Here Are the Surprising Tips From the Three Articles That Made Me a Top Writer

They may work for you too

Confetti shot into the air and rained on the couple as the officiating minister finally pronounced them husband and wife. I swung back into action, pointing and posing guests who wanted a picture with the couple.

While I was shooting a wedding in a church, Medium was quietly anointing me with promotion and robing me in a cloak of honor.

Cue another spray of confetti, this time in my inbox.

When I made the 98-mile trip back home, I summoned my phone for my late afternoon email duties before I napped the exhaustion off. As I waded through the deluge of notifications that had flooded my inbox, an unfamiliar note of congrats lurched at me.

“Congratulations! You’re now a top writer in Creativity,” the message read. Neither my biggest hopes, nor my wildest dreams foresaw that happening. The mail delivered a soothing smile that erased every feeling of tiredness I felt.

The congratulatory email flagged three articles for getting me there. The main one that drove me to the top had collected 1.8k views and 190 fans along the way, while the other two rode along with a combined 129 views and 27 fans.

Looking past the style to the substance of the articles that drove me there, here are the tips that could help you get there too.

Help one writer, then another

I realized a lot of the Medium members are entrepreneurs, IT professionals, doctors, accountants, or other professionals who are also interested in writing.

You likely fall under one of those categories, and you share similar pains and frustrations with hundreds of thousands of other community members.

Your creative solutions to some of those pains will not only help you, but a lot of your readers as well.

In my case, since I hadn’t yet published any paper in a peer-reviewed journal, nor earned an MFA in writing, I knew I would be walking on thin ice by dispensing writing advice without the experience under my belt.

But I also knew at least one writer, who doubled as a reader, who faced some of the problems I also had along the way.

Problems like low fan engagement and a steep learning curve, to name just two. I figured if I could speak to her, I would be helping her, and others like her.

That meant I was under no pressure to offer top-drawer writing advice to writing veterans with battle scars bigger than my writing portfolio.

So I listed some of my challenges and shared some solutions. For example, when I realized my articles didn’t garner enough engagement, I asked myself why I took up writing in the first place.

The article I wrote on that ended up providing answers to the pains of some readers in the community. In response, they left heartfelt notes of thanks and resounding claps of cheers.

Ruffle a few feathers if you have to

“To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong.” Joseph Chilton Pearce.

People will always disagree with some of your points. Worse, you may step on a few toes along the way, but that’s okay. What is not okay is to allow the fear of offending others to hinder you from having an opinion.

When I drafted the piece that suggested “write every day” is the second best writing advice, part of me thought I would start a fight I couldn’t win.

But I also knew it would take more than writing every day — which I had been doing that for some time — to go far, fast. I had to learn how to write better articles. And I had to let new writers know of it too.

Publishing that article meant killing a few sacred cows, or at least stirring a hornets’ nest. I got some heat for that, but more and more readers thought I had hit the nail on the head.

They saw sense in the points I made and high-fived me at the end. For me, that was the most important thing.

Look, everyone can write, but you have to learn the rules of engagement to play the game well.

To practice what I preached, I began by reading works of other writers like Ayodeji Awosika. I also enrolled in a few writing courses on Coursera; the first was Writing and Editing, by the University of Michigan.

The course instructors recommended more writing resources, and the learning snowball kept melting, forming trickles, and then rivers that carried me further in the writing journey.

Let the reader for whom you wrote the article — and not necessarily some expert — be the judge. If they found it helpful, that’s nice. If not, better luck next time.

To write what you know, share your experiences

“Not only is your story worth telling, but it can be told in words so painstakingly eloquent that it becomes a song.” Gloria Naylor.

It gets even better when you weave a few helpful tips into those stories. Besides sharing your unique experiences, you’d be teaching your readers something new.

The three articles that propelled me to the Top writer status were articles in which I wrote about what I had experienced.

In the first, I saw myself as a more successful writer, and from the dizzying heights, looked down at my beginnings. I asked myself what I could have done differently? “I would have invested more in my growth, networked with others, enjoyed the process,” I suggested in the article.

In the second, I wrote about what I thought were the problems with the advice to write every day. I knew I had to learn how to write, how to write well. But since I was already on that path, I figured I could share those details with my readers.

In the third, I mentioned a few factors that had ferried me to my destination thus far: failure, patience, and personalized defaults.

Pulling the points from your bag of experience means you are confident in what you write and comfortable with the facts you share.

Ignore the tags and just write

Yes, have a clear vision of the writing goals you want. But even better, find ways of becoming an invaluable resource to your community, be it freelancing, entrepreneurship, or writing.

When those resources increase and return massive gains, you’d be proud of the path you took.

I was never obsessed with the Top writer tag, for example. And neither should you. I knew not the road to become one. All I knew was to learn how to write content for my readers.

I told myself, “ chin up, head down, write quietly, and loudly your writing will speak for you.” And some of the writing has been gathering whispers online.

So write for the reader, not for the tags.

Takeaways

If someone with zero writing experience can do it, you can become a top writer too. The fields may be different, the tips may be off, but the massage is the same. You can do it.

If anyone ever hinted that I’d be a top writer under any tag unrelated to my profession, I’d have derided them and branded them a false prophet.

But here I am now, looking on my minor accomplishment with a grin of gratitude.

An accomplishment conferred on me by you, cherished reader.

Now what?

Like any kid will treat the last candy out of the pack, I’ll savor every flavor of it while I still have it. Better yet, it encourages me to keep getting better and helping others who are where I was five short months ago.

Again, if someone with zero writing experience can do it, you can become a top writer too.

You may not hear me, but I’m cheering for you, deep in the stands. I can’t wait to spray on you, cans of confetti.