Stop publishing. Please!
Apparently, the difference between professional writers and amateurs is that the former write every day and treat it like a 9–5 job. A bunch of articles and books praise the value of consistency and writing every day. The details vary — one page a day. 1000 words a day. One paragraph a day. One verse a day. Everyone has a very detailed justification on why that needs to be done, how it improves the writing skills, how it brings focus, determination, better mindset. Even Nick Cave, one of the greatest poets of our times, says that he locks himself in his home office and writes for hours and hours every day. Most Medium authors follow these recommendations… but…
What most misunderstood is that the recommendation is to “write every day”. Not to “publish every day”! If Nick Cave released all the poems and songs that he writes daily — he would need a full-blown library just for his own works. The exercise of daily writing is good in order to improve one’s skills, find and polish the tone, get a better flow of one’s words. The exercise of daily publishing though only results in suffocating your readers with mediocrity. It’s especially common for authors who write in a narrow niche, particularly when they write about personal experiences. I see some who are posting so much, that I wonder — when do they have the time to live all those experiences?! In the end — it all becomes recycled, irrelevant, repeated over and over again. It’s one thing to write a diary or a daily log of social media posts, purely for documenting purposes or sharing with friends, it’s very different to publish a 1000–2000 words article every day, particularly about one’s own experiences.
Stop publishing every day. Please. Start curating your own content. Write every day, all day long. Write several articles a day. At the end of the week, spend a few hours curating your own articles. Those that are good — publish them. Those that aren’t — don’t. If you think that all your articles are good — then it’s a whole different problem and you may need a reality check. Ask a friend, or even better a stranger to read your weekly content and give you their unfiltered opinion — it will be an eye-opening experience, I promise you. I’m not inventing anything new — that was the role of the editors in the old days of print books and magazines. Even great artists like Cave, Bowie, The Beatles, would record two dozen songs and only a dozen would end up on the album. I mean… if David Bowie could sacrifice a dozen songs on each album because they were not good enough — you really need to have a chat with your own ego.
Do it for yourself. Do it for your readers. Give them good content. Give them a reason to come back. Show them that you respect and value their time. The returns will be tenfold.
