Does Being a Top Writer Have Anything To Do With Curation?
Reviewing some recent evidence
There are numerous articles out there discussing the steps and tricks to writing your way up to Medium’s “Top Writer” status. Writers proudly display their Top Writer status, including the number of times they’ve been a Top Writer in various topics right in their bios.
But, what does it take?
The best answer is that we don’t know. I always thought that to be a Top Writer, you’d need to have a number of pieces curated under a specific topic. This makes the most intuitive sense. I interpreted “Top Writer” to be short form for “Top Writer Being Curated and Acknowledged for Writing About X Topic”.
But is it true?
My Food Articles Taught Me That Curation Is Not Needed For Top Writer Status
Let’s review the articles that made be a top writer in Food. When you reach Top Writer status, you get an email that looks something like this.
They also give you a sense of which articles made an impact towards this Top Writer status. These are the three articles that Medium provided me.
This short haiku about nachos went a tiny bit viral, in that many people loved the prompt and hopped right on to craft their own cheesy pieces. It did not get curated under Food. It did not get curated at all, at any point of this poem’s existence.
This piece is 50% food (cheese) and 50% about allergens, published in Michael Burg, MD (AKA Medium Michael Burg)’s Doctor Funny. It is comprised of three limericks about my terrible allergies to flower reproduction and dairy products.
Though this piece itself didn’t go viral, Michael’s challenge did, perhaps drawing interest backwards to this piece from readers thirsty for more limerick juice. It did not get curated under Food. It did not get curated at all, at any point of this limerick’s existence.
The final poem the email cites is this haiku about tourtières, a Quebecois meat pie that describes my elementary graduation trip to Montreal.
This one didn’t even go viral. It simply fed readers the way a good, boring-looking but meaty pie does: satisfying but providing a food coma that makes you want to sleep for a million years. It did not get curated under Food. It did not get curated at all, at any point of this pie-oem’s (get it??? a pie… poem??? no? that’s okay, please carry on) existence.
Hmmm, let’s bring out a magnifying glass here, what seems to be the pattern?
My pieces did not get curated under Poetry. They did not get curated at all.
Yet they were integral in helping me achieve Top Writer status. It really helps us debunk and question whether generic advice of striving towards curation is the main way to reach Top Writer status.
When we look at all of these pieces, virality is what unifies some of them. More specifically, readers were quite engaged with topics such as nachos, allergies and pies. All of these pieces, viral or not, had a number of responses.
Perhaps that engagement is the key to Top Writer status?
I can’t be sure, with such a small sample size, of whether this metric of engagement is really answer. But what I can firmly reject as a hypothesis is that curation does not directly lead you to Top Writer status.
And that’s something to remember when it comes to evaluating advice pieces that seem to link the two. They might be correlated, but may not be only way to achieve this.
My Poetry Top Writer Status Shows A Mixture Of Reasons
Achieving top writer status in poetry is even more of a mystery. The usual tactics of achieving curation status are yet different and elusive for poetry. Here were the top three pieces that Medium’s email shared were related to this top status.
The first piece isn’t a poem; it’s rather a piece about poetry. I’ve noticed a higher curation rate for pieces about poetry rather than directly being a poem, and that’s sometimes confusing to me.
Part of my hypothesis is that curation involves a process that is bot-run, and this bot scouts for longer pieces. This idea is supported by the fact that my poetry collections (e.g., set of 5+ poems) do better than single poetry. Poems with long decode or explanations are also more likely to be curated.
This article is curated, if it helps reassure you that curation does have some relation to contributing to Top Writer status. It wasn’t all a lie, after all. Just not the entire truth.
Look familiar to you? This piece was also a contributing factor to me becoming both a Top Writer in both Food and Poetry. It’s truly amazing how one small cheesy crispy snack can have so much power. As mentioned above, it is not curated.
Finally, a poem dedicated to my deceased orchid, that highlights how truly terrible I am as a plant momma somehow made me a Top Writer in poetry. It was not curated. There are a lot of comments though.
And by “a lot”, throughout this article, the magical number seems to be seven. At least seven people loved nachos, allergies, and my terrible plant skills that this made me a Top Writer.
I love that. I love what I learned from this all. I’m so grateful that this wild, unpredictable trait of me being chaotic in the world and just loving food all together has made me a Top Writer.
I’m grateful for the productivity writers who compile listicles for ultimate productivity hacks. I’m grateful for investigative writers who do an incredible amount of research to contribute to their articles. One some days, I can be either of these writers, but I am not this kind of writer on a sustained basis.
So most of all, I’m grateful that readers like you made space for me to contain weirdness. To tell my stories of the little things that bring me joy simply because they made my life absurd.
When I first started reading on Medium, Roz Warren’s humor pieces really changed my day. I regularly queued her articles in between more serious ones because I can’t read 900 articles in a row about Bad News and still want to get up in the morning.
I’m not organically funny like Roz, but I live an incredibly absurd life that continually brings me a mundane version of the Series of Unfortunate Events. And I’m glad that the snippets of that life that I translate and squeeze into poetry and food metaphors have brought joy and validation to everyone.
Prompt Reflection: If you’re a Top Writer in specific categories on Medium, what are they? What do you think makes your work shine on this platform?
If you’re on your journey to Top Writer status, what do you think makes your work shine currently? What do people comment on the most? What would you like to bring to the forefront more?
Hi I’m Lucy Dan 蛋小姐 (she/her/她) and my next writing goal is to think about different short-term projects. I’ve developed a theme of food and poetry and food poetry (woot!) but I’d love to explore other things I love in series form. Could I open up a whole series on wax seals? Or podcasts?
Hop down the rabbit hole? 🐰🕳
^ by Stuart Englander