If You Don’t Read Your Stories, Who Will?
How Studying Your Own Behavior Could Earn You More Views.
Have you ever watched Shark Tank?
We all know it as the popular CNBC show where entrepreneurs are granted the opportunity to walk into the “tank” and pitch their business ideas to the “sharks” who are well established entrepreneurs, ready to invest in great new companies.
Watching Shark Tank taught me a lot about business, but it also taught me to think deeply about a lot of concepts that go well beyond the business world.
I know there have been a few episodes where new entrepreneurs came into the tank asking the sharks for a pretty sizable amount of cash, and in most cases, it was in exchange for a pretty small slice of their business.
One of the questions that always comes up in the tank (from the sharks) is “how much of your own money have you already put into this business?” and it gets SCARY when some people answer, saying that they’ve hardly invested a dime into their own startups (if that).
That in and of itself is almost a nail in the coffin for those new entrepreneurs, because it brings up an important realization that all of us need to come across at one point or another in our lives.
People are not going to invest in us if we are not willing to invest in ourselves.
This Concept Applies to You as a Writer.
I really hate to admit that as I’ve started to take on writing, I have been wildly guilty of skimping on any sort of proofreading and editing for my own work.
A lot of times I will just sit down on Medium and write an article right as my mind thinks of the words. Then I’ll go and publish the article and/or add it to a publication without giving it a second thought.
Is there some sort of value in acting fast, and being decisive about publishing your articles? Yes.
One of the problems that many new writers are going to have is the opposite of this, where they write a whole bunch of articles or stories and then they never publish anything because they haven’t written what they believe is perfect. These people are the prime victims of what we like to call paralysis by analysis.
Then there are those of us that have the problem of just writing as fast as our fingers can type, and putting everything out there to try and see what sticks.
As I think more about it though, I’ve been trying to pick up on why it is that I don’t go through and do any sort of proofreading or editing. Is it for any good reason?
The Truth Is… I Don’t Even Want to Read My Own Work.
I noticed that this has been one of my biggest problems with writing so far. I don’t find it to be worth my own time to go back through and read my own articles, yet for some reason I think other people on Medium are going to find my stories worth their time?
That just doesn’t make sense, and I think that it is something that all new writers should seriously be considering as they start to write more and more.
There is this sort of fad now where we think the best way to create great content is to just keep pumping out content. Article after article after article, because we think that the more repetitions we get in, the more easily people are going to find our work, and the better our skills are going to be in a short period of time.
Again, there is value in putting in the reps, but writing one story every single day without ever editing it or proofreading it is kind of like going to the gym, putting the plates on the bar, and then never actually lifting. You are only completing half of the battle, if that.
The Advice Here is Not to Start Proofreading and Editing Your Work…
Before you get the wrong idea, this is not an article trying to explain to you that you should be proofreading/editing your work more. That will lead to you aimlessly going back through every article that you wrote, and in the long run could seriously hurt the passion that you already have for writing.
Instead, what you should get out of this article is the awareness that you should want to go back through and read your own story, at least once over.
Bring some self-awareness into your writing, and check yourself to see if you dread going back to do any sort of proofreading and/or editing.
That could be the number one sign that even you do not find your articles to be worth the time that it takes to read them.
If you don’t think that it is worth your time to read through your own article, you can bet that no one else is going to think that it is worth their time to read through your article.
Then of course this all snowballs when you go back, read through, make the proper edits, and learn as you go along.
You’ll become a much better writer in no time.
