Medium level difficulty

It’s been 21 days since I woke up to a nice mail from folks at Medium telling me that I can now login with my Twitter id and entertain the world with my writing typing. In these many days however I have done very little writing that would make any sense for a platform like Medium, instead I have spent more and more time thinking what I can write here.

Medium is not my personal blog that I would start posting photos of my cat Whiskey — who by the way, is getting cuter and cuddlier with each passing day. This is not Twitter either that can I post lame jokes about cricket, politicians and technology.

It was then that it struck me — I have lost the ability to write long pieces unless they are dumb straight-forward pieces full of quotes from people who may or may not give a shit about the topic. “You need to have your own opinion jackass, no one cares about what someone you met has to say, tell us what you have to say,” that’s not some riting guru speaking, it’s my inner voice screaming at me from one corner of the brain. My inner voice between, is the same idiot that told me to express myself completely in 140chrs, yes, ‘chrs’ not characters back in 2008. I have always been a man of few words so I found that challenge very easy, all I had to do was unlearn how to write. With a brain as conflicted as that, with a brain with such short-term memory how am I supposed to express myself in more than a few tweets five years later?

The question actually is not about how I can do it, but more about what I have to say. Most things one has to say in life can be expressed in a paragraph and that is after all the basis of news writing. You express the most important things in the first couple of lines of a news story — the five Ws and one H (Who, What, When, Where, Why and How). This is true for most blog posts too, except we mask it in layers of jokes, puns and anecdotes. So what topic can people write long essays about? Religion is definitely not my thing as my believes can be summed up in one line. Economics, though I studied in school is something I don’t ‘get’ beyond the basics and I hate everything about politics so that is definitely out of the question. That leaves me with technology, a field I’m passionate about, a field I spend a couple of hours reading about every day. So may be I should write about it?

The problem with technology writing, as I have noticed over the years, is that bulk of the time is spent dumbing it down for the common folk — people who don’t read TheVerge, Wired, Techcrunch, Engadget, NextBigWhat, Medianama, Quora or any of the sites I frequent. If you cut through that bullshit most of the information can be conveyed in 300 words; definitely not long form.

So with nothing to say and not enough to say I still stare at an open Medium tab and wonder when I’ll ever write something. Whenever that happens I’ll be a little relieved.