How I became a Top Writer with only Three Articles
Why I don’t buy into the philosophy of publishing every day
Lately my Medium feed and Daily Digest have been full of articles praising the value and importance of writing and publishing as often as possible, ideally daily.
The advice you generally hear is that frequency should be the main aim of a writer. Quantity over quality. If you want an article that “goes viral”, just write lots of them and hope that something wins the algorithmic lottery and makes it big.
I really don’t believe in this.
There is a reason why I never got into using Twitter. To me, the signal to noise ratio is just too low.
What I love about Medium is that there is such a high average quality of writing. For a while I read almost every article in my Daily Digest and thoroughly enjoyed a large majority of them.
But I did notice after a while that ideas started to repeat more and more frequently. Instead of deep thoughts and unique insights, an increasing number of stories sounded like stale opinions and worn out views.
I might have created this problem myself. Applauding too many similar articles causing the Medium algorithms to create my own filter bubble. But whether it was my own doing or not, it was a bit of a disappointing trend.
Another slightly concerning trend was that more and more titles sounded like Buzzfeed clickbait. Even though a lot of the articles themselves were still excellent, it left me with a bit of an unpleasant feeling. To be honest, I almost feel a bit guilty for the title of this story as well. But at least I didn’t choose something like “11 reasons I became a Top Writer. Number 3 will blow your mind.”
I understand that writers, especially those writing for a living, want to make sure their content gets as much exposure and traffic as possible, and using the psychological tricks that have shown such a high efficacy for clickbait makes sense in achieving that goal. But the absence of these kind of cheap marketing tricks, as well as the generally very thoughtfully written stories, are exactly why I was initially drawn to Medium.
While there are some trends that I’m not so happy about, there are also others that make me really excited about the future of this platform, and the internet as a way of sharing deeply insightful and meaningful stories in general.
The revamped Daily Digests and website feel much more curated and much less like being stuck in an algorithmic filter bubble.
I’m also extremely happy about Ev Williams’ recent statement that Medium is committed to not just present readers with the most recent stories, but the most relevant ones, regardless of when they were published. This breaks the cycle of writers having to publish daily to be noticed and allows them instead to focus on quality over quantity. In Ev Williams’ words, it allows “writers to make bigger investments in stories”.
While I believe that writing daily, or things like 30 day writing challenges, are great as a learning experience, helping writers hone their craft, I doubt that they consistently produce very high quality content that will stand the test of time.
“Quality is more important than quantity. One home run is much better than two doubles.”
— Steve Jobs
Writing good and unique stories, whether fiction or non-fiction, simply takes time. My favorite articles, across all platforms, all clearly show that the writers spent many hours on research, reflection, and crafting the text itself.
These are articles I still remember a long time later. They stay relevant and fresh. For example Kevin Kelly’s “1,000 True Fans” is still often cited even a decade after it was first written. And I doubt it was written in a day.
The piece of writing I’m personally most proud of is actually my very first article on Medium. The writing and editing itself took approximately two weeks. But if I add to that all the reading, note taking and thinking that lead to the finished story, it’s on the order of a couple of months.
Many of the articles by writers advocating frequency are enjoyable while I read them, but often forgotten again shortly after. It’s almost as if by design, so that the thoughts can be recycled and served again in another piece.
Advice such as “readers care less about content than presentation” is certainly true online, but the often drawn conclusion that this means you shouldn’t polish your writing too much but just move on to the next piece of writing is a bit disheartening.
Imagine Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech with the same content but sloppy prose and presentation. I doubt it would have had the same impact, both in the moment and over time. Sure, this is a particularly extreme comparison, but I think it’s good to hold yourself to a high standard. It also shows respect for your readers.
That’s probably one of the many reasons why books are still so successful. It takes a lot of hard work by many people to get to a finished book. Unique insights require reading, thinking, and synthesis of new material, and that just takes time. And the first draft is only the very beginning of the process.
But the finished product is something special. It is not something a writer puts out as fast as possible so as to move on to the next one.
Recently I directly experienced first hand that quality is valued on Medium.
I published a three part series that aims to explain so called Variational Autoencoders, a fairly technical topic from Artificial Intelligence, in such a way that it is both engaging and easy to understand for a non-technical audience, as well as gives people with experience in the field a new way of thinking about this particular topic.
I’m not sure if I fully succeeded with this ambitious goal, but the feedback I received was extremely positive.
And two days after I published the last part of the series, just over two weeks after publishing the first, I found an email in my inbox telling me that I had become a top writer in Artificial Intelligence.
This shows that quantity is not the only way to be noticed.
Much effort went into this series. In fact it took several months, coming up with the general idea, working out how to present the difficult concepts in an simple and relatable way, making rough sketches of the illustrations, writing the first draft, as well as many rounds of editing. And that was only my part of the work. My friend KITTYZILLA who made the wonderful illustrations also spent several weeks on this project.
Sure, I didn’t work on it every day, but this still could have never been done if I had aimed for one article per day, or even per week. Certainly not as someone writing in their free time. But even for a full-time writer I’d expect a project of this scope to take at least several days. Especially the ideation phase simply can’t be rushed. The thoughts need time to properly develop.
But it pays off. And the result shows that you don’t have to be overly prolific in order to be relevant or get noticed. You just need to create good quality content.
And while I have used Medium a lot as an example, I don’t intend this to be a story about Medium, or even about writing. I think this is true for any form of content no matter the format or where it is published.
While publishing as much as possible certainly increases your chances of getting lucky and “going viral”, the only reliable way to success is consistency and a focus on quality.
“It is quality rather than quantity that matters.”
— Seneca
So my verdict on writing as much as possible and publishing a quick as possible: Good exercise to improve your writing yes, main way to compose meaningful stories with lasting impact no.
Let’s take our time and treat each piece of content we create as something special that deserves to be polished. Let’s make investments in our works. In the words of Neil Gaiman, let’s “make good art”.
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