How I Made $0.04 Writing on Medium
And why it feels like $1,000,000,000.
I’ve never felt like a writer.
When I was a kid I flourished in English class. I was selected for special writers workshops where kids from all over the school district would come and learn from real Authors. I would come home with notebooks filled with page after page of messy pencil marks. Sentences crammed together with ideas and thoughts that moved faster than my hand. As I drifted to sleep I would be trying to direct my unconscious to complete the story for me like a shoemaker's elf.
My love for English continued until I entered University. While I was outwardly determined to be a Doctor, I harboured a secret dream of becoming a Writer. I enrolled in as many first-year English classes as I could — and slammed directly into a dream-crushing wall. The professors and other students spoke in what seemed like another language. They read deeply into what underlying meaning an author was trying to convey with each word. So deeply that I started to feel guilty because when I wrote I would simply — write.
After failing my first few papers I withdrew from the class before it could drive my already struggling GPA down even further.
And my dream of being a writer died.
My first few years of University killed a lot of my dreams — but none of them stung quite as much as that one.
Throughout my career, I have dabbled with writing. A blog here, some copywriting there, I have a chapter in a co-author project, I even submitted a book proposal once — but I’ve never considered myself a Writer. Yes, I wrote things, but I wasn’t a real Writer.
So when the idea of writing on a platform like Medium came around, I felt intrigued. I did some research and thought I would give it one last try. One final push before finally extinguishing my writer's spark.
Remembering my University experience, I tried tailoring my style to the ‘guides’ that now proliferate my daily recommendations. I spent longer than I would care to admit trying to get the perfect headline. I agonized over my grammar and my word choices. I looked up exactly what publications to submit to, read and reread all of the curation guidelines.
I hit publish and…
Nothing.
I eventually received a stock reply from the publication — thanks but no.
I know better than to quit after just one rejection so I tried again.
And again.
And again.
But — nope.
That was really it. The spark was clearly not igniting anything and it was time to just accept it. That being said the Medium format was enjoyable and I could use it to write something that I needed for myself. A way to formulate my thoughts about Sustainable Wellbeing, practical self-reliance, and my role in all of that. I hit publish without submitting it to anyone. Shared it with my network for feedback and carried on.
I didn’t know that the spark wasn’t extinguished until I received a notification from Medium that they were transferring my monthly earnings to me.
I couldn’t believe it so I immediately checked my account and there it was. My first $0.04 (USD so with the exchange it comes to $0.05 CAD).
I almost cried. It’s hard to explain how $0.04 could possibly be life-changing. But it was.
I was officially paid for something that I wrote. It really doesn’t matter to me the amount — for me it means something deeper. It wasn’t the heavily curated, polished, and ‘for the reader’ piece that was thriving. It was simply my mind on ‘paper’, and it felt good. It felt validating and it felt freeing. I learned that I didn’t have to change who I was and how I wrote to be a writer. In fact, it was likely those things that were preventing me from making that jump. It wasn’t the writers in my University class that were dissecting every paragraph — the writers just wrote.
$0.04 — and I finally feel like a writer.
