6 Steps to Write Better Medium Stories
Why starting from the title and finishing with the title is a good strategy to create better articles
As part of my job I’ve launched a company’s tech blog and helped my fellow engineers to understand the quality and value of their creations by writing articles about them. One of the things I’ve learned from that experience is that I had to define a process and an article structure that would help inexperienced writers to create a great article. I’m an avid medium reader and I came across the following article by Robert Turner and I liked it, it’s full of pragmatic instructions to help you write content that has the potential to become popular.
Robert’s article is great but there is one part I am not comfortable with, I think it could be misunderstood by inexperienced writers, so I’d like to share the process I’ve used to help people write good articles, hoping it will help you too.
Mastery in the writing craft matters
I think Robert’s advice comes from the experience of relating to writers that are somewhat experienced in writing articles, but this advice can be dangerous in my opinion if adopted as it is by an inexperienced writer.
One common mistake people that are inexperienced with a new craft (applies to any craft) do is to perform too many unnecessary actions. You can easily spot a “master” by how comfortable he is working and doing exactly what he needs to do without doing nothing more. Inexperienced writers will write by following their mindflow and not being able to refactor it in a way the helps the reader. Inexperienced writers will put too much “fat” to the article, too many things that don’t improve the readability nor the message.
An experienced writer knows when he’s digressing and he knows whether the digression is instrumental to the reading flow of the article: he’s not digressing because he wants to say those things, he’s digressing because the reader needs to read those things.
Robert’s “Step 4. Story First, Title Later” is the one I’d like to comment on; the paragraph states:
Write your story first, always. If you think of a cracking title along the way, jot it down somewhere. Sometimes a really catchy title comes to mind and you’ll be tempted to use that. Don’t.
Titles will dictate your story, even if you don’t realize it, and that doesn’t make for good, easy flowing writing and easily read pieces. Let the story dictate the title. Not the other way around
I would suggest using this flow only for writers that know how to manage the flow of writing, that are able to stay focused on their message. The most common mistake for inexperienced writers is to digress and to add to not stick to the objective/topic of the article.
Over time I’ve developed a different approach that I’ve used to help colleagues (inexperienced writers) to write articles with success (over 5000 views each on medium).
Try this simple process
My suggestion is to use a slightly different process to write an article and reduce the risk of making it too long or, worse, less focused on the topic at hand:
- Before writing a single line, define why the reader should be interested in reading your article: define clearly the benefit you are giving the reader. This is the hardest thing to do and it will require some time to be mastered.
- Draft a title that illustrates the benefit, it doesn’t matter if it’s a good title or not, write it down as precisely as possible, the objective is to state to yourself what you want to say.
- Write your article and, for every paragraph you write, check if what you are writing is essential to achieve the objective you put in the title. The challenge here is to be able to put yourself in the reader’s shoes: it has to be essential to the reader, not to you.
- Tune article length. I found out that 5–7 minutes is a sweet spot for the vast majority of articles, longer ones make it difficult to keep the reader engaged, shorter ones are just too quick to say something meaningful and let it stick. It is quite normal to have a 1st draft that is 3 or 9 minutes long… well, now it’s time to re-read it and find what you can add or remove.
- Write conclusions: write a summary of the message for the reader, a call-to-action. Find your own way to let the reader see you delivered the message you had on the title.
- Tune the title as the last thing. There are many articles on medium alone about how to write a good title, read a bunch of them and try the proposed methodologies (I like Shaunta Grimes article about titles).
This process I’m suggesting forces you to follow the “Golden Circle” strategy, having you to start from WHY to increase the engagement of the reader.
Spend time on the title
I usually spend about 30% of the total time on the article alone. The title is the first thing of your content that is exposed to everyone. It’s the most important piece and must be able to catch the attention of a casual reader and let him understand what he will find if he reads the article. When your article is fully developed you can take the drafted title and focus on finding the perfect title that fits your content in the most effective way.
you have no second chance to make a good first impression
You can easily find many articles about the subject in publications like The Writing Cooperative.
The bottom line is that creating “the right” title usually requires several iterations, it is a work of balancing different choices, testing how many similar or identical titles are already there, how to find the best way to catch the audience… so yes, Title should, in my opinion, be fine-tuned as the last thing of the article, but it has to be defined as first thing in the article because it’s the closest thing you might have to the article’s objective.
If you lose the chance to state the article’s objective by writing the title, you will have a hard time identifying whether what you will be writing should be part of the article or not.
How I decided this title
I started from the inspiration I got by reading Robert’s article. The title I wrote on the post before writing the post was:
“Story first, title later” is bad advice
After writing this, I concentrated on writing the story. I finished it (except for this paragraph of course), then I went back to work on the title again.
I knew I didn’t want to focus on the critics regarding the article so I’ve tried to rephrase the title to explain part of the reason for the critic, at the same time it gives a clear target for the reader, it’s for inexperienced writers.
Why “Story first, title later” is bad advice for inexperienced writers
After one day (I always find useful to let the article “mature” during the night). In this case, I’ve realized that the first part of the title was not really useful to the reader and that it could be possible to express the objective in a positive way “write what you can do, not what you should not do”.
how to write a good article if you are an inexperienced writer
not too “catchy”… I’ve worked on it and got:
How to write a great article (even if you are a beginner)
please note it’s the same structure as Shaunta’s one. After a few days I’ve changed my mind about focusing the title to “beginners”, this would limit the appeal of the post to other people, so I’ve changed it to:
6 Steps to Write Better Medium Stories
Try this process and let me know how you find it. So far the people that tried using this have all improved both the time it took to write articles and the overall quality of the article itself.
