Your Writing is Still Remarkably Real

Even though it didn’t go viral.

It’s the morning after you published the article. You know, the one you thought for sure would go viral. You had watched every one of Zulie Rane’s YouTube tutorials on how to write right on Medium. You followed all the tricks you’ve learned from the greats: Tim Denning, Ayodeji Awosika, Todd Brison. You’ve consumed so much of their content you are beginning to think you’re friends.

You can see your article on the Medium red carpet. You’ve spit-polished it. You’ve waited the prescribed number of days and edited one last time. You’ve wrestled Grammarly to the ground. You’ve shaped that baby into a well-oiled machine. The whole thing is spectacular. You know it in your gut. This. Is. The. One!

The moment of truth

The next morning you reach for your phone as soon as your eyes peel open. Damn, that screen is bright. No matter. You squint through it. Click. Click. Click. There you are. There is your baby of an article…drumroll.

What? Something’s wrong. 12 views? You click on the bell. Someone highlighted the sh*t out of your 1438 word masterpiece and there’s one clap. Could that be your mom? You throw the phone across the room and scream into your pillow.

I know your pain. I’ve been there. Although I am new to Medium, I’ve read about the overnight successes, as I am sure you have. My “About Me” article, the first I ever published on Medium, did reasonably well. I even received a few mentions by more established writers. I was pumped. My ego and I basked in the pink glow of the newcomer cloud for a few days and then…Crickets.

My next few articles did not go viral. They were viewed and some even read. I received comments and claps. A few cents were added to my wallet. That’s it!

If you are in the armpits of writing hell because your hard work is not receiving the accolades you believe it deserves, know this:

You are a remarkably real writer because:

• You crawled out of a warm bed to write for an hour before the responsibilities of parenthood swallowed your day.
• You gave up your coffee break and wrote the conclusion to your article on the absurdity of The Real Housewives of Orange County, while your coworkers sipped their lattes and bashed The Real Housewives of Orange County.
• You scribbled down possible headlines for your future articles and ignored the creepy guy staring at you on the train. (He later becomes the headline.)
• While in the arena at your kid’s hockey practice, you jotted down a description of the dad who lost his shit because his boy cried on the ice.
• You turned off Netflix and grappled with the stubborn plot twist in your story instead.
• You’ve had your pen-babies rejected, passed over, ignored, and have felt disappointment more times than you’d like to admit and still returned to the laptop or notebook, or journal, asking yourself the most writerly question of all. What if..?

The day it all started

Twenty years ago, I saw an advertisement on a bulletin board at my local grocery store for a correspondence course (yes, those still existed back in my day) on how to write children’s stories. I sent in a page of my writing for them to deem my natural talent sufficient for their tutelage (I giggle at my naivete then) and danced a jig when two weeks later, I received a letter of acceptance. I knew little about creative writing but told myself that having been a ferocious reader since childhood, I must have picked up some writing skills through osmosis.

Over the next six months, I wrote story after story. I sent them off, like little orphans, to a school in Connecticut where a faceless writing teacher read, edited, commented, and returned them in his yellow manilla envelopes. I still remember the disappointment when my stories made it back to me, deformed and forever changed by my teacher’s red pen. Let’s just say I learned humility and grappled to accept criticism without quitting.

A few years later, I took another course. This one was from a real College in Ontario, with a real writer whose books I had read and loved. I wanted to write a memoir of my family’s escape from communist Czechoslovakia in the late ’70s. Having then been a fresh teenager, plucked out of her homeland at a delicate age, I believed my perspective of escape and immigration to be unique.

I wrote and wrote and wrote. I finished the memoir and hired an editor. She told me it was good, but would be better if I could re-craft it into a young-adult novel. I re-wrote the memoir into a work of fiction, buoyed by the idea of publication. My manuscript made it as far as the publisher’s round table and then…thud.

I was devastated. I was too attached to the work. I had become the work and the manuscript, my baby. My fragile ego interpreted its rejection as a rejection of me.

I boxed up everything: my notebooks, research notes, photographs, first, second and third drafts, memory sticks, all of it inside a cardboard box that I shoved into the darkest corner of the basement. I told myself I needed a clean break. I needed to recover from the massive rejection blow. I needed to get my shit together and start again.

But I didn’t. I stopped being a remarkably real writer the day I buried my manuscript.

The sequel

What followed was a massive writing drought. I decided I wanted to become a yoga teacher and took yoga teacher training. After that, a year of massage therapy school. I attended a slew of self-development programs in hopes of finding myself. I left my marriage. I started and left two jobs. I crashed and burned after a painful relationship landed me in Codependents Anonymous and then, one frigid winter morning when I felt as though my life had made a pin-cushion out of me, I picked up my pen and began to write again.

Morning Pages to start and then, Facebook posts about the gritty parts of emotional healing I thought others could relate to. I created a blog and began to compose personal essays that I submitted to an online magazine publication.

My first two articles were chosen as editor’s picks. I couldn’t believe that someone out there, someone I had never met, thought my writing was good.

I wrote about my struggles with relationships, about healing from codependency, about addiction and trauma bonding, I wrote about childhood wounds and Christmases gone by. I wrote about emotions, monogamy, and memes that demoralize women.

The more I wrote, the more I became obsessed with success. The more I became obsessed with getting reads, hearts, likes, shares, and making the publication’s eco-system winner’s round, the less I felt like a remarkably real writer.

I stopped writing for the magazine.

Never give up on your dream

Two years later, I am writing for a new publishing platform, creating in a very different way. My writing and I are transforming into something unfamiliar; as though we’re hiking the bottom of the Grand Canyon looking up and ahead and behind us without any idea of where we’ll end up.

Some days I have no drive and no inspiration to write. I sit and look up at the achingly blue sky between the slices of red earth and just wait. I sit with the discomfort of not knowing what kind of remarkably real writer I am becoming this time. I sit with the disappointment of my articles not going viral. I sit with the fear and then sit some more until I am ready to write honestly about where I’m at.

Flannery O’Connor once said, “I’m a writer simply because writing is the thing I do best.” She didn’t say she was a writer because others deemed her the best.

Remember

When we are remarkably real writers, writing is the ember that smolders inside us and does not cool until we’ve taken pen in hand, or keyboard to fingertips. We write because we must.

We write to communicate that which we can’t utter aloud. We write to express our innermost feelings. We write to be true to ourselves. We become remarkably real writers each time we risk sitting down to create something where before there was nothing.

A version of this essay first appeared in Vocal.

Become a Medium Member today for full access.