You Can Write Simple Pieces On Medium
Does every piece on Medium have to be like a rare piece of art at the museum? Is the only way to craft a well-developed piece to spend hours researching for an esoteric exercise of prose or whittle away at creative phrases for hours to draft the best poem?
That is at least what I seem to think. Currently, I have 188 drafts and only a couple dozen published pieces under my Medium account.
Medium seems to imply super-formalism. “Publish,” the green button begs from the right-hand corner of the screen. Furthermore, thousands of Medium publications screen for the best of pieces to include in their online editions. For countless, “published” generally brings to mind the hardback books shipped to local stores or through Amazon fulfillment centers. If a scholar, writer, or another type of established guru is said to be “well-published,” it means many of their rigorously edited works have made the pages of newspapers, magazines, academic journals, hardbacks, or other forms of literature. So, Medium writers spend hours crafting, editing, and redrafting the most formal, relatable, and publish-worthy piece they can. Numerous great lines make their way to the page, and whole other paragraphs get cut. Many hours may go by drafting the piece with no resulting final product.
This is all very good. We see enough online or social media platforms where users post unfiltered, unedited, and low-quality content. Oh boy, this has been going on long before the last 30 years of the Internet! Misinformation, blatant lies, falsehoods, and egregiously crude content all seem as old as civilization. So, of course, please keep at least the bare minimum levels of editing and proofreading!
And writing itself is a process. There is a unique journey that starts with each piece, for sure. This is true whether one is drafting a short story or a cocktail party speech. But perhaps this is where the trouble lies. Not all compositions have to reach the same level of threshold to be ready to share with others or even publish in some shape or form. The trick with Medium is that some pieces will likely need to be super-polished, like if you are submitting to a top-notch publication or entering a contest with lucrative prizes. But if you are just wanting to get something out there, respond to other pieces, or just share new insights or points then a less rigorous form of editing is clearly no problem.
Another point for me is that I have been using online writing platforms to chisel away at big and bold projects. That is wonderful, but I keep realizing just how much time and energy it takes. Maybe it is okay to keep working away at those big pieces and then put them out there when done. But simultaneously, if I dabble in smaller projects as well that gets me to push that alluring “Publish” more, what does that hurt? I will likely be able to get more of my writing out there to possibly enrich maybe even just a few readers, which is itself an immeasurably positive result!
