am in any position to tell people what to do.

The only thing I know I have a 100% expertise in is my own life.

And that’s what I want to share.

Writing from experience is also why I won’t ever run out of things to talk about — if I ever abandon writing, it sure won’t be because I don’t have anything to say anymore. I don’t want my platform to be a narcissistic “me, me me” kind of thing, but I do believe that I can form my past experiences into a message that readers can take away for themselves.

I have so much to say and feel like I haven’t even properly started yet. Just thinking about all the things, experiences, topics, and issues I want to write about in the future gets me excited.

To me, writing is not just a therapeutic process, it is mainly a way for me to communicate with the world. One I feel comfortable and safe in. And the world responding to me was what I needed to fall deep into writing.

It is becoming apparent to me that what started as an attempt to monetize my pastime is now slowly turning into a full-blown passion.

And it is a glorious feeling.

So, what motivates me to write?

My motivation is you, the person reading this, of course.

What motivates me to keep writing is the people reading, clapping, and responding to my work. It’s the fact that despite English not being my first language, I can express myself well enough for someone to want to read it. It’s the ability to see measurable progress in the form of views, reads, and dollars.

It’s every long-forgotten Facebook friend or Instagram follower who reaches out to me just to say nice things about my writing. It’s the people who go out of their way to tell me that what I wrote helped them in some way.

And it’s the disbelief that such things are already happening to me, even though I am still very new in all this.

Medium as a platform and the way it works also gives me great motivation — it provides me with the warm, fuzzy feeling of being heard. I feel like, unlike many other platforms, Medium rewards persistence, hard work, and authenticity.

April has been my fourth month of wiring on Medium and I am very happy with the results I am seeing. Even though I haven’t been as productive as I imagined myself on April 1st and only published seven pieces, one of which was too personal for me to promote and one of which was quite lackluster on top of that, I still managed to make progress.

Baby steps, right?

My two last pieces finally got curated, I gained my first 100 followers and the number I am seeing in my earnings today is not a full-time income or a Gucci bag, it doesn’t even cover my phone bill yet, but it’s adequate to the amount of work I put in and that’s incredibly encouraging.

The last thing that’s left for me to do is to thank you. If you read until this point, you are a part of my motivation and a part of a reason for my rediscovering of an old love for playing with words again.

And I can only hope that by my writing, I can motivate you in some other, completely different way as well.