How I Came to Embrace Digital Publishing and Sites Like Medium

Like many of the people on Medium, Substack, and WordPress, I have always seen myself as a writer — not because I have published a bestseller (my bank account swears I haven’t), or because I write every day (I don’t), or because I think I’m an unheralded genius whose work will echo down through the ages like a trickling stream carving up canyons of time. No — I am a writer for a single, irreducible reason: I don’t know how NOT to write.

So, like many of you, as I grew from child to adult, my brain filled with all the novels I would write (and their screenplays I would adapt); the awards I would humbly but secretly gloatingly accept; I practiced my enlightening quips and craft philosophies that I would knowingly but sympathetically impart wittily in 1,000-word web interviews and at panels where I would mingle with my peers, and we would all get along swimmingly. I would write entertaining but enlightening novels spiced with short story collections filled with ideas I couldn’t turn into novels, which, unlike story collections, sometimes make money. And on and on…

I had wanted these things, or slight variations of them — exorbitantly — since I was ten or eleven and realized that, yes, I was a writer. Again, I wasn’t a writer because I had written anything longer than a page or two (I hadn’t come close), but because writing — stories — was all I ever thought about.

So, I lived my life. I did not become a writer. But I did write. Still, all I could think about were stories. And I wrote. And I was not a good writer. In fact, I was an awful one. But I did what you were supposed to do at the time: I kept a blog, and I wrote my stories and novels and submitted them to magazines and agents. Like most of you, my stories were met by grossly inadequate form letters. It was a long process — it usually took a month, mostly more, to hear back from a journal. Some journals required no simultaneous submissions. I realized I could increase the odds in my favor if I had more stories to submit. So, I wrote more stories.

Now, this blog is not going to be a rant against the publishing industry. We all know its problems. That isn’t to say there isn’t great stuff being published — there is. In fact, I believe now’s the best time for literature in the history of the world, with more books by more diverse authors on more diverse subjects available to more people than any other time in history. I think it just gets frustrating because, as writers, we can use our imaginations to picture a better publishing industry, but we also are all too aware such visions are probably nebulous utopias.

Long story short, after trying to get into the publishing industry the only way I thought possible, by submitting stories to journals and agents (the MFA wouldn’t work for me, I never graduated high school and never got a graduate degree. I was a real fuckup), I realized I was wasting my time. I needed another way. Making money would be nice, yeah, but what bothered me the most was that people just weren’t reading my stories. My stories wanted to live! They were trapped in my head, in my heart, on USB drives and MacBook’s, inaccessible to anyone but me. I started writing seriously in 2007–2008, so that’s about 13–14 years of work. And I’m a productive writer.

So, inspired by something I no longer remember, in July I started putting my stories on Substack before I realized Medium had a built-in audience of literature lovers and a better system for presenting a lot of multi-part stories (I said ‘better’, not ‘good.’) I’m not copying and pasting from my archive — everything gets rewritten and spruced up, and then reviewed and edited multiple times (and typos still get through). And people are reading my stories. That’s what I wanted. Maybe I’ll make some money. Maybe I won’t. Either way, I made the right decision. I’m in love with it.

I don’t have any prescriptive advice. The future is always inchoate. But there HAS to be a better way for people to create and disseminate literature. I’m not saying Medium, WordPress, or Substack are the answer. But we have to accept that right now, we really don’t have a clear answer.

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Reprinted from my Medium account.

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