Why We Can’t Allow Writer Frustration to Become an Obstacle to Our Success

Don't alienate the sincere people who want to help you succeed

My interview with Kristina God is LIVE, click here to watch!

Hello Everyone!

I’ve had a couple of interesting conversations today and there are some topics I want to address. First of all, let me say that I understand writer frustration better than anybody. I’m 50 now, and though I’ve been writing all my life, I’ve only recently started to make any money at it.

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I had my first novel published when I was 36, and it’s made me a little over $2,000 in 14 years. I wrote an article for the local paper that was shared 250,000 times. An SEO expert told me that that article, all by itself, dramatically improved the domain authority of that paper (it was the most read article they’d ever published). Not only did I get ZERO dollars for it, the paper didn’t even publish my follow up.

Writing is an endless series of setbacks offset by the occasional baby step forward. But I also believe that it’s possible for the levee to break and for writers to find a themselves the beneficiaries of a FLOOD of success.

Progress can happen in leaps. It’s not erosion. It’s more of a “straw that broke the camel’s back” kind of scenario.

I do have to be careful because I don’t mean to provoke writer frustration—writers, I’m HERE for you. Writer frustration is normal but please don’t let it control you.

My background

I’ve mentioned it before but maybe some of you don’t know that my degree is a Bachelor of Science with a minor in Physics. I picked up that minor after a surge of panic in my Junior year made me think, “I need to study something that can actually make me some money.”

I haven’t much used my Physics minor, but it’s been a very nice thing to have in my back pocket all these years (plus, Physics is really interesting). It might even be the case that what I learned in my Physics classes has helped me more in my writing pursuits than anything else I was taught in college.

The thing that was stunning to me in those classes was that they proved how often our intuition is completely wrong. When you sit down and do the math, you sometimes see that you’re not just “off” but your predictions were 180 degrees wrong. You were going in the EXACTLY opposite direction of your goals, and every step, every effort you made took you further from your objective.

I see this play out in writing all the time. Quite often, we have to take a deep breath, push our frustration to the side, and focus on controlling what we’re able to control.

Boost

I understand that there is a lot of frustration with Medium’s Boost program. I’ve been hearing it through the years, and I’ve been addressing misconceptions as they’ve come up.

Today, a woman left me a comment saying that the only people who get a Boost are, “People who are friends with the nominators.”

I politely replied, “That’s a common misconception, but you have to understand that nominators can only nominate stories. They can’t Boost stories. The curators decide that. So, if a nominator sends in a bad story, it’s not going to be Boosted, and soon the nominator will be dismissed from the position.”

The woman who left me the comment accused me of being “rude” and “gaslighting” her.

Don’t alienate the people who can help you

What happened there is that this person allowed her frustrations to supersede her reason. At that point, she was engaged in confirmation bias, and she took all my constructive criticism as a personal attack.

Folks, if you succumb to that you are never going to succeed as a writer.

I wished that woman well and told her that I sincerely hoped she achieved all of her goals on Substack. But it also made me sad to think that here she was, engaging with a Boost nominator, and she was so angry that she ended up making hostile comments that alienated me.

Again, folks, I get it... I’m a frustrated writer too. But frustration is a part of writing and we can’t let it rise up to sink our opportunities when they present themselves.

Seize your opportunities!

Perhaps that woman missed her “straw that broke the camel’s back” moment. I would have been willing to evaluate a draft from her and potentially nominate it. But that went out the window when she allowed her frustration to compel her to assail me with personal insults.

I’m not the problem. Medium isn’t the problem. The writing market isn’t the problem.

Quite often, attitude is the problem.

What I’ve learned in my 50 years of writing is that there’s always, always, always something in my work that I can address to improve the quality of my submission.

ALWAYS!

You need to redirect the natural and completely understandable writer frustration so that it doesn’t become self-destructive. Turn that energy into something positive.

My process is as follows:

• Take a deep breath

• You might even have to step away from your work for a day or two

• Come back to your work and find ONE thing that you can do better

• ONLY find one thing because otherwise you’re inserting too many variables and the approach is no longer scientific

• Change that thing, improve your submission

• Resubmit (elsewhere if necessary)

• Evaluate the response

• Repeat this process until you find success

The big thing to avoid is to not fall into unsupported assumptions that create a sense of hopelessness:

• The game is rigged against me

• Everything is unfair

• I’ll never be able to succeed without the approval of some gatekeeper

• Stories that receive a Boost are inferior to mine

Look, even if those things are true, you can’t do anything about them. There’s no point dwelling on things you’re powerless to change. Instead, take control of the situation and find something in your work to improve.

Channel your frustration into something productive

My work on Medium often gets Boosted. That’s because I spend a LOT of time on it and a LOT of time trying to figure out what the platform is looking for.

Even so there are days when I write or nominate a story that’s not taken and, yes, it makes me FURIOUS. I’ve gotten so mad at times that I had to drop down on the floor and do push-ups until I was exhausted. I’ve gone out for runs or bike rides. In our interview,

Kristina God

noticed that I had a treadmill and a stationary bike in my office. I need those things to burn off my writer frustration.

Again, and I can’t emphasize this enough, I HEAR YOU! I get frustrated too. I’ve been embarrassingly frustrated at times to the point where I’m not even going to tell you those stories.

But you can’t let your own frustration become an obstacle to your success.

So, do your best to avoid dwelling on unsubstantiated assumptions that steal your autonomy. Whenever you feel that frustration begin to build, divert that energy into something productive. Go get a workout, and when you come back, channel whatever energy you have left over into making a change in your work so you can evaluate the results.

Be scientific.

Do not pick fights with sincere people who are trying to provide you with actionable information so you might find success.

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• Tuesday, May 7

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