You should write as many crappy articles as you can

I hate how perfectionist I can be sometimes but I’m glad I prevented myself from bringing that habit into my writing. By choosing to publish one article a day for my first entire year of writing, I didn’t get the time to be a perfectionist. I had to move on to the next piece quickly.

The result was a whole lot of crappy articles. So many you wouldn’t believe. Want to suffer through one? How about this one? Enjoying the awful bolding everywhere and the disorganized ideas? Exactly two years later, I wrote this one. A bit better, right? The second one even took me less time to write than the first.

The real difference? Experience. 731 days' worth of experience to be more precise. Full of awful, disgusting, barely readable, articles, and — hopefully — a few enjoyable or amazing articles. Going through this wasn’t always pleasant but I’m glad I wrote them all.

If you’re not satisfied with your articles and don’t get many reads, rest assured. It happens to everybody. I used to be happy when I had 5 reads for an article. It’s now very rare to have less than a hundred. Most are read by hundreds of people and many by thousands. One was even seen by over 100,000 people.

Here’s why you shouldn’t run away from your crappy articles and instead publish and embrace them.

Proficiency is only trial and error combined with time

When you haven’t been writing for long, you don’t know how to organize an article well. You may read pieces that give you templates but you can’t seem to piece your ideas well together.

You’ll write some stories that seem right to you but will fall flat in the ocean of articles online. Your amazing ideas and stories will be overlooked by many. You won’t realize why your title isn’t good enough or why the cover image you chose didn’t attract readers.

Little by little, as time passes, you’ll notice a few patterns. You’ll notice your stories about relationships connect more to your readers than the ones about travelling, even if you loved your travelling articles. You’ll understand how to craft a listicle title that attracts readers. You’ll discover the potential of power words. You’ll learn how to use your own insecurities to connect with the readers.

This process doesn’t take weeks. After a few months, you start getting a certain sense of what works “less badly”. But it takes years to really notice what works “better.”

You’ll also realize there’s no one-size-fits-all. You’ll begin to see using a certain type of title works better for articles about productivity than about finance or time-sensitive pieces.

Proficiency is the capacity of accepting the bad to reach the good one day. Nothing more.

You will never ‘find’ your voice

I spent my first year struggling with the idea of finding “my voice”. I read countless articles about it and thought I could craft my voice one article at a time. It’s all rubbish.

Your voice in writing comes out of nowhere. It finds you. Not the other way around.

One day, you’ll write an article and feel triggered to write something you’ve never used before. It could be a joke, a rhetorical question, an exclamation, or anything else. It’ll just feel right, even though you’ll have no idea whether others will like it.

“If something strikes me as funny in the act of writing I throw it in just to amuse myself.” — William Zinsser, On Writing Well

I couldn’t explain what my voice is exactly. It’s only a combination of feelings that merge at a certain time in the middle of each article. For this reason, I often have to completely redo the introduction of my first article of the day as I write it before my voice decides to show up. The other articles I batch usually already include my voice in them.

You’ll also notice your voice changes depending on what type of content you write. When I write about my life as a polyglot and plan to publish an article in The Ascent, I have a completely different style as when I write for The Writing Cooperative. It’s not made on purpose. It’s become a natural part of my writing process.

Your voice will develop itself with time. It’s no specific style you can pick from other writers. It’s no follower of rules. It’s no fixed tool to pick out of your writing toolbox. It just is.

Don’t ever try hard to find your voice. Keep your mind open and let it find you. instead.

Accept the wrongfully ignored gems

The more articles you write, the easier it becomes to accept the ones that fail you. When you have only 20 articles behind you, each feels precious. When you have hundreds, you don’t care anymore. You know some of your beautiful stories will fall into oblivion as they are.

I remember when I wrote an article about what I felt my most shameful experience. I love that piece with all my heart. It was the first time I shared a particularly hurtful part of my past that I had hidden away for years. I hoped readers would connect with it. Yet it completely flopped. I hurt but I had to move on since I was publishing one article a day for a year.

On the contrary, I thought my article about the different kinds of polyglots wouldn’t reach many people. It seemed too niche to be widely read. Yet it became my most-read article for over eight months.

Readers don’t make sense. They never have and never will. It’s not their fault, nor is it yours. They have their own lives and even your most frequent readers will ignore some articles you wished they read. They will also read some of the articles you really didn’t care for.

Writing many crappy articles means some will be seen as amazing while some will seem even crappier than they really are. You can’t control this but the sheer quantity you will produce will help you reduce the importance you put on each of your articles.

I now rarely let myself delve into why an article did badly and how I could have made it better. The only times I allow myself to do that is during my reflection periods, when I willingly take time aside to find new ideas in old articles.

Final thoughts

Quality is overrated. We all know there’s no such this as “quality for everyone” yet we keep on trying to make each article perfect. Quality is in the eye of the beholder. That’s it.

When it comes to writing online, quantity and time do the trick. Head for 100 articles first, then 200, then 300, then 500, then 1,000. Keep going and your writing style will naturally improve as well.

Take some time to consciously improve and reflect on your errors, but don’t do it too often. As a writer, what you need to do is keep lining word after word. Not read your own words over and over again.

Embrace your crappy articles. They are the reason your future articles will be astounding.

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