How I published my first Medium article

Almost 2 years back I started writing in medium, Fast forward 2 years I have 3 drafts in my stories section with none published and last month I published my first article, the article I published was completely a new one from my first 3 drafts, and to my surprise, it only took 2 weeks overall to publish my first story.

I was curious about the change in pace between the first draft and the first published story, so that I can use the technique to pick up pace for my future writings.
On analyzing I found some really helpful mindshift I had over the course of 2 years in general which helped me to complete the article faster, so I decided to write this article to help people who are going through the same phase(A lot of stories in draft but none published).

Some Background

Why Do I Want to Write

So like most people, I have an urge to share my thought process with people to expand my thought universe, I love talking and listening to people about the general understanding of things, new ideas, etc.. it gives me so much energy and joy.
I have also enjoyed reading medium articles as I always found a lot of authors write their heart out on their experiences in their specific field which has helped me in many ways in my field, so I just want to do the same to help people who are going through similar difficulties or challenges.

Its about two things
1. To expand my thought universe.
2. Helping people by giving my perception on different challenges which might help someone at some point.

The Rabbit Hole

When I usually talk to people the ideas start to flow at ease (no problemo), I focus mostly on communicating my vision to the listener rather than structuring or sounding interesting, and as the conversation is a 2-way communication you can present your idea multiple times on different context based on the understanding and feedback of the listener, but In case of writing its important that you hit the sweet spot the very first time the reader reads the article, so you must structure and engagingly write your article but this process can become very time consuming if you are not clear with your objectives, I rewrote my first drafts again and again several times without satisfaction and slowly stopped working on those draft.

“With writing its important that you hit the sweet spot the very first time”

The Problems and The Way How I Handled Them

Not Engaging

The first thing which puts me in the back seat was the pressure to write an engaging article, I used to write a paragraph and will keep on editing it for an hour or so to make it sound quirky, witful and smart, I will do this for days for a paragraph, believe me, this ate most of my time even after multiple edits I wouldn’t have crossed 100 –150 words.

I overcame this by writing the full article without worrying about the structure or engagement, In the book The Zen of Design and System analysis book on the topic of ‘many paths to the mountain’, to some people writing the outline first and filling the content later works for some other writing down the full content and structuring it later works, the second worked for me.
I wrote the full content within a week and later edited it again and again for another week till I was good and published 👍.
So why the editing didn’t take much time was because previously I was trying to multitask both writing the core content and making the content engaging at the same time, they contradicted each other most of the time and dragged me, I decided to write only the core content first and when I started structuring, they kinda fell in place magically 😏.

Not Unique!!!

The second was the fear that my content is not unique and it is true my content is not unique, there are already hundreds of better articles than me on the same topic. So I am not doing much of help by writing this article, this thought just make me quit the article, all the stories in my draft are on hold because of this, I start very enthusiastically but after some time I think its nothing new, and leave it to rot, this has became a norm for me and I kinda disappointed about myself for not being able to write unique content

And then one fine day I got excited about a new topic and came to my stories section to find out the topics of my old drafts

All the topics were different and interesting, and I was surprised that these were written by me, then I realised one thing that all of us are very unique and all our experiences are very unique because of the perception we have is unique which is because of our belief system.
So I became more confident that more than the core content, it's my experience and the way I approach the problem might touch people and give them a diverse perception for that particular situation and might provide them a different options to act.

“All our experiences are very unique because of the perception we have towards the situation is unique which is because of our belief system”

Bottom line, you are unique and special in your own way, go and get them Tiger!!!!

Will people find out who I am really

The third one is what I am most afraid of, what if people find out who I am,
The readers who read my article might find out
— I have a bad grammar
— I don’t have enough knowledge on what I am talking about
— and maybe people can think that “I am just a wannabe who is desperate to get the spotlight” and it might be true too or not 🤔, maybe I will write another article about it 😆.
The fear of getting exposed!!!!

I read in the book The Pragmatic Programmer

“The greatest fear of all is the fear of appearing weak.”

One thing I have realized over my course of life is life becomes easy when we start accepting who we are rather than living live a life of fear with a mask because it opens us new doors for improvement.
— Yes my grammar is bad
— yes I don’t have enough knowledge on what I am talking about
— yes, maybe I am a wannabe, I don’t know.

But I am willing to learn and improve, I have to start somewhere, I am starting by writing and publishing this article, and by doing this I am breaking all my shackles of fear and I am very excited about how better the future me is going to be.

Never let not knowing what you are doing stop you, but its very dangerous that you don’t know that you don’t know

So stop living in denial and Start writing!!!!!!!

Laziness

I also lacked the will to write consistently day by day, I start an article with great excitement but then lose it over the process of completing it and stop coming back to it concluding the content has lost its juice.

This is the most important of all, getting disciplined!!, whether you enjoy the process or not you should spend the promised time to get better at any activity. Let me use an example from my experience, I used to suggest book reading to people and the usual response I get is “I don’t find reading interesting”, what I suggest to them is to spend a small amount of time every day irrespective of the boredom you go through, like a well-oiled machine and the benefits I don’t have to explain it to people who are here, and this is the case for any activity and yes it works for writing too.
I decided to write 15 minutes a day irrespective of I like it or not and some sessions got stretched to more than an hour and some were a drag but I continued and here I am, so stop procrastinating and start writing.

Conclusion

So Finally, I was able to push the oval green button, but to be honest I am not yet close to good in the above mentioned hacks, I faced and failed on the above mentioned struggles even while writing this article but I got better and published the article as I hold on to my nerves.

To sum it up

1. Stop trying to write engaging content instead write your experience and it will be engaging by itself.
2. You are unique so don’t think too much about the purpose and the usefulness of the article, sharing your unique view to the problem gives a diverse view to people.
3. There will be criticism but “face your fears”, there is no other way to get better.
4. Laziness!!! Get disciplined — Nuff said.