Member-only story
Is My Compulsion Filling Your Pockets?
How the “new rules” for getting paid on Medium are making me feel funny
I just finished writing a short story for The Weekly Knob. I followed their weekly prompt. This week the prompt was Meat Hook. OK, not my favorite but I’ve made a commitment to follow their prompts faithfully each week. This week’s story is not my best work, but at least I can say I finished and sent it over.
So, that sounds a little bit compulsive.
As I wrote the Meat Hook story I considered the new guidelines for getting paid here on Medium. Instead of the old “fan claps” based method, payment is now based on reading time.
Normally, I go long in my writing. A ten minute read time is a fair average for one of my pieces. Writing using the Meat Hook prompt though, my story times out at four minutes. This newfound brevity will hardly be a good measure of how the changed metrics will affect my paycheck. I guess I could have added some fluff and come out with more words but somehow my writing is self-limiting.
And I’m not a padder.
The amount of words it takes to tell the story is the amount of words it takes to tell the story. When I go long, well, that’s just how it is.
Conversely, I refuse to be a school kid wrestling with an essay and adding superfluous…
