Medium: A Great Teaching Tool for Aspiring Urban Writers
By: Rj Carr
Tags: Creativity, Urban, Writing Life, Creative Writing, Mentorship

Photo by Brad Neathery on Unsplash

Prior to the lockdown and maybe it is still going on, you could walk through Times Square and there would be some African American guys offering you their music CD free. Once you took it they would ask for a donation.

These men have a dream. They create their music somewhere to pursue it. Maybe they rented a studio or they used their own basement. In either case, they took the time to compose, practice, record, cut a CD (no label usually) now they want you to listen to it.

I did not get to New York often and obviously now I don’t go, but the message of the incident is real. There is creativity and real desire to share talent in the urban neighborhoods including New York.

My last time in New York last year, I was preparing to start a program on radio and I was looking for bumper music. I could even showcase the CD, however, there was nothing marketable on it. It was rap, hip hop which is fine, but it was inspired by the gangsta rap roots and filled with misogony and more. I just could not use it. All was not lost, I did give them twenty dollars for it before listening to it.

Free speech vs marketability

These artists needed to understand the difference between free speech and marketability. Their music was not marketable in any forum except as they were doing — asking for a donation sight unseen. They need mentors to help them how to form their talent and use it in ways to express their thoughts, feelings and ideas. They need to know how to focus on their audience to move them in ways they cannot learn in normal venues.

Granted they have their public school they attend but do public schools really know how to help urban youth find expression in their art? This is an even greater issue when they want to innovate. Students have to pay attention to a full curriculum that does not always lend itself to innovative creativity Schools focus on the path to college.

Medium — a forum to develop writers

Medium is the perfect forum with the proper mentors to help urban youth, especially those of color, to learn to express their creativity at least in poetry and prose. It also enables future writers to share their work with others well established and new. They can develop the craft while tapping into their unique words coming out of their souls. It is a perfect venue to really build these urban writers’ talents and confidence in all forms of expression including poetry, lyrics, story and journalism.

Venues like Medium become the roots of new forms of art in the world just as the urban youth brought forth rap and hip hop. These genres began on the street outside of the school environment and Medium can develop the same for aspiring wordsmiths. School can assist in some aspects of talent development but not as much as the Medium community.

School teaches through classwork and homework. The student writer learns to compose creatively by following established rules in their curriculum. Medium helps the aspiring writer build upon those basic skills and explore their passion and dreams. If the focus is forming the voices to match current trends or standards of writing that is important but can limit the creativity of the student. Those lessons lay down the foundation but new writers need to learn how to build upon it as their creativity leads them.

If they go off on a tangent they need to defend their decision but not short change it. They need to learn how to be fully formed in their respective creativity so they can explore it without the walls of convention. This is why forums such as Medium can really help the urban artist to create and explore outside the convention of standard curricula.

The potential for the aspiring urban student writer on Medium is huge. The more people realize they can create and they focus on developing their creativity first they more they can grow as artists.

No one wants to create starving artists but we do not want the youth to feel their effort is all about a door to riches. Writers get excited to see developing artistic talent. I am sure most if not all of us want to allow the world to read these urban writers who otherwise would be lost. Medium is perfect for developing these talents. Many describe Medium as YouTube for writers. That visual venue opened the door to a dynamic that previous structures stifled.

Medium and YouTube

One of the greatest rules I learned on Medium is Ray Bradberry’s philosophy that if you write a short story a week then after one year you have fifty two short stories. It is impossible to write fifty two bad short stories.

Medium is the place where great things can happen and it can become a place for people to really build upon the Black Lives Matter mantra.

Going back to YouTube gives us a good model however: A lot of urban and ethnic voices do well on YouTube. These voices would never be allowed on the limited airwaves on television during its Golden Age. Remember, the Doors were never again allowed on the Ed Sullivan show because Jim Morrison sang “higher” during Light My Fire.

Read about other incidents such things as the first inter-racial kiss. The first interracial hand holding. These were boundary breaking events but why? Who put up the boundary? Medium does not have much of a boundary. That same dynamic on YouTube allowed some of the great creative minds of color to do powerful things in the visual media. Medium can do the same for the aspiring urban writer. There are comedians of color on YouTube as funny as some of the great comic artists of the early days of television: Carl Reiner, Mel Brooks, Buck Henry. If they only had TV as an outlet would they have made it? Now take that same model and apply it to publishing.

Last year, I was on the Blue Note Jazz Cruise. One of the artists on board explained to the audience that he had a full scholarship to Berkeley College here in Boston. He gave it up to just play with the greats in New York Jazz venues. Now he is one of the greats. This is what Medium can do for the aspiring urban writer.

Medium can do so much for the urban youth. Let celebrate that plank on the platform.