I have been published, for REELS! A few weeks ago a an article of mine was published on Elephant Journal. It feels rather unreal still. It is my first published piece of writing, except for Instagram captions and Facebook statuses.
I am really proud of this article. It is personal but yet reaches out to a larger community as well. It did not just happen though, several drafts and re-writes lies behind the finished product. Choosing a topic for an article can sometimes be really hard and you will maybe change it or shift focus, broader or narrow it, more than once.
One of the best experiences with Elephant Academy is the peer editing groups. Within a smaller group you have the possibility to post a piece of writing and get invaluable feedback from your writing peers. the part that you may like the most, can be the parts others are gonna tell you to change or even remove. It is so easy to get personally attached to your piece, after all you do put your heart and soul into it. Important to remember when that happens, is that if you want to get published it is the reader you are writing for, not yourself. Therefore, letting others read your piece and give you feedback is the best way to know what to edit and make your article as accessible as possible to the reader.
I chose a rather niche topic, and with that I knew that maybe my article would not get so many reads. So when my article after 24 hours had over 500 readers I was stoked! I could not believe that 500 human beings actually took the time to read something I had written.
As of today the article has been read 1,400 times and shared more than 300 times. For being an article on Elephant that is really not that much, but for me personally it is a huge accomplishment. It has given me confident to believe I can write, and that my writing is actually good enough to be published in real magazine.
Despite this, it does not feel right to call myself a writer. It feels too defining, like giving myself a title I have not earned. But I do write, almost daily. But, if we look at the definitions of a writer, according to the Oxford Dictionaries, they are;
1: a person who has written something or who writes in a certain way, or
2: a person who writes books, stories or articles, especially as an occupation or profession.
According to these definitions, I would qualify to be a writer. I do have written something, not sure if it was in a certain way though (whatever that actually means). Maybe, we are all writers. We think, therefore, we can write. Almost like walking—just put one word in front of the other and just don't stop.
If you would like to read my article, click HERE!
“Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts. You need to start somewhere.” ~ Anne Lamott