Editor’s Choice — Top 10: Why Intuition Alone Won’t Make Your Sentences Concise and Powerful

Let’s go through our top 10 stories today

Wouldn’t it be nice to intuitively get all the sentences, paragraphs, quotes, supporting materials, and takeaways as soon as you started writing? Oh, I forgot to add one thing: in a well-organized form.

Now that I say it out loud, it seems kinda funny.

Wouldn’t it be poetry if it came like that? But some prose is just like poetry. Flows rhythmically sentence after sentence. I wonder if anyone reads this poetically written prose.

When you get an idea, it is always an abstract feeling — it doesn’t come with words.

You feel you have a full story. But then you sit to write, and you cannot even start to write. No words surface for hours. You float in the intuitive state for some time, and then you snap out of it for some reason. Or you start writing.

Sometimes, I write for hours. It feels like intuition is blessing me with sentences as if I was a poet. But after I finish reading my miraculous piece, I am in for a surprise: ‘Not a single sentence is ready for publishing. I have to rewrite the whole piece. I have to reorganize, add notes, provide supporting material, and make the article — at least — less harrowing for the reader.’ Usually, these articles never see the light of the day.

Intuition alone is an awkward writing tool. Successful writers think we should be able to work intentionally — by reading and stealing ideas from the work of greats — if we want to become professional writers.

Writing does not mean typing characters on your laptop. I have seen articles that say that by learning to type fast, you can publish more articles. It is ridiculous advice. I can type at 75 words per minute — or I can write a 1000 word story in 13 minutes. At this rate, I should write my novel in 7 days. But I have not been able to complete my book for the last seven years.

Writing is hard work because you want to capture your abstract intuition with words, sentences, and paragraphs. Your story should communicate the idea powerfully to your readers.

A good 18-minute TED talk — delivered by a respectable author — takes 90 days to prepare. One writer on this platform spends 100 hours — 12 working days — on every story he writes. He maintains that these unbelievable 100-hour-pieces will earn him money for many years.

So if you find yourself grappling with your ideas for hours before you can start writing, don’t be discouraged. Writing is supposed to happen like that.

Most of us have brilliant insights at some time in our lives. But if we fail to convert them into an article, speech, video, or book, we lose our ability to become writers, creators, authors, philosophers, and teachers.

When your intuition gives you an idea, be thankful for it.

Your work as a writer now begins. It involves grappling with words, sentences, and paragraphs for hours before you can say that you successfully transferred your intuitive feeling to your readers.

Here is the list of our top 10 stories by writers who know working hard on your story is the only way to write:

10. Nature’s Gift for Arctic Mammals

ANIKET PANDEY says, ‘Discovering and exploring my life.…I love to learn about the Who What Why Where When & How of everything and anything.’

At first glance, the polar extremes of earth look completely inhospitable, but what should be an inhospitable place for mammals is instead full of them. The question is which forces drive them to survive there?

The last glacial period on earth began to fade around 11,000 years ago. The kilometers-thick ice-sheets that covered much of the earth started to recede, and the earth entered into the Holocene, the current geological epoch. But the once-mighty glaciers did not disappear entirely, and the extremes of our earth — the north and south poles — are the remnants of the last ice age.

9. The Incredible Mind And Life Of John Lilly

Clay Raymond is a lefty in politics and a believer of psychedelic spirituality.

He is a fine writer. His writing style is simple, direct, and engaging. Do check his other work.

John Lilly is a truly one of a kind character. On the one hand, he was a man with an accomplished career across multiple fields of science. He went on to be a uniquely committed researcher of, and personal experimenter with, psychedelic substances. He had a very unique approach to such explorations, having the idea that the human brain could be looked at as a programmable ‘biocomputer.’ He maintains cultural relevance to this day due to his invention of the flotation tank early in his career, in 1954.

8. Can Bananas Make You Float in Mid Air?

Tomer Noyhouzer, Ph.D. Serial Entrepreneur, Chemistry Ph.D., and Technology addict who is fascinated with the way people are making decisions and rationalizing their behavior.

Growing up in the ’80 one of my favourite TV shows was Star Trek, both original and next-generation since you asked. If you ever watched the show, movies or played the games, you might remember that antimatter powers the ships’ warp engines. It is fascinating, as Spock will say, that what many of us knew as a sci-fi explanation to justify the ability to wrap or fly at incredibly high speeds is something very real, it is so real that scientists knew about this since the early ’30s.

7. Oil Rig Spaceports

Samantha Falcucci is a technology professional and mentor in NYC. Training to be an analog astronaut. Space and ocean exploration enthusiast.

She is a fine writer. Her style is full of suspense, informative, and to the point. No nonsense here. She is new to Medium and needs your love.

Two old oil rigs have been spotted in South Texas sporting giant name tags of Mars moons. Who other than SpaceX and Elon Musk would be behind such an acquisition?

SpaceX is refurbishing two former oil drilling rigs near their Brownsville, TX site. Aptly named Deimos and Phobos after Mars’ two moons, these future spaceports may be our terminals to deep space.

6. What Do Gender Identity and This Tiny Critter Have in Common?

Rich Sobel writes about fascinating creatures and biological issues that affect our everyday lives.

He is an outstanding writer. His style is informative, scientific, and highly engaging. Do check his other work.

You’re an alien on another planet and you walk into the local joint hoping that maybe you’ll meet someone to partner with. And you see 7 different genders and the only one you can’t successfully mate with is one that’s the same as you!

Nice! Lots of choices!

5. Malcolm X

Bernadette DeCarlo believes writing has healed her in ways that she could have never imagined.

She is a superb writer. Her writing style is frank, direct, and engaging. Do check her other work.

The movie “One Night in Miami.”

“One Night in Miami” spends the bulk of its time in Malcolm X’s hotel suite, where the four men gather to celebrate Ali’s monumental victory — a celebration that turns into a long and sometimes contentious night of debate and discussion about each man’s place in the world in 1964, and what they’re doing to advance the cause of racial and social equality. Chicago Sun times

4. WHAT IS BITCOIN? And What it Isn’t!

Ricardo Testori is a full-stack developer taking a turn at writing. An Aussie living it up in southern Spain — and loving it. Health & Fitness, Tech, Humor, Economics, Startups.

He is a skilled writer. His writing style is honest, informative, and engaging. If you decide to read this story, it’d be time well-spent.

Bitcoin is described as a “digital currency”. This explains some key points about the “what” part — firstly, being digital means that it doesn’t exist in any physical form. There are no actual “coins” — it’s all just numbers in the cloud. So that pretty picture at the top of the page is just for show! Secondly, being a currency implies that it is a type of money for use as a medium of exchange. Thirdly, as money, it can be considered as a store of value.

3. Why is colonizing Mars so difficult?

Ziva Fajfar is a human, web developer, astronomy enthusiast, and animal rights defender.

She is a fine writer. Her writing style is informative, accurate, and pleasant. She is new to Medium and needs your love.

Laura Lark just signed up for the weirdest mission of her life. This is January 2017 and she has spent the last 5 years as a Google software engineer. But she is about to embark on a whole different adventure.

She and five other “astronauts” will spend the next eight months in a habitat in complete isolation on Hawaiian Mauna Loa, the world’s largest active volcano. The project is called HI-SEAS V and it’s the fifth such mission funded by NASA since 2013.

2. What Walden Teaches about Creating Your Perfect Life

Nick Keehler is a sustainability advocate, theology enthusiast, aspiring minimalist, and recent world traveler.

He is an excellent writer. His writing style is informative, well-structured, and engaging. Do check his other work.

I recently finished reading Walden by Henry David Thoreau, and let me just say, for someone who wanted to live in solitude in the woods, the guy LOVES to talk. I mean, he legitimately dedicated pages upon pages about how much he loves to talk. He loves to talk so much that the first chapter of his most famous book is 60 pages long, and most of it is just him rambling about things like the cost of flour or his clothing preferences.

I once heard the first chapter called one of the biggest deterrents in the American canon, and I could not agree more. I picked up the book in the Classics section of Barnes & Noble as a sophomore in high school, and I didn’t actually finish it until I was a year out of college.

1. How To Build Your Willpower According to The Stoics and Aztecs

At number one, it is Sebastian Purcell, Ph.D. He is an extraordinary writer. He is a philosopher and a happiness researcher as well.

His writing style is frank, direct, logical, well-structured, well-supported, well-researched, thorough, and as engaging as a Steven Spielberg movie. If you still decide not to read this masterpiece, it proves your willpower is already well-built. 😃

Don’t forget to read his stories and don’t forget to follow him.

One paradoxical quality of willpower turns on the way it is unevenly distributed in our lives. For example, I’ve earned a few school degrees, which means that I am able to “knuckle down” and study uninterrupted for long hours. But if you put a chocolate chip cookie in front of me, I buckle after five minutes.

How is it that a person can be both disciplined and undisciplined?

This post is part of the Top 10 Series — you can meet almost 400 top writers with these links:

1–2–3–4–5–6–7–8–9–10–11–12–13–14–15–16–17–18–19–20–21–22–23–24–25–26–27–28–29–30–31–32–33–34–35–36–37–38–39–40–41–42–43–44–45–46–47–48–49–50–51–52 –53–54–55–56–57–58–59–60–61–62–63

Final Thoughts

If your story was selected in the Top 10, please share another one of your stories with a brief introduction and a short convincing review. (Please write the review in the third person and start it with your name.)

I must have missed something today. I cannot read every story on Illumination and Illumination-Curated. Dr Mehmet Yildiz, the Chief Editor and Founder of Illumination and Illumination-Curated, read, highlighted, and applauded every good story when he started his publications. He still reads almost all of the good ones. I try — and fail daily — to read all of the masterpieces.

Dr Mehmet Yildiz has kindly allotted the top 10 series a full shelf on the front page of Illumination-Curated:

If you find any mistake, typo, or other error, please leave a private note for correction. Thanks.

Happy New Year!

To be included as a top 10 writer, read these curation guidelines carefully.

You can read my curated stories here.