Hey Jacob! Good to see you're off and publishing on the platform - and thanks for the tag. Glad to see you're rejecting the things that don't work for you too. I have a similar feeling about sex articles.... some writers seem to be able to bang out anything with 'blowjob' in the title, pocket a few thousand dollars and retire for the month. Very annoying.
I have two pieces of advice for writing on the platform in your the early days. First of all, write small, write bland and write often. Writing small means producing pieces around 3-6 mins in length. Writing bland means hitting tags like 'humor' or 'life' - things that don't delve too deeply, but offer a unique position and writing often speaks for itself. You already comment often.
The benefit of this is that you'll quickly learn how to write good titles, subheadings and work out what page layouts to do (without losing hours out of your life). You'll get to see what works and what doesn't with not very much time or emotional investment. This seems like a cheap trick (and it is) but I did this in my early days - most of those pieces are long deleted. My Nazis in Our Classes - my first viral piece on th platform was a rewrite of an earlier low ranking short article that I felt I could've done better - I came back to it with more experienced eyes after 6 months of writing here.
You're also looking to build a clickback audience on your comments. Your comments on my pieces have been insightful and interesting - that's why I followed you - other people will do so too, and you need to make sure that you give them something short and good to read upon arrival. Sometimes I click through to someone's work and they have 24 minute pieces - this often stops me in my tracks. It's judgmental not to read of course, but 24 minutes is a long time. A short, pithy opinion style piece is normally what draws a follow from me.
The other thing you're going to need to do - and I offer this as someone who writes the way they think - is moderate your pieces into a story rather than a stream of consciousness. That's in the editing, and you likely know it and that's why they're still in the draft folder. You need a comprehensive strategy of what you're trying to say and how you're trying to say it. Structure structure structure.
I really do have to drill this into my brain every time I write - and the difference between my comments and my stories is the amount of time I spend structuring my thoughts into a coherent and cogent digstible pile. Think about narrative flow and consider using headings or subheadings to guide your audience down the page through your argument.
You're a damn good writer and a very good thinker - opinion pieces are where you're at (this piece is an opinion piece - pretending its a journal) - but the difference between an opinion piece and a generalised rant is in the structure and flow of the work itself. Audiences will engage with and try and fight the former, they will ignore and act with derision at the latter.
You will publish when you feel ready to - and the reason you haven't is that you intuitively know your inner writer is better than your inner editor - and you're defending yourself frrom the likely ego damage of putting wonderful thoughts onto the internet but nobody reading them. Some people have no ideas - so they re-hash news, you aren't one of those poeple - but all writing is re-writing whether it's your own stuff or someone from the NYT.
People will find you and they will read you if you stick wth it - I can assure you of that. Your job now is to give them every reason to stay on your story and no reason to click away. I no longer use it, but you might want to consider the hemmingway app.
Keep up the good work - and apologies for the long comment :o)
