Let’s celebrate (Finish Your) Draft Day!
On April 25th: Pick an unpublished draft, polish it up, and hit publish.
What is (Finish Your) Draft Day?
We’re declaring a new holiday: Mark your calendars for April 25, it’s (Finish Your) Draft Day!
If you’re anything like me, your Medium draft folder is full of half-finished drafts, random ideas, clever titles for story ideas that you never got around to writing (as of this writing, I have 75 unpublished drafts in there). If so, listen up, because we have created a holiday JUST FOR YOU.
Let’s encourage writers to liberate their highest-quality drafts by finally punching that “publish” button.
Publishing can be scary, and hard. So we want to normalize the act of publishing the imperfect, the incomplete, the not-totally-polished. Making it a holiday gives us all the same excuse to just publish.
What do I do?
The idea is simple. On April 25th (which is coincidentally the first day of the NFL Draft in the US, though our lawyers have asked us to stress that we are in no way affiliated):
- Find a draft in your Drafts folder on Medium: https://medium.com/me/stories/drafts
- Polish it up. If you need the space and inspiration to work on it, join us for Writing Hour on Thursdays over the next few weeks.
- Publish it. Use the tag “Draft Day 2024” when you post, and/or drop in this template at the end: “I started this draft on [date] and finally got around to finishing it thanks to Medium’s Draft Day. More here: MediumDraftDay.com”
- Encourage other writers to do the same!
Then what?
Throughout the day, we’ll highlight published drafts on our social media channels, in Staff Picks, give them a Boost, or link to them in future newsletters. But that’s just the icing on the cake. The main thing is: Just publish!
