I discovered Medium in 2015. I was in my second year of teaching high school English Language Arts, and this was after a significant career shift. I’d always wanted to be a writer ever since I was in junior high, but I never pursued it for reasons I won’t go into here. I loved my job as a teacher, but I still wanted to be a writer, so I started blogging, which led me to Medium.
At the time, Medium seemed to be a place dominated by articles about technology, business, productivity, and entrepreneurship. All good stuff, but I’d always wanted to be a storyteller, a fiction writer. But Medium, although an intuitive digital publishing space, seemed to be primarily used by nonfiction writers. But I wanted to use it to share short stories, so I wrote a nonfiction piece about why Medium should be a space for fiction writers.
Five years later, and I still receive responses and claps from that post from fellow fiction writers, which tells me that I wasn’t alone. Since then, Medium introduced the Medium Partner Program, so writers could not only share their stories on Medium, but generate income from them as well if they can only earn enough reader engagement.
I’ve since used Medium not only to publish short stories, but a serialized thriller story called Extraction.
While I still appreciate Medium as a place to publish fiction, there are a few things I would tell my 2015 self that might be relevant to other fiction writers on here.
1. Don’t settle for merely practicing in public
Medium really is a great place for sharing fiction, but I don’t know that it’s the best place, especially if you aspire to be a professional fiction writer. If I’m honest, my motivation for publishing my first short story on Medium all those years ago was because I didn’t think I’d ever be able to sell a story. This was based on my experience of submitting a short story to two literary journals and getting rejected by both, which is a pretty common occurrence for fiction writers, but I just gave up. I didn’t have the confidence to keep trying, so I published on Medium in the hopes that a few people might read my stories and enjoy them, and maybe I’d move on to selling stories later on.
Medium is great for practicing in public, especially with the Medium Partner Program, because you can publish your stories, and you might find some people who enjoy them. But the likelihood of building a fiction writing career from publishing on Medium is almost nonexistent. I say it’s great for practicing in public because that’s essentially what I’ve been doing for the past five years on here, sharing original stories, such as “The Perfect Letter” and “The Better Place,” that a few people have enjoyed, but never having the courage to write a solid story and submit it for publication instead.
Using Medium to practice in public helped me to hone some of my fiction writing skills, but the purpose of practice is to prepare you for a performance. If you just settle for writing fiction on Medium, you’ll never get to the performance.
So if I were to tweak some of my advice about fiction writing on Medium today, it would be to use Medium to hone your storytelling skills, but be intentional about using the practice to prepare you for a performance, aka, submitting your work to a real paying publication.
2. Don’t be afraid to write nonfiction
When I started writing on Medium, I wanted to write fiction, but the majority of readers on Medium weren’t primarily fiction readers. So I wrote nonfiction too, which wasn’t a stretch because I’m an English teacher, and I spend everyday teaching my students how to write great nonfiction. I wrote nonfiction, particularly some of my ideas for writing fiction such as “How to Write Short Stories,” in hopes that people reading my nonfiction might read my fiction as well. For the most part, I can’t say that was what happened, although it did to a slight degree.
But I did discover that I love writing nonfiction. In fact, the majority of what I write is nonfiction. And any type of writing is helping me to become a better writer and a better storyteller.
So don’t be afraid to write nonfiction. Even if your readers might not make the transition to reading your fiction, you’re developing your skills, and you might discover that you love it.
3. Learn from others
My favorite publication on Medium is The Writing Cooperative. Publishing several articles per day from fellow Medium writers about the craft of writing, The Writing Cooperative has become a powerful community of writers on Medium and a great place to learn from other writers. I’ve published several pieces there myself.
Ironically, a large subsection of Medium has become a place where writers share their thoughts about writing with other writers, and I’m okay with that. I’ve read some great tips on here, and I learn how to be a better writer as a result.
If you’re going to be a fiction writer on Medium, you should take advantage of the opportunity to learn from other writers.
4. Connect to a larger community through fiction publications
While it may not have been this way in 2015, today, Medium has a large body of fiction authors, and there are several publications that are devoted to publishing fiction. I’ll highlight two, although there are more.
- The Weekly Knob is an innovative publication challenging writers to write from a visual prompt each week, and it’s literally a great way to practice in public.
- The Junction, as far as I can tell, is one of the most well-known and quality fiction publications on Medium.
As I mentioned above, I’ve written several stories that have been published on Medium. They’re all gathered in the link below, and I’d love for you to check them out.
Tom Farr is a writer, teacher, and storyteller. He writes regularly about teaching at Teaching ELA and his love of Star Wars at The Force Analysis. His work has also appeared on The Writing Cooperative, The Startup, and The Unsplash Book. Check out his fiction writing portfolio on Medium.
