How to Make a Table of Contents
Tips and Tricks
Over time, enough people have asked me how I made my Table of Contents that I felt I ought to write a piece for it. Somewhere, I believe I have explained it, but whether it was an actual article or buried somewhere in the responses, I can’t find it.
The reason I had a Table of Contents in the first place was to address my own bad memory. At the point of this writing, I have crossed the 500 stories mark. It helps me to answer the question, “Didn’t I already write about that?” On the one hand, who cares? On the other, perhaps I can address a different aspect of the subject and put the URL to the related story at the bottom of the new piece I am writing. I am pecking my way through life, trying to be a better writer.
Win-win.
Also, it actually doesn’t matter if you write about the same subject more than once. We are writers. We are artists. Consider Claude Monet or Georgia O’Keefe and all the flowers they painted. These artists disprove the idea that if you’ve seen it once, you’ve seen it all. Plus, our minds are interesting because life lessons aren’t answered once but in stages, as you move through your life.
Anyway, I try to be an orderly person, at least with what I write. My house may be a mess, but I just don’t have time to spend cleaning it. Also, I can’t see as well anymore, and unless I step in something, I vowed several years ago not to allow minor things like that to bother me.
So, here is my own take on a Table of Contents and how to order the stories. I elected to number the stories, provide a link with the title, and date them. I also mention the publication that published them.
To keep up to date with it, I update at the end of every month, so that’s one of the first of the month things I do. Or the last day of the month. Take a stab at it. You could do it quarterly or with the seasons if you wanted to. Or, like some people do, they group similar pieces into lists and pin those instead. Whatever floats your boat.
The actual mechanics of the list happen in a Medium article conceived in February 2022. I’d already been writing at Medium since Thanksgiving in November 2021. So, that first entry was composed of four months’ worth of stories. As time went on and I realized something else might work better I would go back through the list as I did my monthly updating and change the stuff to reflect my new idea. At this point in time I decided I would put a link to a popular article that I’d written during the month. Remember when you are going to do something like that you want to copy and past everything but the first letter of the URL. So, you’d paste in ttps://TalkingToSpirit.com into your article. Then, you’d go back, add the missing h, put your cursor at the end of the URL and flip the switch. I could have said enter, but doesn’t flip the switch make you think of a light coming on?
I always start my stories on a blank Word document. I don’t always write one at a time. Right now, I’ve got three other Word documents in various stages of completion open on my computer. The finished ones I publish are recorded in a massive Word document after I have published on Medium. I also include the picture I use to illustrate the piece and the keywords I use.
When the repository document for all my articles at Medium becomes unstable (slow to save, jittery, wonky behavior), I close it and begin a new one. Right now, I am placing stories in a second document of my Medium Articles, which is 296 pages at 133k words. It is loading a little slower than normal, so I might think about making a third document before too long. I also number each of those articles consecutively, which never gets published with the actual piece. So, article 503 in the document that has all the articles in it on my computer exactly matches My Stories on Medium and the Excel Spreadsheet on my computer. It helps me stay organized.
The reason I am so anal with this is because I’m old enough to have blown up four computers and lost everything. Yeah, yeah, I started over again, but so much information lost is a dismal feeling. I’d like to avoid that in the future.
The actual process of my writing begins with a blank Word document. Once I’ve massaged enough of it, I cut and paste it onto the Medium platform and finish up the piece. Eventually, I will dump the unsaved Word document. I don’t want it. It served its purpose to get me to the next stage on the Medium Platform. I will find a picture to illustrate the piece, either something I have photographed or compiled in Canva, created in an AI designing program, or found on Unsplash or any of the other places we go to find illustrations.
If I want the piece to be published through a publication, I can choose from that point. The three little ••• at the top right hand on your computer screen next to the publish button. Then, I go to publish and choose five keywords. I don’t know if it makes a difference, but long ago, I began having my own name as one of the keywords. It’s up to 488 or some such silly number now. If I am writing for a publication, the first keyword is the name of the publication.
I waffle back and forth about the idea of keywords that have been used 671k times or one that hasn’t been used at all. In fact, I’ve begun telling stories that involve my husband. When I first used that as a keyword, nobody, can you believe it? Nobody had used that particular word as a keyword on the Medium platform. Which, if you’re googling “husband” is more likely to produce your article than using “husbands who are dumb” I don’t know if that’s a valid SEO concern, but I try to keep it in mind.
I also have an Excel spreadsheet I use to track my stats. I keep track of the day I publish something. This helps me visually to see if I’ve spent two weeks in a slump and correlate that with the reason nobody is reading my stuff. Doing that also helps me to write ahead of schedule and pre-schedule articles for publishing.
For example, I loved participating in the NaNoWriMo events in November. National Novel Writing Month is every November. You write as fast as you can on one 50,000 word project. It doesn’t cost anything, and as misery loves company, you feel the energy of 200,000 other people all over the world who have done a butt-plant and are writing as furiously as you are.
NaNoWriMo started in 1999 with about 20 people. Now, like I said, it can be 200k or more folks every November. Started, as I proudly hold my head up, in my own stomping grounds of Oakland, Berkeley, and San Francisco.
There are NaNoWriMo events throughout the year, but the most famous one of all is in November. It was chosen because the weather in our neck of the woods sucks in November and what better reason to hang out in a coffee shop? They still have in person events that are slowly picking up steam since the first of the Pandemic hit, but there is also the comradery that develops via Zoom meetings. I attended one once where all you saw were the tops of everybody’s heads as we were all silently bent over our keyboards writing. First Zoom meeting I ever attended where everybody was quiet.
There are NaNoWriMo camps in April and July where you either choose your own goals or write to 30k words. What I start doing the month before in October is to schedule articles to publish every other day or so during November so as to not shirk my duties as a Medium writer who writes.
The Table of Contents resides on a separate page of that same Excel spreadsheet.
How I get it involves cutting and pasting from the Stories section of my Medium Account. I just grab everything dated from the first to the last of the month and paste it to the side of my Table of Contents. I manually move the stuff I want: The title (be careful not to click on it, or it takes you to the story on Medium), the date it was written, and how many minutes it takes to read it. I move all that over into the Excel spreadsheet. Then, I edit the link and take off the last tale section, which is always the same for every story: https://readmedium.com/abcde-6b5e2f8b1d5a?source=your_stories_page-------------------------------------
This is the part in the URL I get rid of: ?source=your_stories_page — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —
Why? Because the coding is ugly. I might not be a great house cleaner, but that annoys me. The link still works to take you to the story, but it’s like everybody can see under your skirt to see that particular bit of underwear.
Once the month’s worth of stories has been updated in my Excel spreadsheet, I do another copy and paste back into the Table of Contents.
I have started putting a link to one of the stories I wrote during the month at the end of the listing. It’s a divider between one month and the next. It gives that piece a little bit of traction. And, who knows? Somebody might read it. Visually it works as a little bit of a graphic break.
I am slowly working my way down through the month’s so that at the point of me writing this there are a bunch of the month’s that don’t have a dividing link at the bottom which includes the picture and link to a story I wrote that month.
I have to admit that I don’t earn a whole lot with my pieces, but I like them. It seems to help other people too who would like to see an orderly list of their stories.
As time goes by, Medium might even address the issue.
So, thanks for reading. I hope you’ve gotten some tips on how to set up your own Table of Contents. Here’s an idea: If you get a lot of traction on your stories, you could go back a month and record something about the number of reads you’ve had. It’s just a thought. Especially useful if you have lots of people flocking to your stories.
One last thing I do that has helped with my readership is that I go once or twice a week and post a couple of story links to Many Stories. Because of the way Medium has our stories set up now is anybody coming in as an external view only gets to see part of the story. However, the thing with Many Stories is there are a lot of Medium writers using the platform. What you get by listing your stories at Many Stories are even more Medium writers reading your stories.
Thanks for reading. There are probably lots of ways to create a Table of Contents for your own articles. This is just the technique I use. Hope it helps.
The Links ManyStories.com — Spread the Word about Your Stories NaNoWriMo — National Novel Writing Month — November is the most popular, but April and July also have programs. It’s free. You’ll have good writer’s energy behind you, and you force yourself to write. Fast.