3 ways your stories can be valuable for someone else

Writing on Medium

Photo by S O C I A L . C U T on Unsplash

I have read hundreds of articles on Medium about gaining followers, views, and money on this platform. I think I could summarize all the good tips in the following sentence: Create valuable content. I have read this sentence about a million times.

The question to ask is this: how can I determine that content is of value? And most importantly, how can we create that type of content?

Well, for a story to be good it is not only enough that it is well written. Let’s say the story is completely consistent and has no grammatical or spelling errors. However, no matter how perfect that writing is, if it is boring or if what it says does not interest or help anyone, I would not classify it as valuable content.

After reading a lot, on and off Medium, I think I could say perfectly what a story has to have to be valuable enough for readers. You see, a valuable story has at least one of the following three characteristics.

1. Educational or informative

That is, it teaches people something new or informs them about a specific need they have. There are many ways that something new can be taught.

• A tutorial. The list of possible tutorials is endless. For example, you can teach how to cook a dish, how to create an account on Medium, or even how to make the bed. This is what I did in my article on how to write a book review.

• A collection of tips. This is similar to the tutorial, but you do not have to follow a specific sequence, rather it is some tips that can help the person achieve their goals.

• A collection of ideas. That is the case with this article, where I am putting together several possible story ideas that may be valuable to readers. Another example could be collecting different ideas for outfits, hairstyles, or house decorations.

• A collection of resources. Resources can be as varied as books, school supplies, kitchen utensils, or car parts. There will always be people looking for recommendations from different resources depending on their interests. For example, I recently wrote an article in which I mentioned different fiction books on traveling.

• An explanation of different aspects of reality. Here the possibilities are endless too. You can talk about anything depending on your knowledge and training. That is why the same can be explained how our body is formed than how the Medium algorithm works.

• An account of some historical events.

• A critical analysis of a work of art or literature.

In short, there are many ways to teach or inform. In all of them, we help our readers in a meaningful way.

2. Entertaining

Sometimes the stories do not have to teach much, but to entertain the reader. Not all the time we go through life looking for tutorials, sometimes we need a little leisure. Here I am going to give you two ideas of how your stories can be entertaining:

• They use humor and sarcasm.

• They maintain a mystery that is solved only in the end.

Just yesterday I wrote an article on how to make your stories trap the readers. It is especially dedicated to fiction writers, but you can take a lot of the advice that I give there.

3. Emotionally relevant

The reason self-help literature is so successful is that it touches people’s deepest emotions, their greatest desires. Knowing this, we can apply it to our Medium stories.

Emotionally relevant stories directly touch the human essence and that is why writing content like this is truly beautiful. Now, you have to know what emotions you want to touch and why. In my case, I like to talk about the experience of being a writer beyond the tutorials, that’s why I wrote the following article.

What makes you a writer?

This story is about how a writer can find his/her identity.

You can talk about what you are most passionate about. For example, if you are a musician, you could talk about the feelings that come over you when you finish a long concert. There will always be people who will want to read and will enjoy all the subjectivity of our thoughts.

I hope you enjoyed reading, if so consider following me and leaving your ideas in the comments