Should You Write Long or Short Stories on Medium?
Why I’ve held the same opinion for 18 months
People sometimes ask me if their stories ought to be long or short, and the knee jerk answer I want to give is that they’re overthinking things. But I can see how such an answer wouldn’t be all that helpful, so I decided to delve deeper into the issue with some of my real-life experience.
I’ve been writing on Medium for 18 months, and it’s rare for me to write anything under two minutes. Ultra rare. To be honest, I’m not a fan of writing pieces under four minutes because I find it difficult to wrap up whatever I want to say in such a small timeframe.
That said, I might experiment with more two-minute stories if I can get to the point where each one feels complete. But I’ve published some stories as long as a 15 minute reading time, and I don’t feel that those stories have been penalized.
When I wrote 5 Ways Men Who Manage Women Treat Us Like Crap, it took me all day to finish. I was nervous that I might be wasting my time, but it felt like a story I needed to tell. I remember seeing that 15-minute read time and thinking, “This might just pay off.”
And sure, it doesn’t have a fantastically high read ratio, but I suspect that’s normal with most lengthy stories. I still don’t regret writing it and it’s nice to see the piece still gets some love nearly a year later.
On the flip side, my highest grossing story is only 4 minutes, has fewer views, but a higher read ratio. And it’s a few months “younger” than the one above about some men who manage women poorly.
What Does Medium Want?
It’s true that some Medium readers don’t like long stories, but clearly, other readers don’t mind them at all. And if we’re looking at the stories Medium editors and curators choose, it seems their choices are all over the map.
My first featured story, A Different Kind of Abuse, has a 12 minute reading time. It’s not my most-viewed, and again, that read ratio isn’t so high, but I have no complaints about the engagement.
My second member feature was also a 12-minute read, and this time, the Medium editors added audio.
My third member feature was 9 minutes, and has performed much “poorer,” but I suspect it’s more because it didn’t receive any front-page promotion.
My fourth and most recent feature was 10 minutes long, and it has performed “the worst” out of all my features, but I wasn’t particularly surprised. Personally, I’ve found it difficult to break into blogging about fat acceptance and body positive issues. Even among many readers interested in those topics, they don’t necessarily want to hear about them from me.
Other people complained that I’ve branded myself a fat writer, as if that’s all I talk about. They say, if you don’t want people to focus on your fat, quit talking about it. In turn, I don’t expect many of my stories about body image to perform spectacularly. Someone who truly excels in that arena is Your Fat Friend.
All that to say, in my case, Medium editors have favored my longer pieces. But Medium publications have more specific editorial guidelines. If I’m trying to get into Forge, for example, I might do better to focus on shorter pieces. But a quick glance at their home page shows that even if they favor two- to five-minute reads, they’re still publishing longer stories.
I Have Always Believed in Publishing Long and Short Pieces
And, of course, anything in between. One of these days, if I happen to write a 30-minute story, so be it. Ever since I got started on Medium in April 2018, I’ve thought that the optimal length for a story is however long it takes to tell it well.
There’s no benefit in needlessly padding your work for length. But it’s also not a great idea to be so brief that the message never really sticks. What matters more than story length is how well you tell it.
Yes, some people will shy away from reading a long story online. It’s not much different than people deciding they have no time for lengthy books. Readers will always have their preferences, but you will find there are readers for every form of good writing.
You Should Write What Feels Good to You
If you’re really curious about whether your long or short stories fare well, take a look at your work, along with others’. You can search for any Medium writer to pull up their most popular stories.
Here I pulled up what Medium displays for my top 10:
Nothing is under 4 minutes, and the average is 8.2 minutes. Now, that’s just for me. Darius Foroux will have a shorter average reading time, and John Gorman will have a longer one. Yet both writers have been on Medium longer than I have, and both are far more successful than me with more followers and much greater engagement.
There are so many different ways to be a good writer with a successful career. You don’t have to get so caught up in all of the details. Sometimes, the details are weeds that keep you stuck when you need to move forward.
So? Move forward. Write the stories that need to be told. If you do it well, you can forget about rules like writing too much or too little.
Just write.