Member-only story
I’m New on Medium — and These are Things That Scare Me.
What if my writing isn’t enough to break through the noise?
Will the publication accept my post? What if I publish on my own and the algorithm ignore me? Will I ever make it here? Yada, yada.
When our posts do well, we’re worried about the next one not doing nearly as good and diminishing existing credibility. When they don’t do well, we lose the push it took to get us to start publishing in the first place.
We as writers, more often than not, depend on external validation to determine our worth. We’re scared to experiment, and a platform exposes this “stage fright.” It’s worse when we’re determined to make it a full-time career (which, let’s face it, we at least dream of). We want to write but keep losing our drive for it. We know we need to be consistent — every professional writer advises us to — but we’re scared that in the race for consistency, we’ll lose our touch.
What ends up happening is that instead of writing, we procrastinate.
I get it. If people don’t want to eat your food, why cook?
This takes me back to when I first started writing stories in school. My whole motivation was getting my friends to read them and watching their reactions live. It was a different time. I had…
