4 Foundational Elements of Successful Stories

Before you worry about specific writing strategies or tactics, make sure these four key factors are in your favor

As a writer, editor and publisher, I think a lot about what makes an online nonfiction story work, why one might gain wide readership, why another flops. We can’t always discern the particular magic or lack of it in a given piece. Often the answers are highly nuanced and complementary, related to factors ranging from the story idea itself and the writer’s talent to algorithmic whims.

Those factors barely scratch the surface of what drives a successful story. There are countless strategies and tactics and vagaries that might (or might not) propel any given article to wide appeal. Some are in the writer’s control. Many are not. Sometimes—often, I’ve observed—a story soars or sinks for no obvious reason.

But I’ve come to appreciate four underlying, fundamental building blocks on which every successful story is built. These are the most basic ingredients that allow a story to rise, like the flour, salt, yeast and water needed to bake great bread. No amount of olive oil, sugar, rosemary, garlic or other tasty additions will render great bread without the key ingredients. And sure, things can go wrong even when the ingredients are right. Temperature, humidity and other confounders can spoil our best baking efforts. Story confounders number in the dozens.

All that in mind, here’s my take:

The most successful nonfiction stories are of high quality and focus on one main point that’s interesting to a large audience that has access to it.

QFIA is a lousy acronym, so I’ve re-ordered it as FAQI.

I don’t expect you to memorize the acronym. There won’t be a test. What I hope is that the deeper explanation of each of these four foundational elements, below, will make a great deal of sense, and help you think about how you write, who you write for, and even where you publish.

Image: Pexels/Tim Mossholder

Focus

The best stories focus on one thing. They may touch on many aspects of that thing, but every aspect serves the ultimate purpose of supporting that one thing, the premise, the main point, the takeaway.

A story’s focus should be abundantly clear in all the primary, complementary but not repetitive story elements: the headline, subtitle, lede and nutgraph, outline and throughline, ending.

There’s another important aspect to focus. The best writing comes from writers who focus on a limited topical range. Let’s say you write about sports, and maybe sometimes also the business of sports, but you’re interested in science and technology and are keen to try your hand there. Do you really think you can write masterfully about all four of those topics? If you self-publish, do your fans and followers even want that from you?

You can apply these principles to a freelance career, too, where you might be writing for multiple publications. You’ll want editors to get to know you for the one thing you do really well, not the many things you do in mediocre fashion.

All this harping on focus leads us to…

Access

For a story to succeed in a big way, you need access to a big audience, and that audience needs access to your story. Sounds obvious. But: You need to know your intended audience and where they do their reading, or at least where a lot of them do a lot of it. Otherwise you’re just spitting into the wind. This relates to subject matter, style, length and many other aspects of your work.

If you write about the environment, Car & Driver is not the publication for you. Duh. But what if you specialize in short news takes—500 words or less, say—on a very narrow subject-matter category? A Substack newsletter could be the best avenue for you, whereas Medium is probably not the right platform. Medium readers, by and large, want more substance, driven by a writer’s lived experience and rooted in contextualized storytelling. For those same reasons, Medium also isn’t the right platform for lengthy reference-based “Wikipedia” type articles (see the difference between articles and stories). There are science, health and business pubs, on the other hand, that drink up reference-article pitches, with SEO being the goal.

Building access to your audience involves playing the long game to generate a following over time, ideally on a particular topic or beat, and one or just a few publishing platforms (and/or in one or a few certain pubs) as well as in social media. It does not happen overnight. To do this, you have to really know your target audience, and know that a big chunk of them can actually access your story. Are you placing it in the right publication or platform? Is it behind a paywall? Is it easily discoverable directly on the publishing platform, or is it more apt to be found via search or social?

Quality

There’s a lot of haste in writing and publishing these days, even among stories that aren’t news-driven nor particularly timely. If your story will be as valuable tomorrow as it is today, take advantage of time to make it the best it can be. Because, yeah, amid all the bloggy schlock out there, quality is at a premium these days.

A well-focused story, targeted at the right audience on the right platform or publication, has a chance of doing well—if it’s of high quality. I write regularly in this newsletter about how to achieve quality, so rather than summarize here, I’ll point you to the Writer’s Guide archives.

Don’t sacrifice quality for quantity. Churning out new stories daily (or hourly) is an exercise in wheel-spinning, unless you have some pixie dust not available to the rest of the writing world. One good weekly story that soars is worth far more to your career than five slapdash pieces of content that give the writer a daily dose of dopamine and leave readers shuffling along to find better writers.

Interest

The best story you ever wrote will matter to nobody if they’re not interested in it. This might seem to be the most obvious statement in this post, but if you spend any time scrolling through the interwebs looking for something to read, you’ve perhaps noticed that a lot of the stories out there just aren’t very interesting.

Before we start writing a story, it’s vital to ask ourselves (or a friend or a partner or an editor): Is this interesting?

I ask my wife this question all the time, before, during or after I write a story. I show her the headline, or I verbalize an elevator pitch. Sometimes she says yes. Sometimes she says eh. Almost always, she helps me know if I’m on track, or if perhaps I’ve missed the most interesting aspect of the story, which reorients the focus in sometimes miraculous ways. A polite eh often helps me drop an idea altogether and put my energy into some other story. An interesting one. Here’s a trade secret: The things that interest me or you don’t always interest a lot of other people. Or they don’t interest the readers on the platform or publication where we publish.

Let’s review.

• Does your story make a strong point around which every word revolves?

• Do you know who your audience is, and will they be able to find this story?

• Does the story achieve a quality standard you are proud of?

• Is it a truly interesting concept and a compelling read?

If so, then publish that puppy and be proud, no matter if it flies or flops. Because it always will.

Cheers,
Rob