I haven't really set any New Year resolutions, but there are as part of my life journey, things I would like to pay more (or less) attention to in the near future. One of them is how I go about building an audience and getting my words across as a writer in the online world.
As some of you know, I also write on Medium. And I used to be a happy writer on Medium before my content was monetized. I wrote sporadically, when I felt there was something worth saying. I wrote to build an audience or address social situations that I thought were interesting.
I started getting positive attention for a fiction piece I'd written, called Lover of a Much Older Man, and started dedicating more time to the platform. Interacting. Seeing it as a place of potential.
Then all of that changed. This time last year, someone was kind enough to gift me a 1-year membership, so I could earn money from my writing, and I did. I was lucky enough that several pieces garnered attention and within the first month the gains outweighed that generous person's investment (I mean, it's a $50 membership, but it's a great generosity towards a virtual stranger, and it's not nothing to earn from doing what you adore).
Things changed. I started getting jaded. I became suddenly resentful when pieces I considered 'worthy' weren't boosted or failed to receive the attention I'd hoped for. I blamed people who perhaps were, to a small extent, to blame. I started getting overrun by the quid pro quo nature of the platform. I took a short break that extended into a longer break that I'm still recovering from.
I figured I could afford to. In August, I penned a rant one night against a man I loved and it proved to be a really lucky strike. I'm still getting money from it.
But I never wanted to stay on break for long, and as I've renewed my determination towards online writing, I'm looking at how that happened. At why I became so easily disenchanted with Medium and what I can learn from my time on Hive to hopefully do better in the next year.
The supposition of quality.
I started writing on Hive very young, and while I did strive to write good stuff, I think a factor of my longevity has been this sense of freedom. Being able to write about anything on here, not having it feel like I need to work or have it sound a certain way.
I do feel that about Medium, and perhaps it's true, and perhaps it's all in my head. But as we're learning from the past, my history on Hive has, if nothing else, shown me I can do quite well by writing what goes through my head and being authentic.
And that's not a lesson to be easily discarded.
The pieces you think will do well never do.
Even after more than 7 years, I still occasionally trick myself into thinking otherwise. Don't you? You write a piece that you feel is good or that you worked on a lot or that expresses something genuinely meaningful to you and think privately yeah, this is gonna get traction. And it doesn't. Maybe it flops miserably, and maybe it leaves you really disappointed.
And then, you have a random piece, maybe one you feel is so-and-so at best, that gets all sorts of unexpected (and perhaps unwarranted) attention.
What's the trick, then? Teach yourself not to expect things? I don't know if that works. They say we'd be much happier without expectations (from life, relationships, Hive, etc.) but me, I think we're made to expect things and it's hard to drop that completely. So then, maybe just accept the randomness of it all as a necessity of this wonderful opportunity that the Internet provides for writers like me.
Don't fucking fake it.
Maybe it's different for others, but I don't excel at meaningless pleasantries. I was never good at sucking up to whales on Hive and I'm shit at quid-pro-quo empty praise on Medium, as well. Trouble is, I didn't ascribe any genuine meaning to my interactions on Medium like I did here. I didn't look for people who were worthwhile, which left a bitter taste in my mouth.
It's fair. I know why I didn't. I'd done that once before somewhere else and burned my fingers. But it did cause my relationship with Medium to sour in a way it never did with Hive. Why? Because here, I only follow a very small number of people, but I'm genuinely interested in what they do. I like reading people like @riverflows or @ericvancewalton or @trucklife-family or @lizelle. And I realize now what a deciding factor that has been in my longevity on Hive.
You're pursuing something worthwhile to you. And that is very, very fortunate already.
Cyndi warned us. Money changes everything.
But on Medium, it changed things more than on Hive. And that's partly because on Hive I came into it thinking of it as "imaginary money" and never really left that mentality, in a sense. When I did my Hive recap on December 31st, I was quite surprised to find my posts had raked in almost $5000's worth of Hive. It's not nothing, certainly. And it struck me how fortunate I was to be able to actually earn even that from pursuing my passion.
If I'm to redo my relationship with Medium, I reckon I need to be mindful of these things:
- you might not get what you think it's worth, but the fact that you get anything at all shouldn't be taken for granted;
- people know when you're faking it anyway (and you probably suck at it), so look for a couple genuine connections to keep you coming back instead;
- write well, but don't get hung up on the fate of any single piece;
- write more (I wrote 308 posts on Hive last year, impossible to get hung up on all), but also don't force it;
- don't try to write the way you intuit someone else might like - they probably won't, anyway;
- write things that matter to you. If they are good enough to judge "quality", why shouldn't you be?
To end that, I'm genuinely curious. What has kept you happy with Hive so that you'd want to come back all this time?
