How Medium's Boost Program Helped Make Me a Better Writer

Reflections on the last two years of storytelling

I did this picture of a dragon with my girls about 10 years ago. It’s been hanging on the fridge :)

Hello Friends,

I hope you all had the opportunity to get rested and recharged over the weekend. It was warm enough yesterday that I was able to go out on a bicycle ride with my daughter. I appreciate those moments. It allows us to chat and I get caught up on the stuff that’s going on in her life.

My daughters are becoming powerful and that’s so wonderful to see. We played Pictionary last night, and it was delightful to see how sharp their minds are. It’s becoming obvious that I can no longer keep up with them. I’ve had this experience before with really smart students. You learn to get out of their way and support them, but they still need guidance every now and then.

These are the precious moments we have to absorb if we’re going to find the strength to get through these anxiety inducing times.

Last week,

Ben Ulansey

sent me a humorous article he’d written about how he got Jack Frost the slasher film mixed up with Jack Frost the heartwarming holiday movie when he was young. You can read it here.

Sharing this story led to a chat about how much our writing has evolved over the last couple years. As I was reading Ben’s piece, I was reminded of my story about getting sent to remedial math.

Both stories are still professional, but they need refinement in a similar way. I think if you were to read either of those stories and then read something more recent, you’d see a difference.

First of all, the read time for that story is 15 minutes long. These days, most of my stuff ends up around the 7 minute mark. There’s a lot of superfluous language. In fact, I could probably cut the first third of that.

The dog, just to make you smile

I should have probably started the story with the line, “I was holding my dumb pencil and nursing a goose egg when the teacher came stomping around the room with a big stack of math tests.”

When it comes to writing for the internet, I suppose it’s fair to say less is more. In my chat with

Courtney Sender

the other day, she brought up the revealing example that modern writers have to deal with people who are looking at two screens.

You know… somebody’s watching a movie and then they pull out their phones to play a video game or something. I have to confess, I’m guilty of this from time to time.

That’s a good illustration because it sets a standard for how interesting you have to be. It’s always been easy to lose readers. It’s never been easier than now.

In my own habits as a reader, I bounce off things quick. I almost never settle in and read anything deliberately. I scan for a couple words at the beginning, skip most of the middle, and jump straight to the end. Sometimes if the ending is really good, I’ll go back and read the whole article with greater care.

This isn’t because I’m rude. I spend my whole day doing this and I’m cruelest to my own work.

Cut… cut… cut…

Most of the time when reading my own work from 2-3 years ago, I have to cringe… a lot. I see those extra words as the kind of speed bumps that could lead to reader erosion.

Even if people aren’t astute readers, they recognize when a sentence isn’t going anywhere.

In going through my old work, I can also see that it got a lot more concise and entertaining when I was writing to the standard of Medium’s Boost.

These days, Boosts are hard to come by and they don’t pay out as much as they used to. But I’ll forever be grateful to the program because it helped me maintain a better awareness of audience expectation.

Example of what used to be possible with Boost:

Yes, writers should be thinking about that anyway, but motivation and clarity of purpose always help.

Boost encouraged writers to add more of a personal element, that led to more storytelling. I appreciate that I was able to transform my articles from listicles and dry, informative pieces, to something a little more vibrant.

The lessons of Boost have held true and now the objectives I had to think about deliberately have become instinctive. Everything is faster and more efficient. I cut phrases, paragraphs, and whole sections without debating or doubting myself.

Boost worked because it offered greater distribution and therefore higher compensation. But really, it functioned by simply reminding writers that there would be a couple people who would read your work and who had the power to make it fly.

Boost is not the same today as it was a year ago, but that truth remains.

With everything you write, you have the opportunity to meet a reader who can make your work fly.

I’ll be bringing in more of my old, Boosted stories throughout the rest of the year. I wonder if I’ll be looking back at the things I’m writing today with that same self-conscious awareness?

I hope so, because it means I will be getting better.

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