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When I was looking into Medium, I could not find a concise set of quick and easy guidelines to help launch my first story on the platform. So, in this post, I write an account of my first time writing a story on Medium. By the end of this account, I would hope that the readers are well-acquainted with the basics of writing their first stories on Medium with relative ease.
The first major event that had to occur for me was amassing enough courage to make the decision to write. Once I was over the initial hump, I had to decide on the sort of content I needed to include in my story to make it meaningful. Everything else boiled down to performing a string of procedural steps. What better than a story about my experience writing my first story on Medium and helping neophytes like me!
Step 1: Setting up the tools of the trade
You will need a medium (no pun intended) to express what you intend to convey in your story. Therefore, the first procedural step is to sign up on Medium. Equally important for you is to familiarize yourself with the rules of the trade. You can conserve time by opening your favorite browser (I like to use Firefox or Chrome) and pointing it to https://policy.medium.com/medium-rules-30e5502c4eb4. After reviewing the rules, I clicked the “Sign up” button in green on top to register on Medium.
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Step 2: Understanding the tools of the trade
The next step is to get acquainted with what you have at your disposal on Medium to begin your writing journey. I found the link — https://help.medium.com/hc/en-us/categories/200058025-Writing — very helpful. Click the URL above to display a page containing important links, including this one — https://help.medium.com/hc/en-us/articles/225168768-Writing-and-publishing-your-first-story. I quickly reviewed the features of the text editor on Medium using this last link before going to the next step.
Sidenote:
The aforementioned links were working as of this story's publication date.
If an error is returned in your case, try searching online with these strings:
"first story on Medium" and "help with writing on Medium".
Step 3: Selecting the title and “cover art”
I picked a title that was fairly descriptive of what I was trying to do with this story. For your story’s distinguishing artwork (optional), an apt header image in this case, I pointed my browser to this link — https://unsplash.com/images/stock/public-domain — to select a suitable image from the public domain. No permission is needed to use these images free of charge. For a detailed review of the unsplash license, you can click this link: https://unsplash.com/license.
Step 4: Starting your writing journey
With that, I began to write my first story on Medium! I learned more about formatting using the text editor toolbar as I went along, although it may be more helpful to look at some writing samples and trying out the formatting options beforehand. On the whole the text editor, with the toolbar and the add button, is fairly straightforward and fun to use.
Well, there you have it! I hope that my modest effort at chronicling the rudimentary tasks for embarking on a journey of authoring content on Medium will empower newcomers to take to writing stories on this platform. Start with a story of your own today in just 3 easy steps!