Writing | Career | Self

Kickstart Your Writing Career By Thinking Big and Celebrating Small

I define success by love and continuation.

I went through a dark age at the beginning of my writing journey. I felt blind, alone, bumbling along, trying to find my voice and audience. My writing wasn’t great. My income was non-existent.

And I was loving it, not in a glutton for punishment kind of way, but because this struggle is how I found my love for this craft.

Focus on finding bad

I’m years into my writing career and feel very lucky. But even during months when I make great money, I catch myself disaster-thinking, “Welp. That’s your peak. It’s all downhill from here.”

Clients come and go. Stats rise and fall. Some assignments are easier than others. Two days ago, I was slumped down in my chair, feeling deflated with a client draft. I sat there groaning, “This draft sucks. This draft sucks.”

After a few hours of questioning my existence, I managed to fix it. It’s in those moments that I love writing the most, when you emerge from that dark tunnel and realize there was always a solution.

Editing is more about identifying what is bad than what is good. Most of my time at this monitor is me saying, “This draft stinks. I just need to figure out why.”

When you feel pushed up against that wall of fog, that’s where growth happens. You learn how to troubleshoot. You improve your sense of tone and overall message.

It’s an obvious analogy but weight-lifting has the same effect: it hurts in the moment but you get stronger afterward.

Be OK with being a beached whale

I looked up the very first thing I ever posted on the internet. It was on Blogger and got a total of 3 views. On Quora, my first post had 43 views, no upvotes, no comments.

My content just landed there like a bloated beached whale, getting ready to explode and rain on everyone. Onlookers whispered to their spouses, “Oh my god? What is that? Is it safe to get closer?”

It’s not.

I understand a new writer's struggle. My best tip is to think big and celebrate small.

You can literally monetize your shower thoughts and weird things that keep you up at night. You can pay your rent with dick jokes. There are no rules of writing, and even the rules that do exist, are put there to be broken.

How many industries can you do that in? I remember getting dinged for being five minutes late to my cubicle, or not filling out one small part of a PTO request correctly.

Writing is freedom. It’s incredible. Think big, weird, anything, and enjoy that aspect of it.

New writers keep putting the horse in front of the cart. They want to duplicate what high-earning writers are doing. They imitate their style rather than exploring their own. It’s a race to earnings — which is fine on some level. Numbers do matter.

But slow down and celebrate the small wins. Develop your voice. When I started five years ago, I’d get excited about getting 5 upvotes, 100 views, or a few comments on a post. I’d feel like I was getting better and get excited. Don’t worry about all this nonsense about “top writers”. Enjoy your craft and celebrate those small moments.

Online writing is not a pure meritocracy. If I created a new account and reposted a viral article from my main account — it probably wouldn’t move. Algorithms hate new and low activity accounts. It’s nothing personal.

Milestones give you the feeling of growth and progress. Small wins help you stay motivated and hopeful. If you can’t hit any milestones, an easy win is to research a writing lesson and practice it to cement it in your mind. That’s progress.

The defeats never stop coming in writing, no matter how far along you get. The Pareto Principle, a statistical distribution stating that 20% of activities drive 80% of results, is very much at work with writing.

In fact, I’d say it’s more 90:10. A very small portion of your content will carry you most of the way. By definition, this means lots of misses. The first misses hurt the most.

You may write something you are immensely proud of, that you were sure would do well and it sinks. A client may push back on a submission. You may get ghosted by a publication. Your stats might nosedive on a platform. The most important thing is that you keep pushing content.

Things are always changing in this career. It seems like every year, there’s one big shakeup. Above all, I work to protect my love of this craft. Years from now, I may return to my dark ages. And I’m OK with that.

Success is doing what you love and continuing to love what you do. Keep thinking big and never stop celebrating small.