Member-only story
How Medium Changed My Writing Life
For good and for bad (though mainly good)
It’s come as a surprise, but using Medium has changed the way I think of myself as a writer.
For many years I wrote in fits and starts, stories and essays that I would return to over and over again. I kept them in drawers for long periods, not even ready to show to friends let alone attempt to publish. I had the sense that a perfect literary career awaited me if only I could remain patient and diligent enough. I had a portfolio that I was building, but despite the luminous future I believed I was storing up for myself, the work was largely unseen: a private and uneven collection I worried about, celebrated and despised at different times.
When the time came to send my writing out into the world, I found that winning professional writing commissions was hard work. I’d been writing privately for years, but I never understood that in the commercial landscape, timing and topicality are basic tenets of marketable writing. My vision of a writer of literary points-of-view was utterly naive, and it took me a while to realize that the ‘portfolio’ I’d been working on for years was little more than a ragbag of half-finished opinion pieces that had little chance of securing me a professional writing career.
