Writing Is Competitive. Here's The Only Way You Win.

Some thoughts on finding your way as a writer. Especially if you write on Medium.

There’s a scene in Alice in Wonderland where Alice asks the caterpillar which way she ought to go. He tells her it depends where she wants to get to. She doesn’t know, of course. So he tells her if she doesn’t know where she wants to get to, it doesn’t really matter which way she goes. I can’t think of a better analogy for writers.

Here’s what some of us love to say. We write because we have to. Kafka echoed that sentiment when he said a non-writing writer is a monster courting insanity. That’s all fine and well. Like Kafka, some of us are compelled to write. But there was no internet when he said that.

To give a little context, most of his writing was published after his death. Because frankly, he was dead sure his writing sucked. After all, his father told him everything he did sucked. Told him what an utter disappointment he was as a child, as a human. He wrote because he had to. With pen and paper. Hid it away from the world. Worked a job he hated. Died never knowing how good his writing really was.

But that’s not what we’re doing, right? Not most of us. We are putting words on the internet. We’re not writing words in a journal because we are compelled to do so, to keep from becoming Kafka’s monster, and locking those words away like he did.

But first, let’s state the obvious. Because this is the internet, after all.

A lot of people aren’t writing because they’re compelled to do so. A lot are writing because they want to build a list and sell something. Most of them are building a list to sell a program that tells other people how to build a list and sell a program. The Ouroboros. Snake eating its own tail. Never ending circle.

So let’s remove that chunk for now, okay? Now you have a smaller pool.

Here’s another chunk. A lot of people are writing because their day job doesn’t pay enough. If salaries suddenly leaped to match the cost of living, a lot of people writing on Medium would stop. They’re just trying to make ends meet. Maybe they’re good at it, maybe they’re not. But they aren’t writing because they’re compelled to. They are writing because maybe with a little luck and a kiss from the fates, it might fill in the gaps between what it costs to live and what they earn.

And another. Some people write because they’re lonely.

For years, Roger Ebert *was* the movies. Forty years as a film critic for the Chicago Sun Times. Half the Siskal and Ebert team that could make or break a movie with a thumb. Then he got cancer. Lost his thyroid, salivary glands and chin. Lost his ability to eat, drink and speak. He said writing on the internet saved him.

“When I am writing, my problems become invisible, and I am the same person I always was,” he told Esquire magazine in 2010. “All is well. I am as I should be.”

And another. Some people write to educate. Not because they love writing.

That one’s a little bit of a slippery slope. Some people pretend they’re educating when they’re not. Climate alarmists come to mind. People who care about the climate crisis tend to be activists. They get involved. They affect change or strive to. They don’t just write about it with sensational headlines that get clicks and pay well. Same with politics and feminism and any hot button topic. There are people affecting change and people writing clickbait headlines. Because it pays.

Let’s remove all the people who write for some other reason than being compelled to write. Now we have a tiny group of people who write because they have to.

A lot of those people find some other way to support their writing compulsion.

Elizabeth Gilbert said an interesting thing, in Big Magic, I think. She said before Eat, Pray, Love went crazy, she worked as a bartender. And she worked as a bartender because she writes best in the morning. Slinging drinks let her write when she’s at her best, without putting her bills on the shoulders of her writing. Interesting, no?

Stephen King did the same. He was a teacher. Bukowski worked at the post office. Vonnegut sold cars. Margaret Atwood was a barista.

But again, that’s not all writers. Some writers don’t sling drinks or sell cars.

They sling words. Because we do have the internet now. And when they’re not seeing results, they get frustrated. Disappointed. Hurt. They feel like they are failing. And maybe they are. But maybe they aren’t. Here’s the thing…

Writing is competitive. You need to know what it takes to win.

I talk to writers every day. I run three publications on Medium and write on Substack. I worked in publishing for years. I participate in a couple of Slack groups for writers. There’s not a day I don’t talk to writers. I hear their frustrations.

Here’s the thing. Writing is crazy competitive. And if you’re writing to make a handful of friends on Medium and you don’t care about anything else, that’s fine. But if that’s not you, and you want to accomplish something with your writing, you need to understand how truly competitive the environment is.

There are 4 million books published every year. 11,000 books every day. 457 titles an hour. Eight every minute. Around the clock. Tick tock, tick tock, every minute, another eight books go up for sale. You think you can just hold your breath, cross your fingers and upload your book to Amazon and get sales? Think again. It don’t work that way.

If you want to succeed on Amazon, you need to know how to sell a book before you upload it. If you don’t learn that, you’re destined to be a statistic. Here’s the statistic, most writers on Amazon do not ever sell more than 200 books.

Same on Medium. In January, 91,500 stories were published in publications. That’s an average of just under 3 thousand per day. It doesn’t include the spam that gets killed before it lives. That does not count stories outside of publications. Know how many were boosted? 2,422. Out of 91,500. Do the math. 2.6% of stories got boosted.

So if you have been boosted or get boosted frequently, kudos to you. Seriously. Because landing in the 2.6% - that’s not nothing.

Also worth mentioning that there are unboosted stories that get great traffic and earn decent pay. And there are boosted stories that fall on their face and don’t pay crap. Every rule has the exceptions.

Here’s the interesting thing about the boost program. The attitudes to it.

Viktor Frankl called attitude the last of the human freedoms. When everything else has been taken away and there is not one damn thing left that anyone can take away from you, the only thing that’s left is attitude.

Lock you in a room with nothing but a pen and paper and all that’s left is attitude. That’s what it boils down to.

When people talk about boost, some people love it. Some are ambivalent. And some downright hate it. One person said it feels like a competition and they don’t want to compete. They want to write because they love writing.

Here’s the thing. In a competitive environment, you don’t have to be competitive.

You just need to be so goddamn good that you’re the person other people need to compete with. You. Set the bar. Voila. No competing.

The guy sitting on page one of Google isn’t in a competition. Everyone who wants his spot, they’re in a competition. He already won. We don’t set the bar with self pity. We can say wah, wah, why don’t they like my writing, they used to like my writing, I used to get curated. We can blame Medium, blame Tony, blame publication owners who reject you, get disgruntled and complain. Or we can say how do I set the bar?

What do I need to learn or do to elevate myself?

Only one of those will get us where we want to go. Everything is a learning process.

I’m going to end with a brief story about believing in people.

A writer sent me a submission for my history publication. Instead of rejecting it, I fired back an email. Said this is a great topic, but I’m looking for a conversational tone, not an academic one. I’m rejecting this, as is. But I think you can do it. Give me a rewrite like you’re telling me a story. Write me the best thing you’ve ever written.

She didn’t just get accepted, she got boosted. It paid more than anything she’s ever written. I think we can all achieve more than we could ever realize. But sometimes we need to check our attitude. It’s astounding how often that’s our real problem.

Love to hear your thoughts. :)

xo
Linda

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