Writing Momentum
Writing at night and needing a picture.
I admit, I get a little discouraged at times as a writer. I don’t know what I was thinking when I first started to post in public. It was 2015 when I first decided I wanted to put something out there, and the idea was to write something helpful to other entrepreneurs. I was dealing with a corrupt company and CEO at the time, and I was doing my best to bite my tongue. I could legally only hint at what was happening, and I had a lot to say as I distanced myself from the company.
As I started to write and gain traction, I created a Google Alert for my own name to see if anyone was commenting on my writing anywhere. I received an alert about Open Interface North America and what it did, so I answered that question on Quora. Prior to that, I had never heard of Quora before. The next question someone asked me was about what I did after the sale of the company, and that answer had huge readership and far more “views” than anything I’d written anywhere else. I was never clear on what a “view” actually was.
I was busy with consulting, and Quora became an occasional pastime. What I loved about the format was just helping people. I had no other agenda. From the start, my writing was making the Quora Digest, and after it did a few times and I couldn’t find any aggregate totals on the site, I decided to keep my own spreadsheet, which I still keep today. I’m up to 215+ million, of whatever that is. I think it’s like circulation. I wanted to compare Quora Digest to other places people would read my work. The numbers seemed big, so I just kept writing.
I tried Medium, and it sucked. Nobody was reading my stuff. Quora was consistently the best place to write if the numbers had any meaning, and it was the readers who were making me a better writer, so it became a regular pastime, like needlepoint to some.
Where it gets discouraging when I write is that I often, too often actually, get very personal attacks from those who disagree. You do have to develop thick skin. It’s a shame, really, because I’d love to see more people write, and I can’t blame them for not doing so. There are some really horrible humans out there.
As I’ve become better known as a writer on Quora, my readers seem to cross topics right along with me, so what I sometimes think will be a small number of views turns into something big that day. Yet, I never know what readers will find interesting. I answer what I think is interesting, and sometimes I get very few readers. An answer about how I’d renovate an office has fewer than 100 views after a week. I thought that would be popular! Yet, I just wrote a piece on ICF construction (Insulated Concrete Form), thinking it would be just home builders who were interested in the answer. The numbers were astounding in the first day when I was only expecting a few hundred views. It received 27,000 in the first 24 hours.
I have no idea what answers will become popular on Quora, so I never bother to try and figure it out. I’ve never asked for followers, upvotes, or views. I just write answers that I think matter to people. The pursuit on Quora for me, from day one, has been to write the best, most helpful answer I can think of and nothing more. The discouraging part is the comments. I don’t mind disagreements. I love the debate. What gets to you after a while are the personal attacks.
I understand that the personal attacks are a flawed mindset from people with problems. It’s a bit like a disease, sort of like when you threaten an alcoholic about drinking. The first thing they do is attack, so I try not to take it personally and develop an even thicker coat of skin, but it’s still bothersome, and I try not to think about it. I never thought of this, but it might be rectal itch.
Regardless, everything I write has to be reliable. I welcome differences of opinion on every subject, but there are some real dicks on Quora, and I either delete the comments or block them entirely. It’s not just for me. Keeping their vile posts discourages others from commenting, even when they agree. People don’t like to get into personal fights. Who does?
I ended August going out on the Quora Digest 63,095,000 times for just one month alone. I’m now at over 215 million, and it took me five years to get to 63 million. September will have big numbers too. That’s the part that saves all this. I don’t know how many actually read, but the numbers are always bigger, so in spite of my discouragement, I keep writing.