On Becoming a Writer
On writing, doubt, and the price of validation
The first notification dinged at 2:37 AM. I remember because I’d been staring at the ceiling for three hours straight, my laptop abandoned beside me, the cursor blinking accusingly on a half-finished draft. I grabbed my phone mostly to confirm the time, to calculate how much sleep I’d already lost. But there it was — “Your story has received 50 claps.”
Fifty. Claps.
Not the thunderous applause of viral success, just the hesitant appreciation of strangers who’d somehow stumbled across my words. Strangers who didn’t know that I’d written those words sitting on my bathroom floor at midnight, back pressed against the tub, because something about the cold tile and the humming fluorescent light made the sentences flow when they wouldn’t come anywhere else.
I’ve never told anyone about the bathroom floor. It sounds too precious, too writerly in that performative way people mock. Like announcing you can only write longhand, using a particular fountain pen imported from Italy. But the truth is always more pathetic than the aesthetic we present. The truth is I write in the bathroom with my laptop because it’s the only room in my space where I can close the door and pretend the rest of my life isn’t waiting on the other side.
Digital throat clearing
The first piece I published on Medium wasn’t even meant to be read. It was digital throat-clearing, a way to prove to myself I could hit publish without spontaneously combusting from shame. I spent more time choosing the right minimalist stock photo than I did editing the actual words. I published it on a Tuesday afternoon and promptly closed my laptop, determined not to check for responses until the weekend.
I lasted seventeen minutes.
Zero views. Zero reads. Zero claps.
This is good, I told myself, pouring another cup of coffee I didn’t need. This is exactly what’s supposed to happen. Nobody starts off with an audience.
By evening, there were three views and one clap. The rational part of my brain understood this was nothing. The irrational part — the part that had been secretly dreaming of being discovered like some digital-age Lana Turner at Schwab’s Drugstore — felt a humiliation so complete I considered deleting my account and pretending the whole experiment had never happened.
Instead, I wrote another piece. It was angrier than the first, less careful. That piece got twenty-three claps. Someone highlighted a sentence in the middle — not even a sentence I’d thought was particularly good. But they’d highlighted it, which meant they’d read it, which meant my words had traveled from my bathroom floor to someone else’s eyes.
It’s a strange intimacy, having your thoughts read by people you’ll never meet.
Success is relative
Success on Medium, I quickly learned, is relative and largely algorithmic. A piece I spent three weeks crafting would sink without a trace, while something I’d vomited out in a single sitting after a bad date would suddenly get curated and featured in someone’s newsletter.
“You have to understand the algorithm,” a more established writer advised me via DM. “Post consistently. Use the right tags. Engage with other writers.”
I nodded along virtually, thinking: But what about the actual writing? Wasn’t that supposed to be the point? The words themselves, not their packaging or distribution?
God, I was naive.
After three months, I had seven published pieces and a grand total of $11.37 in earnings. I screenshotted the deposit notification and sent it to a friend with the caption: PROFESSIONAL WRITER STATUS ACHIEVED.
They replied: Does this mean you can quit looking at job listings? Buy a yacht? Finally move somewhere with an actual living room?
I laughed, but something sharp twisted under my ribs. Because part of me — the same part that had fantasized about being discovered — had genuinely believed this might be the beginning of something. That I might be one of those Medium success stories where someone parlays their articles into a book deal, a speaking career, an escape route.
Instead, I had eleven dollars and thirty-seven cents. Enough for two oat milk lattes or one-third of my monthly streaming services.
“What kind of writer are you?”
The question came from someone I barely knew at a party, after I’d mentioned I sometimes published pieces online. I’d been loose-lipped from two glasses of cheap pinot grigio that tasted like watered-down disappointment.
“I write…” I started, then stopped. What did I write? Not fiction — I’d tried and failed at that particular mountain too many times. Not quite personal essays, though they drew from my life. Not service journalism or hot takes or cultural criticism, though elements of each sometimes crept in.
“I write the kind of pieces people read on their phones while they’re on the toilet,” I finally said.
They laughed uncomfortably and changed the subject. I excused myself soon after and walked home instead of taking a ride, partially to clear my head and partially to punish myself with the forty-minute trek in inappropriate shoes.
What kind of writer was I? The unsuccessful kind. The unclassifiable kind. The kind who doesn’t know what the fuck they’re doing or why they bother doing it.
That night I drafted a piece called “The Toilet Reader’s Manifesto,” a half-serious defense of writing that exists to fill those in-between moments of people’s lives. I never published it. Even I have some standards.
Thirty five dollars
The email arrived on a Sunday morning, subject line: “Submission Guidelines — The New Quarterly.”
I stared at it, coffee cooling beside me, sunlight making dust motes visible in my apartment’s stale air. I’d signed up for approximately thirty-seven literary journals and newsletters in a fit of ambition the previous month. This was the first one that had actually sent anything.
The New Quarterly is now accepting submissions for our annual fiction and poetry contests. Entry fee: $35.
Thirty-five dollars to submit something that would almost certainly be rejected. Thirty-five dollars I could spend on groceries or put toward the dental work I’d been postponing. Thirty-five dollars to participate in a system that seemed designed to extract money from desperate writers feeding their delusions of legitimacy.
But also: thirty-five dollars for the chance to be published somewhere other than Medium. Somewhere that carried the weight of external validation. Somewhere that might lead to… what, exactly?
I opened my drafts folder. It contained seventeen pieces in various states of completion, plus another nine that had already been published on Medium.
The cursor blinked. The submission deadline was six weeks away.
I closed the email without making a decision.
This was easier when it was a secret
I’m sitting on my bathroom floor again, laptop balanced on my knees. It’s 11:42 pm. I should be sleeping. Instead, I’m toggling between tabs: Medium stats, submission guidelines for three different literary journals, a doc containing the piece I still haven’t decided what to do with.
The truth — I don’t want to admit — is that I’m afraid. Afraid of rejection from the journals, yes. But also afraid of committing to this path that might lead nowhere. Afraid of the hope that comes with each submission, each published piece. Afraid of the person I’m trying to be.
It was easier when writing was just a secret thing I did for myself. When no one knew, no one expected anything, and no one could be disappointed — including me.
Now there are stakes. Small ones, admittedly. Microscopic in the grand scheme of the literary world. But they exist. People have read my words. A few have even paid me for them, if only in fractions of cents. I’ve created an expectation — mostly in myself — that this is going somewhere.
But where? And how do I get there? And what if there isn’t actually a there at all?
The bathroom light flickers, a momentary dimming that’s been happening for weeks. I should change the bulb. I should do a lot of things.
Instead, I open a new document and begin to type.
The first notification dinged at 2:37 AM. I remember because I’d been staring at the ceiling for three hours straight…
Maybe this one I’ll keep for myself.
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