If You Write Only To Hear Yourself Talk, You’ll Never Get Paid

Writing is about building community, that means shutting up every now and then

On most Saturday mornings, I awake with the intention of staying offline until at least noon. This is harder than you might think. Our darn cell phones have worked their way into our daily routine. You find yourself handling them even when you’re deliberately making an effort to avoid it.

The first thing you should do in this hectic, modern world is buy yourself a digital clock. That’s because when you use your cell phone for an alarm, it completely controls you.

It doesn’t sound like much to unplug for a morning one day a week, but it’s a deliberate act that changes everything. By the time you get to noon, you find you can make it to one or two without much additional effort (that seemed impossible at 7AM). What I really need to do is go cell free for a week… or a month. I’m tempted to think the break might realign your whole brain chemistry.

In life, it’s important to periodically touch bases with reality. It’s important to mix up your routine. Sometimes you’re blind to all your bad habits until you take a step back and realize you’re constructing a giant mess.

The same thing is true with your writing, and that’s why it’s important to push your keyboard away for a few hours and focus on reading. Other people have things to say, and if you don’t take the time to listen, you risk making yourself irrelevant.

Comments

One of the things I like about Medium is that it’s kind of a cross between a blogging platform and a social media page (minus the toxicity). There are a lot of bright, thoughtful, and highly educated people on Medium. You don’t have to agree with them all the time, but you can trust them enough to at least listen.

The purpose of writing, as I see it, is to level up in life. Writing helps provide you with a better understanding of the world. You get new information from doing research and from interacting with your readers.

If you’re just spewing out the random stuff that originates in your own mind, you aren’t going to make progress. You have to hold yourself to some kind of standard. There has to be an interaction (preferably more than one) with a form of reality other than yourself.

I know a lot of “top writers” on the platform don’t read their comments, but this is problematic. Not long ago I read an article about a top writer who included an inaccurate statement about Nelson Mandela in his article. It was a comment that struck me more as ignorant than deliberately malicious (although you can never be sure these days), but he owes it to his readers not to use his platform to spread misinformation. The article had attracted about 70 comments with people gently saying, “You have to remove that Mandela example.”

It’s important to remember that sometimes what we can observe doesn’t represent the totality of what’s going on. You might think, “Well, 70 comments isn’t that bad.” But you’re disregarding the unknown number of people that unsubscribed and blocked the guy based on his careless statement. Writers can’t do things like that.

These are the examples where your readers can save you. That’s why you have to read your comments.

I think this was a case where the writer could have retracted the statement and posted an apology and avoided damages. By his inaction, he’s making it worse.

Seek out popular articles

If you’re looking to build your base on Medium, one of the best things you can do is highlight, comment, and clap. This means you’re interacting with articles.

One of the first things I do in the morning is jump on the Medium page and go check out the three articles that are featured in the upper right-hand corner.

Folks, whenever you work as a writer for any platform, you have to condition yourself to go and read the articles that the editors find most worthy. That’s how writing works. You aren’t going to get anywhere if you disregard the format and style of writing that the page tends to promote.

So keep these things in mind:

• Read the featured articles to familiarize yourself with the style and format

• Highlight the sections you find relevant (and tweet out those quotes)

• Comment on the articles

• Clap for the articles

These all represent “interactions.” These are all forms of the kind of “mental breaks” I was telling you about in the introduction. Mental breaks help you get out of your echo chamber and encourage you to go push against the rock for a while.

Interactions lead to visibility

Whether you’re writing a blog or for a newspaper or for a platform, you need followers. You need people who see your name and click on whatever you write. That requires visibility.

You can’t forget that comments and highlighting in particular are a way to get your name featured on articles that are performing well.

Early on in my time on Medium, I left a comment on an article about policing and got something like 10k views just on the comment. That led to a lot of new followers and subscribers.

The reason this worked was because it was a respectful, thoughtful comment. It wasn’t just an example of me clicking on the title, scrolling to the end, and leaving some ignorant statement (I hate it when people do that).

If you’re going to succeed as a writer, you have to take the time to read the work of other people and actually allow it to filter through your brain. I see a lot of people, even educated people, do a “brain bypass” on a lot of writing.

For example, I had some guy with a PhD tell me the other day that he hadn’t seen any examples in the media of older generations bashing younger generations. I thought that comment was bizarre because A. it represents gaslighting (“Your observations are wrong!”), and B. a person with a PhD should know better than to assign so much weight to his personal observations.

Too often, people get caught up in these ego vortexes where they simply refuse to perceive any other reality other than the one they assume to be true.

If you get into an ego vortex as a writer, you’re dead. That’s the end of your ability to make any kind of impact.

In the other direction lies humility.

Go in that direction.

Comment, highlight, and clap

I hope that my readers don’t find me ornery and punchy. I do have bad days just like anyone else. Sometimes people make a comment I disagree with and I have the energy to explain why I disagree in a way that’s courteous. Other times some comments land hard with me and I’m shorter than is warranted.

Actually, I’ve tracked down readers on occasion to apologize for when I’ve left what I felt was a disproportionate response. It’s not a good practice to humiliate people. I need people to feel comfortable interacting with me (particularly on those instances where I’m completely wrong).

The other side of that is that a fair amount of writing makes you have to deal with obstinate bots that are only there to socially engineer public opinion in a way that’s detrimental to our whole society. That’s why we have so many people who insist that there’s a poor population living on “government handouts” (there isn’t, that concept doesn’t exist in the USA, the only ones getting handouts are the rich).

If you want to make it as a writer, you have to learn how to navigate these interactions. You have to quickly get away from the bad ones, but you have to be open to recognizing mistakes when your readers are courteous enough to inform you of them.

A big part of building a platform is interacting with other writers. This helps to bring you visibility, and it also helps direct your thinking in new and exciting directions. So, don’t just write. You have to also read, comment, highlight, clap, and share. You can start here: