How to Write Successful Year-End Stories

Plus why and whether you should bother

Writers and editors may think year-enders are quickies—easy compilations that can be tossed together in no time, enthralling readers and generating a ton of clicks. That was largely true… in 2002. Now everyone is doing them, and readers are weary and leery of clickbaity listicles.

Yet year after year, a fresh crop of year-enders typically fails to deliver much if anything new, because writers and editors lower their expectations as they look for low-hanging content fruit they can produce in advance to publish while they’re eating and drinking too much during the holidays and readers are all watching football or taking ski vacations anyway.

Plus: After a year like this, who even wants to read about it all over again?

I’m sorry to burst the bubble, my writing friends, but finding readers during the holiday period is really hard, and on top of that challenge, year-enders require at least as much elbow grease as any story, often more. They frequently flop spectacularly, based on my experience writing and editing them for online publications the past three decades, for any number of reasons, but chiefly because they’re unoriginal.

On a positive note, the best year-enders are fruitful forays into reliving the year that was or speculating about the year that will be. And you can learn a lot about your writing self by doing them. And yes, you can write them ahead of time so they plug a hole in your publication routine to give you time to take a legit break from writing and get rejuvenated for the new year.

So let’s look at what year-enders actually are, or should be, and how to do them well. The takeaway:

Never write what people might expect. Write what they could not anticipate.

If that sounds like good advice for all your writing, well, yep.

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There are two basic types of year-enders: look-backs and look-aheads. Each has its own set of wants and needs, but doing them well involves many of the same best practices, which we’ll get to. First, here are some of the good arguments for attempting year-enders: 

• It’ll force you to get even more creative than usual. 

• You can serve readers well by bringing things together that had seemed disparate or been forgotten.

• You might learn something about your abilities as you review what you’ve done for the year or what’s on the horizon in the topic areas you cover. 

Writing a year-ender is an opportunity to take yourself up to 30,000 feet and assess your writing career as another year winds down. Whether you actually write one or not, you can engage in the exercise of self-evaluation. 

Ask yourself these questions:

• Did you cover your beat well? 

• Did your stories resonate?  

• Has your topical knowledge grown?

• Have your writing skills improved?

• What have you missed? What news or trends did you not write about? Is there an opportunity to circle back to them with a look-back?

• Are you prepared for the new year? What topics or angles should you cover in the new year, or cover more thoroughly, or simply write about again with a fresh angle? Within that line of thinking, is there a look-ahead that will set the stage for next year’s writing?

There’s also a clear, simple argument for avoiding year-enders: The usual challenges for breaking through the crowd of content and garnering reader attention is heightened by the flood of… year-enders. 

I bet you had no idea there was so much to say about the craft of writing year enders! Yeah, I’m just getting started. The most important and insightful stuff is ahead, the actual tactics and best practices. So let’s look at the elements of a successful year-ender, some approaches you can take, and the pitfalls to avoid.