What Makes Top Writer’s Stories Different: Continued & Expanded
It’s simple but not easy. Here’s what you can do.
In the previous piece, I’ve discussed principles that make top writers successful.
A short recap to get you up to speed:
Writers like Ayodeji Awosika about the uncomfortable truth — something truthful yet uncomfortable. People don’t like to talk about it. Take the opening two sentences of his recent article as an example:
You know what your problem is? You think you understand other people, but you don’t. In many ways, you don’t understand yourself.
Once the uncomfortable truth is out of the bag, top writers instill a sense of hope — sure the stuff is bad, but you can change. Niklas Göke is a master of that:
Look inside, fight your own demons, and by 4 PM, you’ll find yourself smiling at your neighbor rather than shouting at them — because one hard battle every day is enough.
Speaking about change, they tell you how exactly you can achieve whatever they propose. This usually takes the form of real-life examples or step-by-step instructions. Take Nick Wignall, the Medium resident psychologist:
There are many forms of attention training, put the simplest and most powerful is mindfulness meditation. To begin, carve out five minutes each day and dedicate them to strengthening your attention muscle:
Sit somewhere comfortable and close your eyes.
Focus your attention on the sensation of breathing. Try to keep your focus there — on how it feels to breathe.
Inevitably, thoughts, emotions, memories, images, external noises, or other physical sensations will intrude on your awareness. Simply acknowledge that your attention has been temporarily distracted and gently return your attention to your breath.
That’s it!
These 3 principles occur in great writing time and time again. When you incorporate them into your writing, you’ll tip the scales in your favor.
But, as with any theory, the picture isn’t complete; there’s more subtlety than that.
Here are 3 more ingredients you can bake into your writing to create the most delicious of articles.
1. Top writer’s stories are relatable
We humans love rags to riches stories. We love the hero who rises to the challenge despite the immense difficulty, slays the dragon, and gets the princess. The shape of this story hasn’t changed through millennia (and it’s safe to say it never will).
On Medium or on the Internet in general, these stories take the form of: “back in 2015 I was down on my luck. I had a huge student loan debt, needed a life-saving left pinky toe surgery, and my only friend in the world — cat Archie — died in agony as a bald eagle dismembered him. I still remember his paw dangling from the eagle’s talon…”
The protagonist, despite all this humongous baggage, works 25 hours a day on his business whilst taking care of 3 of his autistic siblings and moonlighting as a bartender in the local strip club. In a year, he’s worked so much that his health is failing, but he assured his financial security.
From the position of a monumental success, he realizes that life isn’t all about money, but about giving back to the community, meditating, and writing a spicy novel about teen satyrs (probably won’t be as successful as teen vampires).
And when he can do it, so can you.
You know, this kind of story.
Putting the satire aside, top writer's stories include a personal touch that humanizes him. Top writers are top writers for a reason: they’ve racked up thousands of followers and their word matters to the community. This can instill the sense that they are so far above the common person that they lost touch with how it is to be a fledgling writer or a struggling artist.
But by including a certain element from their past where they weren’t successful yet, they show the reader that they too started at one point.
When you read their article, you sense that it’s not a celebrity talking to you. It’s your friend who’s a bit further on his journey than you. If you follow his advice, you can be where he is (only if you sign up for a free email class, of course).
We can all agree that relatability is a powerful tool in top writers’ arsenal. It makes us see them as down to earth and make us hopeful that we too can achieve greatness.
But this combination wouldn’t amount to much if the writer was saying what everyone is saying.
2. Top writer’s stories evoke a certain sense of novelty
Most ideas aren’t new. It’s how they’re put together that matters.
If you put your writing together in a way that hasn’t been done before (and since there’s only one of you, you’re uniquely equipped to do so), you’ll taste success.
Take Mark Manson’s most famous article, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck.
The entire grandiose idea? Focus your attention on what matters and discard the rest. Or, as Mark put it: Save your fucks for stuff that matters.
He wrote the article in such a compelling way that you gobble it up from top to bottom, tell your closest friends about, and talk to a flight attendant on your flight home because she seems she could use the knowledge.
Enough people do that and you have a book deal on your hands.
But putting that aside (and focusing our fucks on what matters) it’s all about how you package your message. Mark’s idea isn’t any new. But the way he presented it is.
There are millions of writers on the internet. If the internet would be a busy Istanbul square, and each writer was a merchant trying to sell his wares by screaming, the writers with the most generic voice would drown in the background. Top writers, on the other hand, would rise above the fray with their unique voice and sell their stories.
If you keep saying what everyone is saying, which, in the end, is what we all do, you need to put your own spin on things. Do something that makes you different. Find a fresh angle on a topic that isn’t that common.
Me personally, I try to use humor whenever I can. When I write about habits or productivity, I sprinkle in jokes whenever I can. I want you to chuckle or smile when you read my story.
I also try to weave in psychological concepts in my writing since that’s what I study and find interesting.
Mark uses profanity to stand out. His humor is also something that makes him stand out. And he’s not afraid to go the extra mile for the cringe:
“Most of us, most of the time, get sucked in by life’s mean trivialities, steamrolled by its unimportant dramas; we live and die by the sidenotes and distractions and vicissitudes that suck the fucks out of us like Sasha Grey in the middle of a gangbang.”
The point is, top writers make use of their authenticity by putting together stuff that isn’t novel, but it sure feels that way. When you write, ask yourself:
- How can I inject my personality into my writing?
And I don’t mean the pretentious persona you show the world each day. I mean the real, raw you.
There’s only one of you on the entire planet. Don’t squander your chances at originality by following someone else. Anyone can write an article about productivity. But is it any different from the rest?
Find your angle and hammer it down.
3. Top writer’s stories are clickbait and deliver on it
When I was in high school, there was this stupid riddle that circled around in our adolescent Facebook feeds. It went like this:
“3:00 am, the doorbell rings and you wake up. Unexpected visitors. It’s your parents and they are there for breakfast. You have strawberry jam, honey, wine, bread, and cheese. What is the first thing you open?”
If you’ve been around back then, you’d know that this was the infamous Great Giraffe Challenge.
The answer to the riddle? It’s 3 am, so the first thing you open are your eyes. I know, ridiculous. If you also fucked up don’t worry. I and many, many people did so as well. And when we did, we had to post a picture of a giraffe in our feeds. Hence — the Great Giraffe Challenge.
How is this all related to the top writer's stories? Well, let me rephrase the riddle:
4:00 pm, you’re sitting in your jammies with a bucket of ice cream, mindlessly scrolling through your social media feeds. As you swoosh by, a bundle of symbols shows up. “How to Be Productive”, “Meditation for Beginners”, “My Favorite Aquarium Fish”, and “The 3 Keys to Becoming Irresistible”. What do you open first?
Assuming you’re not into aquarium fish, you’d probably go for the last one. How do I know? It’s one of the most successful stories on Medium. Written by John Gorman, the story racked up 239k claps and 735 comments until now. Impressive.
And precondition to all of this? A headline. A headline is the first thing you open as a reader. It doesn’t matter how relatable you are or how novel your take is. If people don’t click on the story, you won’t get the chance to show either.
There are many resources here on Medium that show you how to write great headlines. I’m no expert, but I can tell you what I do:
I regularly open a profile of a top writer, say Niklas Göke, and shamelessly scour his feed. I scroll around for 2–5 minutes looking for outliers — articles with more than 5 thousand claps — which I then jot down in a list that I keep in Notion. What I then do is that I look for patterns:
- Does the headline have a number in it? (In fact, many of the top writer’s headlines have numbers in them)
- Does the headline make me curious?
- Does it evoke an emotion?
Once you accumulate enough of the headlines, you’ll begin to assimilate them into your own.
A quick tip: It helps to have the headlines open while you brainstorm your title.
Collect the breadcrumbs, find patterns, and remember: the first thing you open is the headline.
Top writer’s stories are different
They are relatable in a way that makes us feel understood.
They put old ideas into fresh perspectives. Top writers make use of their originality and cultivate their own voice.
Last, top writers make sure their headline is on point because it’s the gate through which every reader has to enter.
Top writer stories are different, but they aren’t a mystery.
You can replicate the principles any time you want.
Will you?