Don’t respond, reply, or comment to articles or stories—hold it and do this instead
I’m going to tell you something contra intuitive.
You might have experienced the need to write a comment or reply to an article that had resonated to you in some way.
Here on Medium, in a blog, or a social network.
Maybe you liked the content a lot, you might identify with part of it, or on the contrary, you strongly didn’t agree with the author or had an alternate line of thought.
However, in those moments, an emotion is pulsating inside you and is driving you to comment or reply.
Unless you only want to clap, favorite, like, or drop a couple of words, I’m going to give you a polemic suggestion: don’t do it.
Feel the emotion, keep it, gather the impulse and drive that is generating, and write something yourself.
Go for a paragraph or two. Get into the flow and write five or six paragraphs.
Voilà! You have produced a new content. Your own content.
Just after you wrote those paragraphs, you can leave a little comment, reply, or response to the article that inspire you. Socialization and networking are important too.
But for your own content, now you can check it, rewrite it, and publish it wherever you want.
This is one of the best ways to take advantage of all the energy that we generate when reading things that we like or that engage us.
Commenting is good, of course, but when I see a long answer to an article, I always think that it could be used for another piece under the name of the commentor.
Instead of replying, responding, or commenting, use your ideas as inspiration for your next story.
