My Experience on Vocal

Celebrate good times, come on! 🎶

Today marks a special little milestone: I’ve officially been on Vocal for one whole month! In this piece, I want to take a moment to reflect on my experience so far, including all the lovely people and creativity that I found along the way.

What brought me to Vocal?

It’s actually a super sweet story.

I’m originally from Hungary and had never even heard of Vocal until Christmas 2024, when my best friend’s fiancé won first place in the Holiday Reflections Challenge. They both posted about this win on Instagram, and naturally, I was curious.

Being someone who’s always loved writing, I was instantly intrigued. I devoured his story, trying to soak in all the things that made it have a uniquely magical, musing atmosphere, earning the well-deserved 1st place. As I read, I found myself imagining what I would’ve written for the same challenge, wondering how my words might’ve been received.

Of course, I immediately switched tabs to sign up. But I ended up hitting the $50 Vocal+ wall. And listen… after three tough years of financial struggle, even though I was finally getting back on my feet, the idea of spending money—purely on myself—was scary. So, I paused.

I never finished signing up.

Fast forward four months to April: I had an issue with a study platform that refused to provide accurate captioning for its videos. As per the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), I was protected against discrimination, despite the company's lazy attitude towards making their course accessible. Through an email battle, I was fully refunded, while still having access to the course.

Cue the classic Girl Math logic: I’d already “spent” that money, so technically, getting it back meant it was free to use elsewhere, right? Suddenly, the Vocal+ subscription didn’t feel so indulgent after all.

And just like that, on April 24, 2025, my Vocal journey officially began.

What was my experience with challenges?

Another big reason I joined so quickly was because I consider myself a jack of all trades. I’m not only a writer but also a musician.

While I play the piano decently and can muster up to six chords on the guitar, my true instrument is my voice. I have loved singing my entire life. So it follows that I have an artist account on all streaming platforms, having signed with a label for my first single, Option B, and produced two indie songs, On the Road to Recovery and Shy Guy on my own.

The incredible coincidence was that Vocal happened to be hosting its Harmonic Verses Challenge. We were asked to write lyrics and were awarded bonus points for singing our songs. Naturally, I had a drawer full of them: old lyrics, forgotten demos, half-scribbled hooks. Many of them were never finished, abandoned due to depression and burnout.

Ultimately, the song chosen as a Runner-Up was one of these unreleased, from-the-vault tracks. Thank you, Vocal, for inspiring me to finish producing my music!

My submissions included Option B and On the Road to Recovery from my released songs and Missouri, Grave, and Grew from the unreleased. I am most proud of Grave, because of its morbid, liberated, and determined nature as it describes letting go after a breakup.

My winning submission was with Grew. Although I wasn’t aware how Vocal judged submissions at the time, I’m truly honored to have placed with this poetic rewrite of my original song. This win lit something up in me. I’ve been writing with more energy and intention ever since.

The other official challenge, Tomorrow's Utopia didn't inspire me quite as much. While I love a good dystopian story, I always felt that Utopias were impossible to write, as perfection does not exist in our reality.

Wanting to meet the prompt, knowing now how Vocal judges entries, I built a very vast and fleshed out world as a satirical commentary for the horrors that have continued to deteriorate in the USA.

I am very proud of this work, and would love to flesh it out in the future for a book series.

As an avid YA reader, I thought Suzanne Collins would be pleased.

To my surprise (and frustration), the story was initially rejected for having too many affiliate links. It was a real punch to the gut after seven days of building that world. I ended up moving the links to the comments and resubmitting, but I’m still unsure how to navigate that kind of filtering going forward.

Onto my next story, the inspiration came from a more personal place.

I was walking through the... shall we say, unpredictable architectural sidewalks of Bangalore, India, when a new idea for the challenge popped into my head.

This walk through the city felt like a video game. Random holes, uneven elevations, and complete chaos made walking in a straight line impossible. As I clumsily navigated the testing road, I thought: what if these sidewalks were actually built to be fun? Like jungle gyms. Maybe my ADHD brain would finally stay alert enough to avoid tripping.

Recalling my parents, I knew they would complain about such sidewalks, whether they were my imagined or real-life Bangalore versions, since they wouldn’t find them entertaining at all. That made me reflect on how our world is built to fit certain types of people while ignoring others.

And that's how my story, Neurodivergent Utopia, was born, following a normal girl who feels perpetually unhappy in a peculiar world that wasn’t made for her. It became my second Runner Up story, and I'm very grateful that it resonated so much with people.

I have worked on several submissions for the Tattoo this Line Challenge, including Henna Tattoo, Three Heartbeats, Glass Tears of Memory, and Poison Vulture, but the one I am most proud of is Flowering Eyes.

A Latin word decorates my first line. The word florescere means “to begin blossoming.” I mean… how cool is that?

How are my stats and earnings?

Honestly, I couldn’t be happier!

When I joined, I had zero expectations. I just wanted to try something new. I never imagined that one month later, I’d have nearly 20 published stories (some for official challenges, others for community ones), totaling over 13,000 words (and that’s before this story!) Many of my stories receive between 5 to 10 comments each, which have all been incredibly encouraging, motivating... with a sprinkle of a few bad apples commenting “subscribe me” in there.

I’m sharing this not to brag, but to show that small wins add up. And because when I first joined, I went on a little research expedition throughout Google about our platform.

I came across so many articles on Medium warning writers away from Vocal, saying it was a waste of time or didn’t value its creators. And while Vocal certainly has room to grow, I’ve yet to see some success stories about it outside of our community, and that’s a shame. Especially considering how Google often doesn’t favor Vocal stories, no matter how hard you flex your SEO muscles.

I plan to write about my experience on Medium too, even though I have no traction there yet. Who knows? Maybe someone else will feel encouraged to take the leap, too.

As for reads and subscribers, I’m happy to say that I'm inching closer to covering my Vocal+ cost, which feels like a victory in itself. I can’t wait to see what’s next!

What can I say, except... THANK YOU?

(What a totally outdated and lame reference to Moana, Dalma!)

More than anything, I just want to say thank you.

I've met so many wonderful, courteous, and out of this world creative writers, all of whom took time out of their day to support me and include me in this community. Please know that every word you write under my stories are not only read once, but read often, especially in moments where I feel like a total imposter; someone who only pretends they're a good writer and gets away with it. Your kindness and feedback keeps me going strong. I'm looking forward to supporting you back fiercely, and being your greatest cheerleader in your future writing endeavors.

May the most enormous wave of my thanks wash over your overworked, typing fingers!

And last but not least, here’s my shout-it-from-the-rooftops big thank you to Vocal! Genuinely, from the bottom of my heart, I’m so grateful to you for reigniting the passion I forgot I had for writing.

I have around 60,000 words hidden away on my laptop. All those stories were abandoned between chapters 3-6, leaving me to feel completely uninspired and unoriginal as I anxiously made my thousandth rewrite. And being on here changed me.

My experience on Vocal taught me that some stories are perfect when they are written. Having a time and word limit to my stories allowed me to do what a struggle with the most: finish them. Although I still edit vigorously, I now do it with direction, and with a desire for quality, rather than perfection.

As for those aforementioned 60,000 words—while those stories are still hidden, everything I wrote in the past month has gotten genuine engagement, and I don't mean the social media kind. I mean the one where someone sits down, reads, feels, and thinks about a given text. That is, in its most pure sense, a dream come true for an unknown writer like me.

Thank you for making me feel like my words matter, that they’re worth writing, and that there can be a future waiting in the uniqueness of what I have to say.

See you at the next milestone 🌵(this is a little cactus waving to you)

PS: My questions for Experienced Vocal Writers (aka celebrities)

1. In your perspective, what are things that make up a Top Story? How has your experience been with them?
2. What is going on with the Vocal app? That is one boiling hot mess, and I feel like I missed some serious tea there!
3. What are the greatest changes you noticed in Vocal since you signed up? What's something you prefer? What's something you miss?
4. If you could have one wish to make Vocal a better platform, what would you like to see?