Our Medium Writing Heroes Still Stumble
They are people, after all, just like you and I
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While I was making up my mind whether to commit fully to writing or keep trying to make part-time effort somehow provide full-time results, I spent a lot of time reading.
Quite a bit of that time was here on Medium, where there is no shortage of people writing about how to write. At first, I lurked, carefully choosing my free articles and taking copious notes to ensure nothing slipped through the cracks.
Eventually, after hearing what I already knew echoed over and over, I took the plunge. I cannot ignore how much the words of those other writers helped me make my decision. It wasn’t necessarily what they said — like I mentioned, most of it was what I already knew.
It was that they had done it. Maybe they weren’t Stephen King or J.K. Rowling doing it, but they were pulling in a living wage using their mind and their words. That had become hugely important to me after over a decade of welding in Northeast North Carolina, where my degree in Political Science and love of reading have always been more of a boon than a blessing.
During this time, I became a repeat customer to several of those writers. Many of them are Medium front page regulars, and rightfully so. I know they are putting in the work because I read it every day, throughout the day, and always have fresh content. What’s important, they are doing the things they are telling the rest of us to do.
And best of all…they are writers. They did it!
They have become my heroes, in a way. I look up to the example they set, I try to be like them without losing myself, and some days I would give anything to trade places with them (or at least the fantasy version of them dreamed up in my imagination).
The thing is, being a hero isn’t always the way we imagine it being. For every article of theirs I read, there is another story between the lines and more between the articles.
“Music is the space between the notes.”
Claude Debussy
Our Medium heroes are people, just like us. They worry about mortgage payments, getting paid in time to cover bills and all of the mundane things we worry…
