I have figured out how Tim Denning is writing ten articles a week and why readers love reading them.
Ever since I started writing on Medium in 2020, Tim Denning has been consistently generating ten articles a week. When many top writers gave up on the platform and started looking elsewhere, he kept showing up, hardly discouraged by what was happening around him.
You got to give him credit for that.
No wonder he has 305,000 followers on Medium and close to half a million on LinkedIn.
When I was new to Medium, I was in awe of his ability to consistently churn so many articles. At that time, he was working full-time and was also running courses and writing ebooks. I thought he had an inborn talent for writing to be so productive. Mind you, in those days it used to take me 7 to 8 hours to write one article.
As I get to know him a bit better, I learned he was a normal young man with steely determination.
As I am using his strategy to write five articles in a day, this week I sat down and read over a hundred of his articles in a single sitting and deconstructed them.
With little ado, here is what I found.
Writing articles in batches is a better strategy than writing an article a day.
As Tim has told us multiple times that he writes articles only on Tuesdays and Thursdays. He writes and schedules 5 articles on each of these days. I used to think it is beyond anyone’s ability (except Tim) to do that. But as I started doing it myself, I found it is in fact easier to write five articles in a day than to write one a day.
The reasons are:
- You are laser-focused (Tim calls it being in the flow state).
- You know you have roughly 60 to 90 minutes per article, so you don’t waste time.
- You can do images and footers for all articles in 5 -10 minutes.
- You can use parts of the material in multiple articles.
- You can choose one topic (say productivity) and write five articles in one go. The next day, you can choose another topic and write another five articles.
Stream-of-consciousness writing is the way to write better.
Most of Tim’s article flows so well as if he is just sitting opposite you and talking to you. You can call it mastery or you can call it stream-of-consciousness writing (or free writing).
Stream-of-consciousness writing happens when you don’t have to think and you just keep on writing as it comes. And usually, it is quick, fluent, and much more engaging.
When you have written as many articles as Tim has, most of your ideas are already clear in your head. You remember your stories so well that they pour out of your fingers at the right place, at the right time.
I am writing this article as stream-of-consciousness writing. I have not outlined this article. I am not sure what I am going to write in the following paragraphs. But I trust the right thoughts will keep coming until there are no more and then the article will be done.
Most of his articles are Leggo blocks put together.
There are so many structures and templates to write good and balanced articles. But I am mesmerized by Tim’s structure. He writes in blocks and then seamlessly puts them together as coherent articles.
There is an advantage in writing in blocks. You can pre-write them. I know Tim uses Roam Research to take notes. Roam Research allows you to take notes in the dot-point format only. Tim skillfully uses the notes he collects in his articles. Some of them he reuses multiple times, but you won’t even notice because it fits within the context.
Block format is also good for embedding stories. For example, he tells the following story in the middle of an article:
Author Ryan Holiday told the story of buying the book “Meditations” by Marcus Aurelius at age 19.
There was an option at the time to get the book for free online. Ryan chose to pay for a copy and get a decent translation of it in modern English.
The decision seemed tiny.
But years later, he became obsessed with stoicism thanks to this $20 investment.
Now he’s built a multi-million-dollar career out of stoicism.
He has already told two stories before this one and then there is one more in the last third of the article.
Isn’t that cool?
Stories make the articles interesting. And they also make the articles less dense, giving the readers breathing space.
He spends more time on the headings than on the body of the articles.
His headings are brilliant. They are not the clickbaity. They are not even the ones with the highest score on the heading analyzers (I don’t know whether he runs them past an analyzer or not).
Instead, his headings are long and reader-centric. He has many bases on personal stories and lessons learned from them.
Here, have a look at a few of them:
The #1 Way to Succeed as an Online Writer Is to Stop Playing It Safe
Never Underestimate Someone Who Practices Self-Education in Their Free Time
The (Realistic) Way to Go from $0 to 7-Figures Online in 365 Days
Today I Lost $6000 on a Rogue Accountant. Here’s How *Not* to Get Screwed by Strangers.
Workplace Principles I Know at 36, I Wish I Had Known at 21
He has an ambition and a drive to become world-class in at least one thing.
None of the above things would have worked had he not had the ambition and the discipline to become a world-class player.
At age 12, he decided that he wanted to be world-class at one thing.
He chose drumming. He went all in for that and found a teacher drummer who trained him as if he’d become a navy seal.
Learning from him put me in a constant state of overwhelm.
As he grew up, Tim grew out of drumming. But he didn’t forget his trainer’s weird way of training him. When he chose to write as his vocation, he applied everything he learned as a drummer to writing.
Today he is in the top 1% of writers in the world.
Without that ambition and discipline, he wouldn’t have been able to be a world-class writer in less than 8 years.
Closing Remark
It took me 57 minutes to write this article, along with pulling out quotes and links, 10 minutes to edit it and 3 minutes to select an image and add a footer.
I have not reached the state of writing and scheduling 5 articles in one day yet, but I am sure if I continue at it, I will be able to, with a few weeks of practice.
I may not have Tim’s trainer to coach me, but I have six decades of life experience to draw from. If I am able to write and schedule 5 article in a day, it will be a great achievement for me.
Thank you, Tim, for giving me something to strive for.