Member-only story
Writing a Fiction Story Guaranteed to Go Viral in Eight Easy Steps
Literary immortality awaits
One of the worst-kept secrets in the writing world is that there are really only two types of writers: those who write fiction and those who just won’t admit they write fiction yet. Both types know all too well how hard it is out there for a fiction writer, and it’s just as hard here in a normally writer-friendly space like Medium. For example, all of my fiction stories combined have fewer views than one article about sex in Victorian-era England. Sex sells, clearly.
Yet I still soldier on (just like all of you do), and on this Labor Day I want to take a break from pondering a life of crime to help all of you would-be Hemingways and Austens stand out amid the incessant noise we compete with. What follows are eight easy steps anyone can use to achieve critical praise and riches untold. Why eight steps rather than five or ten or 27? I answer that at #3.
1. Craft an eye-catching title. The internet runs on SEO (I know nothing about SEO but use the term to seem more credible), and most fiction titles simply aren’t catchy enough to rank in a Google search. For an 1,100-page novel that has nearly 200 pages of endnotes, David Foster Wallace came up with a two-word title: Infinite Jest. What he needed was fewer footnotes and more headline…
