MAY WRITING EXPERIENCE
Welcome to Week Three of the May Writing Experience: Discovering Greatness
Let’s dig into what this means — discovering greatness — and what it means for your writing journey.
The May Writing Experience
To challenge writers here on Medium to grow their content, their reach, their influence, their followership, and yes, their earnings through the Medium Partner Program. Each themed week will have a Medium-specific growth challenge.
The Five Themes are:
Discovering Greatness
Storytelling
Embracing Your Creative Mind
Welcome to week three! If you’ve made it this far into the May Writing Experience, things are truly happening for you as a writer. Your Medium account is experiencing some growth, but so are you.
How’d you all do with slaying your monsters and dragons and all that? I have to say, that got a little down and dirty for me. I wrote about it and submitted to a pub I have never published in called Better Advice. This week, we’ve all been doing that right? New pubs, new paths…I am really proud of the feedback and enthusiasm you’ve all shown. Now, we discover greatness, together.
Discovering Greatness
Greatness. How can we define this with regards to writing? Is it something that can be measured and analyzed, like those frustrating numbers on your stats page? Do we define it by what others say of us or our work? Is it reflected by our earnings? Maybe we feel our own greatness when we capture that unforgettable line and pen it into a story.
Surely, you have seen writing genius before. Maybe you were a child and that one little book really spoke to you. For me, Beverly Cleary reached right out of those pages and made me want to be a writer. I thought her stories were exceptionally wonderful. Then came Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH by Robert C. O’Brien. My fourth grade mind could scarcely contain the wonder of a bunch of rats in bushes, talking to each other. I went to storytelling heaven.
In high school I had a similar reaction when I was introduced to my first real “grown-up” poet, and Sylvia Plath’s Edge changed me forever. There is no other word to describe Sylvia Plath’s poetic vision and her mastery of her craft, but brilliant. I fell in love with her mind. I wanted to crawl in there, poke around, and figure out how she found her words and put them together.
Oh, in literature, the arts, poetry…I have seen greatness. And I know that you have too. Likely, it inspired you to be a writer. Every year there are prizes and awards for the greatest of the great, but that’s not necessarily the kind of greatness I mean. Sure, accolades are wonderful, but there are many aspects to our own inner greatness and how that feeds our writing. I happen to believe, when you touch those sweet places within yourself, our writing goes to new and wonderful places.
Writing prompt: Write about when you first discovered greatness in writing — either in yourself or in someone else.
Developing Greatness
I happen to believe that each and every one of us has greatness inside of us. And that includes YOU.
Finding your own inner greatness is going to look very different for each of us. Do you define it as reach/influence? Numbers of followers? Winning awards with your work? Or finding that one reader who is moved to tears by your story? Or is it a feeling you must capture and hold onto so you can do what you do each day; write without fear? Or is it far more simple…getting up each day and making that decision — I will be a writer. To me, that’s pretty remarkable.
Because our definitions of greatness vary so widely (there’s a prompt in there — I hope you all will share thoughts on this) it is difficult for me to begin steering you in the right direction. All of us will race off in a different direction to find our own spectacular talents, visions for our work, and shift ourselves confidently into the place of our purpose. I can only encourage you to honor yourself in the process. And truly listen to that inner voice that guides you — while at the same time, honing that voice to be kind to you, encourage you, and steer you into your own truth. Self-talk is crucial when it comes to being brave. You’re a writer. Write the words that motivate your own bravery, then do them.
It turns out, I’m not the only one to wonder how to develop or find inner greatness. There are a great many motivational speakers, entrepreneurs, bloggers, podcasters, and TV show hosts who share wisdom on the subject of greatness. Here are a few resources for you to dig a little deeper, find the lessons, and apply them to your own writing work.
Take a look at this short video by Angela Lee Duckworth, uncovering the power of “grit” and “growth mindset” within the education system how those concepts could apply to your own writing success.
Netflix documentary The Dawn Wall is about a young man who set an “unachievable” rock climbing goal for himself. His journey was so inspiring to me it made me want to do great things, believe in the unattainable — and just go for it. It is, by far, the best documentary I have ever seen. You cannot watch this story and not feel the desire bubbling within you to go for it. To tackle something big — and give it everything you’ve got.
You may remember Samantha Lazar mentioned Brené Brown’s conversation on vulnerability in her post Time to Meet Your Brave Self and if you haven’t yet had the opportunity to listen to that podcast, I encourage you to do that. Brown was also interviewed in the popular podcast The School of Greatness by former athlete Lewis Howes. Here’s the podcast for you. Put it on while you are puttering around doing things around the house today or what have you. But do, give it a listen, and you’ll find some truly remarkable takeaways here to help you on your own journey. To help you find, define, and embrace your own greatness, largely by way of vulnerability.
Another gem on Netflix is Brené Brown’s The Call to Courage.
In this short film, Brown says:
Be vulnerable to be brave.
and cautions us against something she had been doing in her own life:
The fear of shame and criticism was so great that I engineered smallness in my life.
She encourages is to live “in the arena” and I challenge you to discover what this means for your writing.
Writing prompt:
What does your call to courage look like in your writing career?
What does it mean for you to be winning at writing? Is it showing up each day? Is it overcoming your deepest insecurities? Is it getting in that pub after 27 rejections? Is it starting writing in a new genre that kind of scares you?
Whatever your call to greatness is, we (the May Writing Experience leaders and participants) encourage you to take it up.
Only you can answer that call.
I leave you with the quote that inspired much of Brown’s work in vulnerability:
“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”
This Week’s Medium Challenges
Challenge One:
Find greatness on Medium. Maybe these are the top performers in your favorite topics to write in. Follow them and look for the greatness you might learn. This is a little different than finding mentors, like we talked about last week. This is about finding those people who rock this thing like celebrities. They rise head and shoulders above everyone else in their field. You may not even like them…but look at how they are doing it. Look for commonalities between the “greats” in each of your favorite genres/topics.
- Can you find the similarities?
- Are there things they are doing that you may want to learn, adopt, or become more familiar with?
- Study them. Study these greats.
You may also decide that greatness has nothing to do with popularity. However you define greatness in your list of genres — perhaps those who write a certain way you admire, or those who are the most outspoken, or vulnerable, or creative. Whatever parameters you set — the goal is the same. Find greatness you admire in other writers, what is working for others in a way you want to implement — and learn from them.
Challenge Two:
Figure out your own greatness on Medium. There is something you are doing on Medium that you feel you are doing well. Own this. I want you to make a list of the things you are doing well on Medium and pin it to your computer, your desk, or somewhere you will see it while you are working.
You are good at this thing/these things…make an actionable plan to expand on that greatness. This will be different for each of us. And you may, after giving it some thought this week, define this greatness differently than you have in the past — and this may surprise you.
But, don’t be afraid of your own greatness here on Medium. Get out there and chase it.
If you choose to write something inspired by your journey with the May Writing Experience, don’t forget to tag us both in your work, if you choose to publish! And remember the Medium tag MayWritingExperience and on other social media: #maywritingexperience. Stay tuned for Week 3 (post 2 of 3) coming up in a few days on Fiddleheads & Floss Poetry publication.
