Notes on My Medium Nemesis

Finding your equal and opposite is vital for your literary well-being.

Lots of Medium is self congratulatory. Numerous articles that give you encouragement, advice and buckets of well wishes. Writers are sometimes fragile creatures, our self esteem can sometimes be tied up with our writing.

I have had numerous people point out to me the flaws in my spelling and grammar. I’ve adjusted my style and my editing to take into account the fact I am awful at both. When writing articles like these, you are getting a stream of consciousness and the grammar is a reflection on the tempo of my thoughts rather than a master class in accuracy.

Sometimes I just write jazz.

However, there’s one person on here who doesn’t take me to task on my poor use of punctuation. He doesn’t have time, he’s too busy ripping apart my articles and questioning the underlying premises.

He’s my nemesis. The Gladstone to my Disraeli. Though he wouldn’t understand that reference at all — he’s from LA. His name is Joe Duncan and from what I can gather from the last year, we disagree on almost everything.

And this is what makes it delightful. You will find huge discussions under both our articles where the two of us have squared off. We pick apart each other’s ideas, concepts, conceits and rhetoric, and we don’t hold back. Given that we’ve had this back and forth for around six months, I see no signs of it stopping.

And nor should it.

Our disagreements are rarely heated, and if they do suddenly veer off into something terse, we are usually quick to offer an apology. Joe is an out and out political lefty, a vocal feminist, pro-marriage and an excellent writer.

I am a libertarian-centrist, I critique both the right and the left. I’ll call out feminists when I think they’re beelining for misandry, I’m also very anti-marriage, ironically for feminist reasons. I am not quite as good a writer as Joe is, and that isn’t false modesty, he’s got the edge on both flow and style.

But that’s just a matter of taste. He’d probably disagree. He normally does.

For lots of writers it might be disheartening to find someone wading in to critique your work. For me (and I hope for him) it’s mostly a delight. It is unlike the glib self appointed grammar police who occasionally send me a private message to let me know I’ve misused semi-colons. I’ve stopped trying to explain that a semi-colon is used when you have a thought and a hesitant feeling about your thought at the same time;

like I said, jazz.

When someone goes for your work and they have taken the time to care about why they think you’re wrong and vocalise it, you shouldn’t be offended. If you’ve constructed a good article, you should be able to hold your ground. The resulting clash of ideologies is instructive and enlightening.

And isn’t THIS what Medium is made for?

I’ve spoken before about the left of centre lazy journalism that Medium needs to be careful of repeatedly curating. Joe isn’t that. He’s left, but he’s not playing to an established fan base. If it feels like he is, I call him out on it. He knows that. I would hope that I’m shaping his writing in much the same way he’s shaping mine. Forged in fire.

Maybe there’s something in the fact that we’re both white men in our thirties. Maybe we feel entirely safe in our own bubbles of privilege to go at each other hammer and tongs.

Joe is my nemesis. He brings my work on through pulling it apart. He makes me think about what I write and about how I write it. We are equal and opposite and that works far better than you’d think. In a world beset by perpetual offence and endless equality landmines, it feels good to have found someone who doesn’t pull their punches and who isn’t afraid to disagree with me.

So yes, be grateful for the eternal encouragement that you can get on Medium. It is nice. But sycophantic bubbles breed homogeny and sycophantic curation breeds intellectual wasting.

Medium is a place for new ideas, disagreement and debate. It doesn’t have the rabid infantile cut and thrust of Twitter, nor the banality of Instagram and Facebook. It is a place for two people to have nuanced discussions about the complexities of the human condition.

My advice

Go against the current grain, find the people who disagree with you and then keep talking to them like you’re both adults. You’d be surprised how rarely this happens both online and offline. Learn to disagree and don’t descend into argument. Write to a stalemate, then stop. Reflect. Learn. Move on.

On a site like Medium, your nemesis is worth more than a thousand followers. I have just over a thousand followers, for whom I am eternally grateful, but none of them have had quite the impact on my writing that Joe Duncan has.

Find your nemesis. Exercise their intellect regularly. Treasure them.

Two digital households both alike in dignity. The first is Joe’s publication Moments of Passion which deals with the concepts of love and passion in the digital age.

The second is mine Lucid Nightmare which deals with bleakness, dystopia and how the end of the world is never more than five minutes away.

Guess what… in a complex and nuanced world, you don’t have to pick a side.

Thanks for reading Writers Guild — A Penname publication

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