I am a Very Serious Writer
Can Medium Really be for Me?
I have not saved everything I have written, but do still have a nine-page typed research paper on the Russian Revolution written in my junior year of high school.
And I have been at it ever since. Academic papers for college and graduate schools, lengthy documents for different jobs. I have penned essays for continuing ed programs and operating manuals for companies.
I won an award for a series of pieces on the finances of the relocation industry. I recently published two scholarly articles in a professional, peer-reviewed journal about the relationship between human communication and emotional health.
So, when I recently decided to try my hand at a book for a general readership, I began the project with confidence in a good outcome.
It did not go as planned. After months of labor and tapping away at my keyboard, I ended up with nothing I felt good about.
This led to a crisis of confidence. Maybe I just couldn’t write anymore. Maybe, after all these years, I had written myself out. Perhaps I had nothing to say. It was more than a crisis of confidence; it was a crisis of personhood. For decades, I have expressed myself through writing. My father was a highly published author, and I wanted to follow in his footsteps.
So, writing was a big chunk of my identity. It was how I figured out the world and my place in it and tackled all the existential dilemmas of the human condition. My identity was wrapped up in writing. If I couldn’t write now, who was I? How about the three book-length manuals I turned out a few years ago? Had I run out of steam? Were my brain cells congealing at a rapid rate? I was worried.
Then, several months ago, in the middle of my despond, I stumbled across Medium. To be truthful, my wife is the one who stumbled across Medium, submitted a few articles, and recommended that I give it a look.
Half-heartedly, I gave a look. There was so much, and I was quickly overwhelmed and confused. Without my wife I would have given up and gone back to the sludge I had been churning up for months.
I assumed that Medium was a single publication, but of course it is anything but. My wife explained to me that Medium is not one publication but a home to many, like a bustling warehouse with hundreds of products, but in this case, publications all with their own emphases, topics, styles, even zeitgeists. It is an overflowing treasury.
I was still skeptical. I liked systemizing stuff, but Medium didn’t feel synthesizable. Just buzz around, I was advised, and you will find articles to like and a place, or places, you can call a literary home.
Since my own writing was stalled out, why not.
So, I buzzed around for a couple days, reading mostly at random, and found articles and authors I liked.
I was flabbergasted that so many people were writing so much on so many topics. How had this existed within a few keystrokes without me knowing about it?
Indeed, Medium is unsystemizable, a benign anarchy. Articles about nearly every topic imaginable, each of the seemingly hundreds of publications with its own rules, style, and so on. Yikes!
After the third day of mucking around, I noticed the obvious. When I compared it to my writing, I could not help but notice the short paragraphs. Some just a sentence long.
What’s more, some of these sentences were not real sentences.
Instead, lots of phrases, not by any stretch of the imagination conforming to the subject and verb structure I had learned in grammar school.
And the punctuation. What was going on here? Much of it wouldn’t pass muster with the punctuation police, or even my high school history teacher.
Nonetheless, as I dove into this literary anarchy I was struck by the revelation that I didn’t write this way. I had never written this way. I had never wanted to write this way. I was maybe even snootily suspicious of people who did.
Then came a revelation: Here, exactly lay my problem. I needed to learn to write like so many authors featured on Medium if I could ever hope to write a book for ordinary human beings. I just didn’t know how to do it.
Then I had a second revelation. I could practice on Medium — practice not writing the way I have always done it as far back as the Russian Revolution. I needed to leave behind, or at least substantially moderate, my academic-specialist-scholarly style.
So, I have put my hypothetical book to the side for a few months and am writing for Medium. Aside from writing, I am reading many articles and commenting where I can, which is another way to practice writing in a new key.
My progress is slow. One of my first articles was rejected by one of the pubs, but the editor kindly suggested I try another site, and this worked out.
There are days when figuring out how to submit to a new publication is harder than writing the article I want to submit. This is OK because, all else to the side, I am learning and having fun.
