Reading Carol Burt's piece, Liars on Medium was the instigator for what follows.

I am always amused when I receive an email to say that 3¢ or 4¢ or once, even 6¢ has been deposited to my Stripe account - which I didn't even know I had.

Much as I'd love to earn something from my writing, it is not why I publish it here. I do so, I think, because I've always loved reading and always wanted to write but never had the confidence or understanding of how to go about it.

I've been told that to be a writer, all I have to do is write. Whilst I accept that perhaps technically that may be true, it actually ignores what I mean by the term, as I suspect most others here would understand.

I was first published when I was around 12 years old, if I remember correctly. It was in the form of what used to be one of the few opportunities for 'ordinary' folk to air their views before the digital and online age came about - a Letter to the editor, in this instance being to a motor sport newpaper published in England: Motoring news.

The letter was a comment on a Formula 1 duel between Jim Clark, in a Lotus and Graham Hill, in a BRM. I was an avid enthusiast for motor racing and keen supporter of Jaguar in sports car racing, BRM in Formula 1. It would have been around 1960 and my letter was a brief, motion filled summary of the final sparring to the finish line, which Graham Hill crossed just marginally ahead of Jim Clark after a heroic chase from well behind.

I was so self conscious that, on that occasion I used a pseudonym of 'Alfred R Hawcroft' rather than just my real name of R Hawcroft. Also, I was using that pseudonym constantly in day to day life because I hated the jibes that my real forename attracted among my slum area peer group, (where it was considered 'toffee nosed' and provoked the upside-down snobbery of the working-class that can still exist today).

The result was that when, with excitement and pride, I showed it to my mother, she rebuffed me saying that the letter was from someone else and I shouldn't pretend it was mine. Such was the encouragement I received from my parents but that's another, (perhaps self-pitying story).

I continued writing to newspapers well into their adoption of digital versions but that activity has now largely been replaced with contributions to what has largely replaced the moderated & selective Letters columns with generally free-for-all Comments - A very different and in my experience, usually very ordinary and even simplistic collection of often barely literate and ill thought out and sadly, not unusually very biased or even abusive, criticisms.

I received my first payment for writing - £2 - from a tiny poetry magazine for a simple, brief, not very good and somewhat self-conscious piece of verse. I framed it and put it on my wall but, sadly, have now lost it.

That $2 and the accumulation of ¢ that haven't yet amounted to it, compose the sum total of my earnings from writing in the intervening 60 or so years!

I guess that I might legitimately claim to be a paid author by now.

So, what is the point of writing all this? Well, if you have kindly donated enough of your time and interest to get this far, you will at least understand why I haven't attracted payment for my words. The answer, I think, is that I agree with Carol's irritation but for a slightly different reason.

In my case, the irritation, though that's perhaps too severe a name for it, stems not so much from the validity or otherwise of what the advisers have to say about how to 'succeed' on Medium.

My discomfort or displeasure is with what now seems to be a ubiquitous belief that 'success' is measured and indicated in material terms and that motivation to give time, effort, energy, even money, to any substantial engagement must be a result of that desire for acquisition.

I write because I love to right. I write to defend others against trolls and abusers. I write to correct clear misinformation and disinformation. I write to practice and improve my writing.

Yes, I would love to have earned my living by writing and to be acknowledged as a writer or worth - as someone respected by many and a thorn in the side to some. With hindsight, I regret that I didn't and haven't done more to achieve that and instead became an educator.

I think my writing can be passable. I am too close & unskilled to feel that I can assess it in a really valid critical way. None of these motivations, reasons or rationales for my endeavour really matter in the face of what is fundamental for me - I write for catharsis - I write because I am.