What Writing a Successful Medium Story in 40 Minutes Actually Looks Like
In case you want to know.
I recently wrote a piece about my experience with Medium curation, in which I describe a little bit of the writing process that tends to yield a successful story. A lot of people highlighted the statement that my most successful stories tend to be the ones I don’t spend too much time on, often no more than 40 minutes.
The truth is that simply stating the time frame between typing the first sentence and hitting publish doesn’t really describe what this particular process actually looks like.
To clarify what I mean when I say I write a successful Medium story in 40 minutes, let me explain what goes on behind the scenes.
I am never not writing (in my head)
The voices. The voices in my head never go quiet.
I’m always thinking of things to write about, constantly building narratives, forming phrases, crafting metaphors, playing around with concepts. That’s just who I’ve been my whole life.
I don’t worry about memorizing anything. If something comes up that sounds really good and inspired, I’ll pick up a notebook, or my phone, and write it down, but most times I’ll just let them go as soon as I think them.
The point isn’t to use everything that comes to mind, but to exercise the mind to have multiple ideas so I can select the best ones.
Some of the stuff I write down become ideas for Medium stories, which makes my stories page look like this:
40 minutes writing doesn’t mean 40 minutes thinking
I hardly ever sit down to write a story the moment I first think of it, mostly because I’m usually busy with something else when that happens. I make a quick draft of what I want to write about later (usually no more than the title), then I keep going with my day.
But the seed is planted. It’s going to grow on my subconscious, flourish. My never quiet mind will cause phrases and thoughts to pop-up in my head at random times, making the idea stronger until it begins to take shape — not on the page yet, just in my head.
Stephen King refers to this process as, and I’m paraphrasing here, “letting the guys in the basement do their work.” On his book On Writing: a Memoir of the Craft, King explains that he’ll have the seed of an idea, but not actively work on it until his subconscious has had a chance to do it. Yes, his subconscious are the guys in the basement.
(If you haven’t read King’s On Writing, run and get it now. It’s a must read for any writer, even if you’re not a fan of his other books.)
Writing from experience helps the words flow faster
Letting my subconscious work on an idea for a while, combined with the incessant writing that goes on in my head, makes it easier to write faster when I actually sit down to do it.
Another thing that helps is to write from experience.
I tend to stick with topics I know a thing or two about. I tend to stick to observations I’ve made and describe things that happened to me. It’s a personal kind of writing, so I have full control over it.
I also write about things I took 28 years (AKA my entire life) to learn, regarding relationships, self-improvement, self-expression, creativity, and more.
I pour my soul onto the page, but I try to make it good
I don’t think I’m especially talented. Any quality I can put into my writing today comes from years of practicing and decades of reading hundreds of books. (And I still have a lot more to improve).
I do think writing in a shorter amount of time leads me to really pour my soul onto the page, and that can be beautiful, but I still have to put an effort to make it good.
If “just write” were the answer, every stream of consciousness would be a master piece, which is, of course, not true. That’s why I do revise my pieces, even if I keep an eye out to not overdo it and completely kill the freshness of those first impulses which led me to write it in the first place.
I don’t ignore the impulse to create
I don’t believe in writing only when the Muse comes to visit.
I believe that writing is a craft, and that creativity, like a muscle, can be exercised. However, there are moments when the impulse to write a particular story is just too strong to resist.
It happens when I have something to say, and I know it needs to be said, and the voices in my head just won’t go quiet over it anymore. I could try writing about something else, maybe develop another story from my drafts’ queue, but it won’t do. It has to be that story, on that topic, and it has to be now.
I don’t create only when I have the impulse, but whenever it does come, I listen and I surrender to it.
It’s what happened when I wrote the story below. I woke up at 6:30am with an idea on my mind, ran to my laptop, and about 40 minutes later I had it done. It has 23K views, 4.4K claps and counting:
What I wrote in that story, however, is the result of months of reflection about my failed marriage. When I felt I had finally understood the essence of what went wrong, that was when I jumped out of bed to write it down even before I had had some coffee. That’s how badly I had to write it. And that’s partly why, I believe, it’s been so successful.
In writing, overthinking is the enemy
Overthinking can easily lead to self-doubt, which leads to overwriting and/or revising my story into oblivion, that’s why I avoid it as much as I can.
By not giving myself enough time to overthink, I prevent my demons from taking over and ruining my creation.
I don’t necessarily set a timer for 40 minutes when I write, but I try to stay focused and write the story all the way to the end in one sitting, so I get down everything I feel the impulse to write. Then, it’s just a matter of revising it (after a quick break).
40 minutes writing isn’t a guarantee of success
It isn’t even something I set out to do on purpose, it just happens.
You should take however long you need to finish a story. Some of my stories take 2 hours, some take 3. Some take 2 hours in one day, then 2 hours again the next. I never actually know how long I’m going to take when I first sit down to work on anything.
Each story has its own particular set of needs to come to life. You just have to trust your gut as a writer and go with the flow.
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