Going Public on Medium, every two years
Apparently, I think about writing on Medium every two years or so. And here I am again.
I first discovered Medium in 2012, I think, when it was fairly new. I’ve been reading stories on Medium ever since. The daily digest always contains something I want to read that day. And I first tried writing on Medium right away. I drafted a story on why genre matters to me (more about that later). What I especially loved about Medium in those days was its emphasis on readers commenting on your writing, giving immediate feedback on what was working and what wasn’t. What I especially dreaded about Medium was readers not liking my work. I deleted that story within days. I was excited to go public, but I was also scared to go public.
In 2013 I tried again. I wrote my first story on whether Medium was a new genre. This time, I actually published it. And in 2015 I added a comment on the top. For the past two years, that story has been my only story on Medium.
But in the meantime I did go public. I started my blog, called Genre-Colored Glasses, on my own website, and I started writing about writing, language, and the ways our writing and language reveal our culture and shape who we are and how we act. Or about current events. It’s more fun than it sounds. I think I write about being human.
I’ve learned how to write better for broader publics as I’ve written that blog. I’ve collected a great set of readers, and more sign up for my newsletter every week (you can sign up, too, to get an email from me when I publish my new post each week, by clicking on the blog’s link). I spend many hours on each week’s post, mostly because I get lost digging into the topic and finding the best links and media to add. I have fun with it and find that I’m writing it for my own enjoyment.
And now I’ve decided to try sharing some of those essays with Medium readers. I’m more comfortable now with going public, so I might as well go public on a more public site. I’m hoping to get comments and feedback, to learn more about what interests readers and I share.
I still wonder, as I did in my first essay on Medium, whether Medium is a new genre and whether blogs will be different when they show up on Medium. I know I’ve revised the original posts before publishing them on this site. I think now that Medium is mostly a different platform, a different sort of forum for sharing ideas with others and having conversations across the world. I’m looking forward to discovering its possibilities as I go public on Medium again. I’ll let you know how it goes — maybe I’ll check back in another two years.
Amy Devitt is a writer, teacher, speaker, researcher, and optimist. She blogs at www.amydevitt.com/genre-colored-glasses and she acknowledges the weird blog title
