I Failed My English Exam But Still Became A Top Writer

If you fail, get up and try again

When I was in school we had to study both English Language and English Literature. I didn’t particularly like either of them. The teachers weren’t great and the books we had to study were badly chosen. But I still became a top writer later in life.

For the final English Literature exam, I was given a “U” for unclassified. That means that I was below the standard for the lowest grade. This was mainly because I really hated the subject and hated the books we were given to read. If you force children to read books that they don’t have an interest in, it can never end well.

I felt that we weren’t encouraged to learn English Literature, but were just forced to follow whatever the teachers and education authority wanted us to read.

In my English Language exam, I managed to get a grade “C”. That is a pass, but only average. My English teacher constantly told me I was average at best. She never offered any encouragement, but just criticized all the time. My two English teachers failed me.

The above experience didn’t give me much confidence when it came to writing. I always felt that I wasn’t good enough, so rarely put in any effort.

It was only later in life when I started traveling that I also started writing. I wanted to document my travels, so I started a travel blog. That meant I needed to write, which I did. The travel blog ended up making me around $60,000.

That was my first success as a writer, but at the time I saw it mainly as making money from traveling not writing.

But writing 300–400 blog posts encouraged me to write a few books for Kindle. I ended up writing 8 Kindle books over 2 years.

Even then I didn’t think of myself as a real writer. It may sound a bit odd that someone that wrote 8 books didn’t think of themselves as a writer, but that was how I felt.

Fast forward to the end of October and I decided to give Medium a go. I was more than pleasantly surprised to find that I actually enjoyed writing more than I ever had. I put this down to me being able to write about topics that interested me. This is in complete contrast to my school days when we were forced to write about topics that I had zero interest in.

Surely children would learn more if they were at least sometimes given a free hand in what to write about.

I ended up earning $92.88 in November. This is when I started to see myself as a writer.

Then in December, I was very surprised to be given an award for Top Writer in writing. Of all the topics I could have been given the award it, it was even more surprising that it was for writing.

It’s now nearly the end of December and my earnings for the month are already over $400. That makes me one of the top-earning writers on this platform.

My main takeaway from this is that we should never give up. Just because we fail at something doesn’t mean we can’t improve and o on to gain some success. I’ve proven that it’s possible. I’ve gone from failing one of my English exams to becoming a top writer and top earner in writing.

If I can do it, anyone can.