It’s difficult to write daily for Medium, and that's okay.

Summary

The author of a Medium article discusses the challenges and personal strategies of maintaining a daily writing routine, despite the difficulties and time constraints, as they navigate their way through finding their voice and niche on the platform.

Abstract

The author, a novice to daily writing outside of scientific journals, embarked on a journey to post articles daily on Medium, inspired by the advice that frequent posting is key to improvement and monetization. Initially optimistic due to their experience with morning pages, the author quickly realized the complexity of crafting structured articles regularly. Despite the struggle, they have managed to publish an average of 11 articles over 15 days, even while preparing for oral comprehensive exams. The author is in the process of discovering their writing voice, deciding on a niche, and establishing a consistent writing schedule, experimenting with different times of the day. They find night writing particularly inspiring but acknowledge the challenge of maintaining this routine. The author remains excited about the learning curve and the potential to engage with readers' curiosities on Medium and Twitter.

Opinions

The author acknowledges the difficulty of writing daily for Medium but maintains a positive outlook on the process.
They are self-reflective about their writing style, questioning whether they are too informal or not.
The author is still exploring topics to focus on and is keen on aligning their writing with their passions to maintain a "passion economy" side hustle.
They have experimented with writing at different times (morning, lunch, nighttime) and found night writing to be especially powerful and conducive to creativity.
The author values the engagement with their audience and is curious about what topics pique their readers' interest.
Despite the challenges, the author is invigorated by the newness of the platform and the potential for growth and experimentation with content presentation.

It’s difficult to write daily for Medium, and that's okay.

As soon as I joined Medium I was automatically bombarded with a bajillion articles about how the only journey to improvement (and the only way to earn money on this platform) is to post daily.

I was honestly quite curious about what that would look like and tried it out. As context, I have never written professionally other than for scientific journals, and that is a long arduous process.

My last manuscript went through something like twenty drafts with my supervisor and that is actually another story on its own. Idea for tomorrow’s post? Stay tuned.

I thought, “if I’m writing about my own experiences and sharing my perspectives on things”, surely it wouldn’t take me eight months to produce a submittable draft? If I can write three continuous typed pages for morning pages, surely more structured writing won’t be that much harder?

I’m wrong. It is hard.

But I’m sticking with it.

I set a goal to write daily for at least 6 months and so far I’m averaging about 11 articles over 15 days, which is pretty good, considering that I (successfully) defended my oral comprehensive exams amidst that.

For me, I’m still discovering my own voice (am I too informal? do I need to be more informal at the risk of sounding robotic?).

I’m discovering what types of topics I want to niche down and focus on. I’m narrowing it down to write about what I really like to do (again, remembering that I do want to keep this as a passion economy type of side hustle).

Most importantly, I’m still locking down a schedule for writing. So far, I’ve tried:

Morning: I usually journal while I eat breakfast first thing in the morning and thought it would be wise to try and squeeze writing into that timeslot too. It’s not. The entire writing process takes me about an hour and it’s putting me at a later start time for my actual work during the day.

Lunch: Then I tried squeezing time in at lunch. I give myself a full hour for lunch and usually finish eating lunch in 10–15 minutes, so it gives me a lot of time to be in creation mode (e.g., designing new products for my shop, writing, creating new twitter threads). This hasn’t been working as well because lately I’ve been having some exhausting or long-running Zoom meetings and actually taking the full hour to slowly and mindfully eat as a way to decompress, which is what brings me to…

Nighttime: today is my first night writing in the evening after I’ve had my nightly video chat with my long-distance boyfriend. There’s just something extra special about writing in the silence with the darkness enveloping you. This might be the best bet. I feel powerful writing at night. But will I still feel powerful tomorrow morning now that it’s actually 9:11pm and I’m typically in bed my 9pm? Only time will tell.

I haven’t worked out all the kinks or learned the ropes well enough yet for this platform.

But that newness is what excites me. Even with platforms I’m more familiar with (primarily Twitter), I love experimenting with how I can present information differently in a more bite-sized way. I love tweaking little things here and there to see what other people are curious about.

In short, I’m curious about what other people are curious about?

I’m excited to find out more.

You can cut the suspense and tell me about what you’re curious about by chirping at me here.