Hi, and thank you as always for reading my work!

I’ve started a small companion newsletter for my writing here on Medium.

Before an essay becomes an essay, it usually begins with a question.
I’ve made a small place for those questions.

One minute there. Ten minutes here.

Substack: One Minute Before the Essay

Author’s note — First written in Japanese, then brought into English with AI. A full making record appears at the end.

This is about a book I read last night. And about this place: Medium. The book, by the Japanese ornithologist Kazuto Kawakami, is about islands and evolution, and in it I came across a fascinating story about seabirds. (I’m writing this now, before the image slips away.)

A newborn volcanic island has almost nothing on it. The soil is thin, the plants are few, and naturally, only a handful of creatures can live there.

How many living things can an environment sustain with the resources it holds? Ecologists call that limit its carrying capacity. On a newborn volcanic island, the carrying capacity for life on land is still tiny. It is an island close to barren.

And yet seabirds come even to an island like that, and stay for a while.

They have one great advantage over every other creature on the island.

They can live there even when the island has no food.

A seabird flies out to sea, feeds there, and comes back to the island. Even if the island itself is barren, the seabird can make a life on it.

What keeps them alive is in the sea. And because they go out to sea again and again, a little of the sea gets carried back onto the island.

Droppings from digested fish, carcasses, driftwood for nests, and the seeds and tiny insects clinging to it. Seabirds import resources from another ecosystem into an island that cannot yet produce enough on its own. (Even if they never mean to.)

And as all this piles up, the island’s environment itself begins to change.

Droppings, carcasses, and rotting wood slowly become soil that holds nutrients and water, and in that soil, a seed can sprout. As places where plants can grow increase, creatures that use those plants can live there. And because those creatures exist, still other creatures can live there too.

A seabird doesn’t just add one bird’s worth of life to the island. It makes the first opening for life that could not have existed there before.

As I read that passage, I thought of Medium’s publications.

An island with zero followers

Imagine starting to write on a brand-new account.

Zero followers.

Of course, you can write. You can publish. But no one is waiting for what you write.

If you publish a story and almost no one reads it, little grows out of it.

No responses. Not enough data to tell where people kept reading and where they left. No one wandering back to your earlier stories.

And when you publish the next one, no one is waiting for that one either.

This isn’t about whether you can write. It’s that there’s no cycle around the writing yet.

The story itself exists, of course.

But the learning, the warmth, the energy that would keep the next story alive and carry you on to the one after — almost none of it is there. It’s a little like a barren island.

Flying out to sea yourself

Medium has something called publications: small, edited outlets that gather stories from many writers.

On Medium, a writer can bring their own story to a publication.

“This might fit UX Collective.”

“Maybe this one belongs in Philosophy Today.”

“I’d like to place this one in Found Worlds.”

Once you’ve thought that, you can submit the story yourself (though some publications ask you to be added as a writer first).

An editor reads it. If it doesn’t fit, they decline. If it does, they publish it.

For a writer with zero followers — a barren island — this matters a great deal.

Because even when your own island has no readers yet, you can send a seabird out, on your own, to a sea where readers are. And it is a rich sea, sustained by the human curation of editors.

A story published in one of those publications is, in a sense, a seabird.

What comes back from the sea

A story that flies out to a publication comes back with readers. Not all of them, of course.

Many will read that one story in the publication and move on. But a few of them will follow the writer.

They read another story. Leave a response. Highlight a line. Share it on social media.

Or an editor at a different publication comes across the story.

In this way, a story brings back to the island more than a count of reads.

Responses. Stats. Followers. Returning readers. Recognition from editors.

And above all,

someone who might be waiting for your next story.

Here begins a change much like the one a single seabird sets off. It isn’t just that one story got read.

Because of that one story, the next one has an easier time staying alive.
In this metaphor, then, a single story is a life in its own right.

What the seabird’s work brings to the once-barren island — new carrying capacity, and new life moving in — is, here, the presence of readers. They are here. They read, they react, they quietly leave data behind.
All of that helps the next life — the next story — come into being.

Other species can live here

Readers who arrive through a publication don’t only keep the same kind of story alive. Just as nutrients carried by one species of seabird let creatures that are not seabirds live on the island, readers gained through one story can create carrying capacity for an entirely different kind of story.

Because someone who followed the writer after reading one story didn’t necessarily do so just for that topic.

The writer’s sense of beauty, way of seeing, voice, values living in that story…
They began waiting for the next story because some single thing in it overlapped with something in them.

If so, maybe the next story doesn’t have to go through a publication at all. A small flash of insight, an image you can’t yet put into words, an experimental format. On a barren island, stories like these would have gone unseen. But in a place that has gained some carrying capacity, there is a chance that someone there will see it — and like it.

At some point, the island starts to move

The barren island probably isn’t unique to writing platforms like Medium. X, Instagram, YouTube, Bluesky — they likely all have a similar cold start. In fact, my accounts on those platforms are still mostly barren islands.

On Medium, though, my island has been lucky. Helped by the seabird system, and slowly meeting kind editors and inspiring readers, it seems to be growing less barren.

Of course, nothing changes dramatically the moment you gain one follower. Ten, or even a hundred, won’t necessarily complete the cycle.

Still, I think there is a point somewhere where the cycle begins to run on its own. A certain number of people find a new story; some of them respond, wander into older stories, recommend it to someone. And so the next story starts with a slightly larger first audience.

To lightly borrow the phrase Malcolm Gladwell made famous, it’s a small tipping point. Not a simple number like “500 followers,” but something born from the overlap of readers, return visits, browsing, and responses. When enough of these line up, the cycle slowly starts to turn on its own.

Where the cycle begins to run on its own can’t be seen from the outside. But how you can take that very first step differs a great deal from place to place.

What I find interesting about Medium’s publications comes down to two things.

The first is that you can send the seabird out yourself. On other platforms where I used to write, once I’d set the topics and tags and hit publish, all I could do was pray. “Please let that huge magazine pick this up!” Or: “Please let some passerby land here!” On Medium, you choose which sea to send your story to, and you send it off with your own hands.

The second is that a single story belongs to both the writer and the publication, and reaches the followers of both. If I had to choose whether a story went to my own followers or to a publication’s, I think it would feel a little cramped. A seabird is never just a commuter working the sea. It is also part of the island’s ecosystem. It may become food for someone there, or return to the soil where it lies.

A life on an island carries things, sprouts, and becomes soil for someone else. No single life fits into just one role.

In those two senses — initiative and multiplicity — Medium’s publications are, I think, seabird-like.

Perhaps the question this metaphor asks us to face is this:
Once one story has been read, what here — unread until now — begins to find readers?

—

To everyone who has landed on this island, and to the editors who protect the rich sea our seabirds can fly to: thank you.

References & further reading

For readers who want to follow the threads in this essay further.

On islands and seabirds
Kazuto Kawakami, Somosomo Shima ni Shinka Ari (Gijutsu-Hyoron-sha, 2016; Shinchosha paperback, 2023; in Japanese) — The book this essay began with. Its account of seabirds carrying the sea onto a newborn island is where the image of a story as a seabird came from.

On Medium as a place

Hiroshi Sato, “Somewhere I Can Afford to Write for No One” (Before the Words, Medium, 2026) — An earlier essay on how Medium’s site-wide subscription model may shape the mood of a platform, and in turn the kinds of writing that can live there. This essay picks up that question from another direction: not the climate of the island, but how life begins to circulate on it.

On tipping points
Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference (Little, Brown, 2000) — I borrow only the phrase. The point where a writer’s cycle begins to run on its own seems less a single number than an overlap of small conditions.

On finding a sea to fly to
Medium Staff, Medium’s Huge List of Publications Accepting Submissions

The seabird that makes the next story possible was originally published in Between Tides on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.