Member-only story
“Writing” Is Easy. Quality Writing Is Not.
A Reminder to Work Hard and Trust the Process
Lazy writing is all around us. From journalism to books to the blogosphere and social media (especially there, actually) we move through life surrounded by plain, simple, bad writing.
It’s always been there, but the Internet Age has put our human tendency to opt for the easy permanently on display.
Medium itself seems to have a love/hate relationship with “self-improvement” type articles, as well as articles focused on writing about writing. On the one hand, those types of posts, seem to do amazingly well on the platform, and are consequently profitable within the MPP for writers who write them. On the other hand, it doesn’t take much searching to find dozens of posts like this and this that glower down on the entire idea of writing articles of this type specifically because they are known to do well on Medium. What is this? Is it authorial hipsterism? Do we as a platform turn up our nose at popular forms of articles because they are not cool enough? Not “writery” enough? Are we (and by we, I mean mostly me) just jealous?
Maybe, but I also think there’s something of actual value worth pursuing in this train of thought. I don’t lump all self-improvement writers, and listicles, into the category of bad writing. It is…
