No, it’s not ‘show, don’t tell’ — This story is behind Medium’s membership paywall, which means the writer earns through our Partner Program. To become a Medium member, click here. I’ve been studying writing for 20 years now. I’m at the point where I’ve now taught more workshops than I’ve been a student in, and yet I…

10 easy steps to take your story from the first draft to a publishable story. — My first few years as a writer were crappy. But, as I continue to write, I found how much writing has a lot to do with rewriting. I had just begun to see how much I loved to write and the good I could get out of it. My first…

Someone did it, so you can too… — I don’t know what changed recently in the Mediums Algorithm. Maybe I changed in the last couple of weeks, and the AI recognized it quickly. For about three weeks now, I get a ton of Articles into my “Recommended for You Newsfeed” that have the same message: I created a…

Welcome to the hottest writing competition happening this summer, where the lucky winner walks away with $50,000 in prize money. — The silly season seems more exciting for creators with the Writers Challenge. Here in Portugal, we have fully adopted the English expression defining a period of the year with less information intensity in the media, usually the summer period — “The Silly Season.” It’s that time of the year when…

Transcend the race for scraps — There is a fact about the New Yorker that always makes me laugh: you’re free to email your short story — but they haven’t accepted anybody since the 90s. The entire creative industry is like that. The barriers to entry are intentionally ludicrous. Most people shrug and give up. …

Five steps to creating a meaningful personal narrative — My colleague Harris Sockel and I recently facilitated a workshop about essay writing as part of Medium’s Creator Workshop Series, and we wanted to share some of the takeaways here. (The workshop was recorded, too — you can watch it here, and we’re embedding it below.) As editors at Human…