My 7 Lessons in 7 Months As a Writer

Doubt, drafts, stats, penny motivation, lessons on writing, and general advice

I’ve published about 4 articles this month. It’s not that I don’t have ideas to write about. 54 of them are seated in my draft section and I couldn’t take any one of them into full completion. Naturally, my statistics have reflected my lack of “productivity” and the experience is forcing me to re-evaluate my priorities here and whether or not I want to be writing one month or a year from now. So far, I have had several reasons to hold on even though this sometimes feels like a storm that will never end. I keep telling myself that the motivation will soon come.

6 months ago when I started writing here, my motivation was money. Am not gonna lie. It may have taken me months to join but Shelby’s video started this all. Before that, I had been writing my soul away on Facebook and WhatsApp status and subjecting my friends and family to my unsolicited stream of consciousness. — Rest in peace to all the words and grammar I butchered. When I saw Shelby Church had made $10,000 I knew that this was going to be my chance to earn money for my rants. My first rant away from Facebook and WhatsApp also served as my first Medium post.

I kept my rant spree for about 5 posts until I realized I had to change strategy and give proof of the “wisdom” I was giving out. It was a great time. Mid-September 2020 to mid-October of that year, I had 30 stories up and $1.65 in total. And nothing gave me more fuel like those daily pennies. Months later, I am way ahead of penny motivation. The pennies have grown to a few dollars but if my penny/money motivation to write were a person, it would have taken a seat, got popcorn, and started watching as I tried to keep growing without it. — It’s miserable.

After the first month, I had decided to abandon the idea of writing for money and adopt the idea of writing for impact. — Or so I thought. But as I continued working towards this ideal, I quickly noticed that impact was just a modification of my efforts to write for money. This was the lunacy of me subconsciously sugar coating a pill to feel like am doing some work here and money is the result. I constantly sought out viral or breakout topics and that is why I have several articles seated in my drafts with unfinished ideas. 54+ efforts of me trying to create something viral have resulted in 54 drafts.

These are drafts about religion, race, gender, health… These are topics I think of when I talk about writing for impact but they are the same stories that have led me to the point where I went from publishing 30 articles a month to publishing 4 articles a month because I feel like I want to talk about them yet I don’t feel qualified enough to do so. Even with 4 articles, I have still made several times more than I made in my 1st month with 30 articles. — $1.65 Vs $20.14 if you are curious. The stories that I published back then earn nothing to this day ever since I published them by the way. It’s not that I can have stories make $15+ each. Back then, my stories were more like $0.06 at best. My sister saw my stats recently and she was like…

“Oh this means that if you write 1 story a day for 30 days now, you can easily make $400+…”

I don’t think that’s quite accurate. I’m sure Pareto’s principle applies regardless of skill level. — But I still take the compliment in the grace given that I’m just an engineer and designer sharing my thoughts through writing. I have not yet had a story that makes $20,000 on its own but I strive for that. But I am not going to say that having stories that make $15 after writing $0.06 stories is not an achievement. You best believe I celebrated my win. But for me, no win is complete if I cannot prove my lessons.

I have to be able to prove that I have grasped the concepts that have brought me here and as much as I feel like giving up at this time, I am not ready to do that and I won’t. But I will share the lessons I learned so that they may help other writers that feel the need to move ahead if they haven’t heard about these already. Here are the most useful lessons that have got me from $0.06 stories at best to $15+ stories after 7 months…

Find a balance between streaming consciousness and writing facts

By streaming consciousness, I mean writing down your opinions and beliefs about anything. Writing facts is talking about existing events and backing them up with research. In my 7 months of experience, streaming my consciousness has been extremely easy. It is my secret to publishing 30 stories a month without burning out. It is also the crudest writing, evidence of which can easily be found in the performance of such articles. Writing in this style alone or most of the time has resulted in me having really terrible articles and lots of them earning $0.01 or less.

This is because articles that are entirely based on our opinions tend to be absolutist in nature and don’t put into account the beliefs of other people with opposing beliefs. People who can resonate with an absolute idea are only the ones who have the same beliefs as you. The rest are left alienated and many push back with opposing beliefs if they even give your articles any attention. Writing from facts is not an easy one. There is a lot of research involved and if done exclusively, the resulting article is always an extremely complicated piece full of references that make my head ache. 95% of my drafts fall in this category. And I don’t think many of them will ever get published.

Here is my solution

I have found that finding the balance between writing streams of consciousness and writing about research makes it easier for each of your articles to perform better than any on side focussed article. Streaming consciousness comes with a lot of relative beliefs framed as absolute ideas and weaving it with the threads of fact helps people to actually take you seriously and not think that you are a crazy person. The solution is simple. I make sure that I can support each paragraph that has my beliefs with facts, research, or external opinions.

Make your writing blend seamlessly with your research

Most people however make their writing separate from the research. I hate when I read my work back and there is a statement like this.

“Discomfort can be healed by a proper state of mind. Research by Dr.D Richardson of fakely university and associate professor of neural linguist sub atomic molecular psychology shows that our minds …..” and then throw in a link at one of the texts.

In my writing, this is what I call discord. I don’t like it. It feels planted and inconsistent. All the pieces where I have used it got rejected from major publications I applied to previously and when published on my own or other publications, these articles performed poorest. — Am talking $0.01 type of poor.

The solution

My approach that I find really successful in the blockquote above for example would be to eliminate everything after the word “mind”. I especially don’t name drop unless I really have to. So I take that whole sentence and directly link to just the relevant sentence. So I am left with a link to this sentence.

“Discomfort can he healed by a proper state of mind”

It keeps the article simple and meaningful to the reader… If I need help you promised in your “How to..” article, some name drop isn’t going to fix me up and if my text cannot stand alone without the name drop but just the link, then that article is not properly written and if destined to fail. I borrow this from my engineering background. In civil engineering, no structural element should fail when a load is subjected to it. If any of that happens it means that your structure is poorly engineered and could fail very soon.

In writing, the structural elements are the sentences. Each sentence should be clear enough without the need for support by a name drop. After your sentence is clear enough, then just insert a hyperlink as reinforcement for anyone that needs further information. “Research shows….” statements are not structurally sound. They tend to take me out of the story I write so I avoid them entirely. I had been rejected from Better humans several times until I stopped using those unnecessary statements and I finally got an article published there.

If you are writing for money then own it

The biggest mental struggle I had to deal with was my attitude towards money and writing. In the beginning, even though it’s the potential of how much I could make writing on Medium that made me start writing, it was hard for me to write an article that I thought wouldn’t be profitable. I remember telling my close friend that my goal writing on Medium was for each of my stories to make a consistent $100 minimum one year from then. (7 months ago). But I would then read a lot of these articles from top writers talking about how you should not write for the money. It made me have a guilty relationship with the money.

Most of the things we do come from some motivation. It may be an intrinsic or extrinsic one. For me, the motivation to write on Medium was an extrinsic one at the start and that was money. The more I try to fight it even now, the more I take a hit on my productivity. So I stopped trying to fight it but made sure that it keeps me going as I write about things that I have found useful in my own life and sharing them with others. I don’t deny the money… I want lots of it… But I have to make it worth writing for by writing about things I care about and making them profitable. This has helped me keep going for the seven months I have been here otherwise I would have quit long ago.

For now, sometimes I write because I have looked in my partner program earnings and I see that I have already surpassed my previous earnings. Other times I write because I have some deeply pressing issue I want to talk about. And other times, it’s just inspirations that I want to pass down to other people. I don’t fight my motivations anymore. I don’t feel guilty writing for the money as long as my articles are truly beneficial to the reader. Fighting your motivations or feeling guilty about them just hinders your growth and productivity so I can say that it’s unproductive in your creative work.

Learn then do and finally teach

“Those who know, do. Those that understand, teach.” ― Aristotle

7 months into my writing journey here, I consider myself successful. I no longer write streams of consciousness that are absolutist in nature. At least I always try to leave room for thoughtful disagreement. Writing has given me a lot of understanding about other perspectives different from my own, and I cannot fail to recognize that am several multiples ahead from the days I earned $1/month writing every day.

My most successful articles have been articles where I shared and taught about different things I have learned that have made my life easier. I have since taken interest in active learning because I know that soon I will have to do and teach what I learned to someone else as a way for me to fully understand the concepts involved. There are many people that will give you advice on how to succeed in various areas of your life but for me, the most useful time I spend is when I take up an active learning role with the purpose of teaching it to someone else later if it works for me.

Most people who take free online courses never finish them and those that do, majority of them never retain the knowledge several months later because they never took the time to do what they were taught or if they did, they never taught it to someone else and so they didn’t fully test their understanding of the knowledge received. My progress on Medium has been fueled by the things I learned, did, and then taught to other people. I can listen to a podcast but unless I do and teach what I’ve learned from it in some way, I never retain that information long term.

Drop the side-hustle mentality

Side hustles are good. I can’t say the same for the mentality though. Side hustles serve as a transition from where we are to where we want to be. There are many people whose lives have changed by taking up side hustles. Am not against side hustles. I’m against carrying around the side-hustle mentality.

There are so many people who have a side hustle mentality from the time they allocate to their businesses every day to the products they deliver to their customers. Dropshippers are the best example of this. Especially the ones that source products from China without checking their quality. My first successful side hustle was dropshipping. I used to sell bracelets from China to people in the US when I was in India. I never got to hold the products. So one time when I decided to check how good my $12 bracelet was, I quickly found it was the biggest rip-off I had been doing and I immediately shut my business down.

I try to push for quality whenever I can but most people don’t. I was born in a 3rd world country and I have always seen people selling all sorts of products just to make quick money. This is a side-hustle mentality. When you are writing, a side-hustle mentality may mean publishing substandard work. With the side hustle mindset, you do anything you need to do in order to advance yourself even if that may not benefit another person. Operating from this mindset makes it hard to dig deep or do proper research and produce products or services that are actually useful. I have seen some people collecting e-mails with e-books made out of an already existing article on their page.

I don’t know if I can ever trust someone that does this to me if I were to sign up and just get an article that I finished reading. Side hustle mentality ruins your productivity and reputation among other things so just always try to approach your work with a mentality that your life depended on it and avoid the side hustling mentality.

Read to aspire and write to inspire

For me, the best $5 I spend every month goes to my Medium subscription. I know there are so many writers that don’t subscribe to this platform and are still incredibly successful in their writing journeys. There is a rather simple reason that makes me keep my Medium subscription. That is Aspiration. Aspiration helps me to keep pushing through times that aren’t very pleasant. When my statistics feel like they are going down the drain, it’s the aspiration that makes me open my medium editor to push through and make my next story or article.

“Far away there in the sunshine are my highest aspirations. I may not reach them, but I can look up and see their beauty, believe in them, and try to follow where they lead.” ― Louisa May Alcott

There are a few places that make me aspire for more and keep my writing journey alive. Sometimes it's youtube videos, other times its random shower thoughts but by far the most useful is the source of aspiration is reading Medium articles. Especially in the beginning, there were several times that I felt like giving up but just as that thought came to my mind, I found articles on this platform that helped me get through those lows… Most writers go through similar challenges as you do and there is nothing more powerful than a narrative that resonates. That is why I decide to read and I also write to inspire others to push for more in their lives.

Allow yourself to be the dumbest writer in your space

“We come nearest to the great when we are great in humility.” — Rabindranath Tagore

I have always struggled with an inferiority complex when in presence of people smarter or better than me. This has not been very helpful in helping me acquire the skills necessary to move me forward. The only time I have benefited and learned very useful skills has been during the times when I have pushed myself out of my comfort zone into uncomfortable environments like those where I am the least smart person in the room. On Medium, this has been through joining groups or publications that require me to produce work that matches a certain quality or stand. I have for example joined and got published in publications like Better Humans where I know there are more accomplished individuals than I am. This forces me to level up and present my ideas in the best way possible thereby helping me to improve in my writing.

Handle rejections with grace and burn no bridges

I have seen a lot of people burning bridges with publications and I have also burnt some of my own. I remember this one publication that used to reject any article I wrote without much explanation. I used to do all that the guidelines used to ask for but I couldn’t seem to get published with them. It wasn’t a big publication either which made me even angrier.

I wasn’t used to being rejected so much after being so vulnerable so, at the time, I felt it was a personal attack. I thought that this guy had issues with me even though he had never met me. Given that he was not the same race as me, I couldn’t help but throw in the “r-word” while I was at it. I was new back then… I still resent that guy and his publication but I have learned to stop that from ever happening again. I take time to heal from all my painful rejections which had helped me advance my skills in writing more than I could ever imagine.

Conclusion

Writing is not an easy task. Writing on Medium has been a journey for me and I know a lot more waits for me in the months to come and I am ready and excited to learn more and keep advancing. I am going to keep chasing the money when I have to. I will keep aspiring for more as I inspire more people to live to their fullest potential. I hope you too will do the same.