Break the Rules and Thrive on Any Blogging Platform
The only way to make it… is to break it.
As a new writer on certain platforms, but having acquired some experience as a journalist, I see writers eject out of these sites, their fingers lit on fire. Why? Because they have been stopped at the gate. Many bailing out, have told me exactly that.
But some writers do survive. They negotiate the rough road, and irrespective of the platform, seem to make it and find happiness and their inner writing nirvana.
I refer to blogging platforms and others. Writers who listened to all the advice, but did what they wanted anyway generally stuck in, and made a nuisance of themselves at least to the curators, and/or other gatekeepers of the realm.
In every platform, each writer conforms to a certain expectation, and I learned that there is no other way. I’m never happy about the unsaid, unwritten set of rules. I learned that unless you are into navel-gazing and meditation amid rule induced bedlam, you generally tend to fall face down and surrender yourself before these rules.
I got used to the fact that these unwritten rules are implicit in each rejection you get from various gatekeepers on the platform.
I don’t say that all rejections are not earned.
Some are deserved and earned, and sloppy writing is on top of the list of offending traits that earn rejections.
But yet, each platform has settled into its set ways. A few months into dabbling in each platform, I learned that writers have to work with mothballed on-site traditions that are worshipped by each platform’s cultists.
I found it interesting that if I look anywhere in the mission statements of these platforms, hosannas are being sung to anyone who might be so bold as to up the ante, upset the status quo and disrupt.
In theory, that is.
The mission statement writers and everyone who sets up the platform, seem to be schizophrenic personalities, but that’s not by choice.
My experience is that as a general rule mission statements are extremely visionary and no doubt their writers have their hearts in the right place. But yet, when they are administrating the system one bolt and nut at a time, do these visionaries turn into staid gatekeepers playing god with the platform’s cultists?
Those writers who bailout of any blogging/writing platform early — and end up writing song lyrics about escaping the bedlam — are the ones that are put off by these unwritten rules. More often they throw in the towel, bewildered rather than taken aback.
Those who persist are willing to break the unwritten rules.
“If you can’t solve a problem, it’s because you’re playing by the rules.” — Paul Arden
It’s counter-intuitive, especially in writing platforms that are saturated with rules that come from ‘those who have made it’, those who have gamed the system — and those who have just enough following to appear to know all the answers. But breaking the rules is the best way to succeed.
Stephen King broke the rules of grammar most of the time.
The same attitude holds for breaking the unwritten rules deciding a platform’s current iteration. But there you are. The rules are often that year’s flavor and nothing more.
If the unwritten rules are tiresome, and you feel writers are being repetitive because they want to conform, abandon it. Not the platform, but your clingy good behavior on it.
By doing so you have one primary advantage. If the next year’s flavor is different, there is a very good chance that the new rules you help make may end up becoming the platform’s unwritten rules for some time. But don’t ever become the platform’s establishment. The rules you make will be someone else’s dinner soon, so let’s not get ahead of ourselves.
The good news is also particularly sweet-sounding if you are a rule-breaker by nature. In many platforms, and you can name them, WordPress, or LinkedIn, etc, the prevailing wisdom doled out by the expert few is mostly rather skewed.
Relying on the prevailing wisdom and being a stickler for the unwritten rules leaves writers very little wiggle room. Writers are in over themselves trying to fit in. When they don’t, they are so frustrated, they retreat into a corner and strategize on how to cremate the unwritten rules and carry the ashes in an urn. That’s when they are not burning incense and worshipping at the godhead they made of these rules …
This is brain-fag territory. I have been there. The rules are all mind-numbing and everyone is peddling a rule out there — you can call them the written unwritten rules.
Someone willing to break the rules will have more time on his hands and he has yards of a handicap over the Fretting & Frustrated Inc.
Why should writers spend time as marketers of their work and SEO specialists and gamesmen whose primary task is to find some way to hack the rules?
They shouldn’t.
Rules breakers don’t respect the rules that much to waste time over writing-tips. If they write in their own skin, they know there is a better chance that the rules that seem to be against them could be bent to their advantage.
Experience tells me that the unwritten rules are shifting goalposts. There are several. For instance, if it’s writing in Medium, they say your stories have to be curated, or you have to find a publisher.
But other articles that are published in splendid isolation do well all the time.
Check this out:
My Only Problem With Medium
I’ve been a supporter of Medium since two and a half years ago.
medium.com
So don’t sweat the small stuff. It makes more sense to break the rules than to worship them.
