Send Some Compassion Toward New Writers

Getting our first 100 followers might be causing more stress than you realize.

I joined Medium back at the beginning. I don’t remember when or how I first heard about it, but I had recently finished an MFA in creative writing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and was on the eve of once again moving back to Fargo when I wrote and published my first post December 2013 (just a little over a year after the site launched).

I’ve been afraid to reread it since I began writing with some frequency a few months ago as I thought it might, well, blow donkey dick, to use a phrase from the essay. It’s a short New Year’s piece that manages to tie in Jane Eyre (I’m a bit ashamed now to see that I completely missed the racism Bertha faced and that I didn’t also see her as a victim, but what can you do except evolve?). To my surprise, the writing itself isn’t terrible.

I suppose it shouldn’t have been as the MFA was my second creative writing master’s degree, in other words, I had some experience crafting a narrative, and I had published a few pieces here and there in literary spaces. But what can I say? I may never not be an insecure writer. In three years I’ll cringe to think about what I’m publishing now.

I didn’t post my second piece until 2014.

I hadn’t been keeping up with Medium, but I remember popping on and coming across a writing challenge that sparked When the End is the Beginning which I’m even less inclined to go back and read, but mostly because I remember what it’s about and I don’t want to revisit those emotions.

I loved Medium as a space from day one. It seemed (and is still) so wonderfully clean. It seemed like the perfect space for the essay writer I was becoming. But I didn’t feel as if I was enough as I was to keep writing. As much as I tried to find one, I didn’t have a niche as so many on-blogging experts insisted one need to develop a following.

And I suffered from the New Leaf Syndrome, can I call it that?, Jane Elliott PhD so aptly helped me to realize in her essay “Why Trying to Turn over a ‘New Leaf’ Keeps us Stuck”. Every time I failed to publish a blog with any kind of schedule I decided I wasn’t capable of being a person who blogged. I felt as if I had to be a whole different person in order to be a person who published online rather than allowing myself to publish erratically and inconsistently about whatever caught my fancy just to see what might come from it. Instead, I went on in agonizing fits and starts trying different platforms, sure that this one or that would finally change who I was at my core.

I wrote a few things on Xanga waaaay back in the day and some local dude I’d never met before even fell for me because of my MySpace blog (which I regret not having saved). I tried Blogger, WordPress, Tumblr. But all those attempts were — personal and erratic. Many of the posts I managed to get out weren’t thought-out essays, and some were just one-liners.

I come from the early kind of internet in which my initial “followers” were almost always my in-person friends or friends of those friends. A blog, in my mind, was less performative (or performative in a different kind of way) than blogs are now. They were more personal, timely, casual.

Even if I wasn’t checking in often, I could tell that Medium was a different kind of space, maybe one I wasn’t ready for yet. It mixed the personal blog with thought-out content, “stories” as they’re called here, and I’m glad to see that more or less the site has attracted really solid writers and that the personal essay flourishes. Personal essays have been my jam since well before popular media has enjoyed them.

Some months back Rebekah Joy reminded me of my dormant Medium profile. I hadn’t been on in ages but she was reading about how us writers might be able to make a few bucks on the platform. Did I even realize that Medium had gone to a paid model? I don’t know.

I try not to think about what would have happened if I’d continued to write, however clunky and erratically, on the platform. If I’d spent any time here at all I’d have realized that the community is super supportive and helpful. I might have already had 100 followers when Medium went to the paid model a few years ago.

I would have already learned a lot about writing and publishing. I might even have realized much earlier on that making money from the kind of writing I wanted to do was easy, but unfortunately, I did not keep writing and though I had those two early essays and a handful of followers (I know or have met in real life who I’m not sure visit Medium anymore), I more or less started from scratch back in September when I published my second first essay.

Shortly after Rebekah and I spoke, I joined the Partner Program, but as I was finishing a graduate degree, I wasn’t able to begin writing and posting immediately. And then the platform shifted focus once again and the recent changes that require new writers to have 100 followers before they can get paid for their writing came into effect.

To my surprise when I started writing, I found I was grandfathered into the Partner Program as it previously existed and didn’t need the 100 followers to receive my pennies for the first couple of stories I published here, but I attended a Medium webinar on earning on the platform and Those-That-Be in-Charge mentioned that this grandfather system may change in the new year. Those of us who didn’t have 100 followers but were Partner members under the previous system would lose our Partner status.

I panicked.

I was already finding establishing a writing/publishing routine difficult (see previous statement about never being able to publish consistently and suffering from New Leaf Syndrome). I only managed to publish one essay in September and one in October. I wanted to be focusing on the writing, but now I was worried about getting (and keeping) 100 followers so as to not be kicked out and once again relegated to the realm of writing for free.

What a blow!

My first instinct was to follow whoever Medium suggested to me on the home page, but I wasn’t wise enough to engage with their work and wasn’t receiving follow backs. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to engage with their work. What I had read on Medium was stuff that totally jibed with my sensibilities, it was a matter of focus and energy.

I was still getting settled in my new living quarters, and still trying to determine how much energy I could put where. It was a clusterfuck, to be honest. Shelves needed to go up, items needed to be sold, things needed to be cleaned and organized (some progress has been made, but much of this still needs to happen). I wasn’t yet making writing a priority. I was trying to organize externally as opposed to internally.

I finally was able to make the switch to prioritizing writing, which has helped me to begin to organize where I spend my time and attention on the platform, which brought me a few more followers to whom I’m grateful.

But I was still feeling nervous, so when I came across my first 100 follower essay, “Why I ‘Cheated’ to Get to the 100 Follower Mark”, by Noelle Beauregard, where she instructed those of us also eager for 100 followers to clap, respond, and follow the responders as a way to break the threshold, I thought, well, why not?

If I could just get over the barrier and feel something like safety, then I could get back to the hard work of writing, publishing, and hopefully, earning readers engaged in my work.

I did this twice (the second, a rather amusing essay on the topic, “I will follow anyone that follows me”, by Holly Faupel), and as of this morning have surpassed my 100 followers! I’m not sure I’m fully safe as apparently, some people get their 100 and then do a mass unfollow (which I don’t plan on doing), but I do feel safer.

Of course, the #followforfollow method isn’t without its criticisms. Those who’ve been writing on the platform for years and got their followers the “hard way” seem a bit irritated by the trend. And believe me, I understand their irritation. What a cheap way to get followers who probably won’t even read your material or stick with you; people should follow you because they’re engaged with your writing!

And to them, I say, YES! Absolutely. Followers who remain loyal readers are the best a writer can hope for on this platform, but what difference does it make if the writer isn’t earning any money from those reads?

Maybe they’re one of the few who hit it big and manage to earn100 engaged follower/readers in their first couple of months and can go on earning from those essays, but what if they manage to get only 50 follower/avid readers who they might earn more than pennies from, but because they don’t have 100 followers they don’t get any of that money?

I do not write strictly to earn money, I write because I NEED to, but I am no longer in the mindset that, just because my skills and interests lend themselves to an art, that I should be a starving artist. I have spent far too much money, time, and energy honing this skill (however imperfect it may still sometimes be) to toil away in obscurity. And I don’t believe anyone else should either. Artists, writers, musicians, we deserve to be paid for our time and efforts, and that’s why I’m here. I wasn’t about to let it be taken away just as I started to build momentum.

And what an absolute shift in mentality! A far cry from the person I once was, too afraid of being terrible at writing and terrible at writing consistently, to give it an honest try on platforms where people might see it or, gasp, pay for it! I now staunchly advocate for myself in writing exactly the type of things I want to write rather than what I might be told to write as a newspaper reporter, magazine writer, or technical writer (not that those aren’t necessary and important writing jobs), but I also believe that I should be paid for my work.

Though some folks seem to go from $0 to $4k in a matter of a few months, like Jenn Leach showed us she did in “How much Medium pays me with 3,000 followers”, while I’m still trying to get myself to publish more than one essay a month, I do feel as if I’ve unlocked a wealth of possibility in my journey as a writer.

At some point along the way I was able to ditch “new leaf thinking” and accept myself as I was and where I was at. I stopped thinking that a new writing platform was what I needed to become a more consistent writer, instead, I asked myself what I was capable of given the reality of my limitations and the expectations of my immediate environment.

For some months that was very little regarding writing, but when I was able, I began writing and publishing slowly and forgivingly. I chose platforms I was already familiar with. I decided to have no expectations and not to push myself too hard for fear that I would freeze. And every time I hit publish it got easier and less scary.

I do dream of being able to write and publish an essay a day, but if I get one or two out a week, I’d be quite happy. I’m giving myself a year to figure out how to do this well, both write consistently and navigate Medium in the most effective ways before I venture into other things I’m interested in such as creating courses and writing and publishing books.

And I will continue to take this one day at a time, checking in with myself each day, allowing myself to be where I’m at, while gently reminding myself that whenever I’m writing, I’m feeling so much better than when I’m not writing.

What hurdles have you faced on your journey as a writer?