Aug 9, 2012 / Posts We Loved

What Makes a Post Freshly Press-able? Literature and Libation

Every day, 19 WordPressers are featured on the Freshly Pressed section of WordPress.com. And every day, many more wonder, “What do I have to do to get Freshly Pressed?”

Well, it’s time to reveal what the folks who push the launch button are thinking. Each week, a member of our editorial team will do a close-up on one post and why we thought it was Press-worthy. We hope we can provide insight into the process and give you tips and tools to make your blog the best it can be.
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Before we delve into today’s post, there are a few preliminaries to get out of the way:

  1. We don’t actually get to push a launch button, although that would be awesome.
  2. There are half a million of you and a handful of us, and we’re scouring the blogosphere day in and day out. If we don’t find you, it’s nothing personal – promise. Keep writing, and we’ll keep looking.
  3. We’re real people with different perspectives and tastes, so we’re drawn to different content. And we love feedback, so if a Freshly Pressed post feels really off-base to you, let us know!
  4. We do not accept bribes, although that may just be because no one has offered us enough gold bullion… yet.

Last week, Oliver at Literature and Libation made it to Freshly Pressed with Craft and Draft: Character Counts. If you haven’t wandered over there to read it, you should remedy that immediately (especially if you’re a fiction writer).

Go ahead, I’ll wait.

There are lots of reasons to love this post, but the big three are:

  • The content was informative and entertaining.

Two-Headed Humanioid PirateLots of Freshly Pressed readers are themselves writers, and we thought this post – a tutorial on the mechanics of character development, with homemade Lego illustrations – would speak to you. The figures morphed as the easy-to-follow post took us though each step of the character creation, refinement and revision process.

The accompanying commentary was clear, well written, and made us laugh hard enough to shoot coffee out of our collective nose. On his newly-born character, left, he writes:

I mean, it is kind of identifiable as some sort of humanoid, but there are some major problems here. One: his period-inappropriate tri-corn hat is on fire. Two: He has two heads, one of which is completely black and has no face…

This is an extreme example, but my point remains. It is very difficult to properly build your character the first time around. He’s going to come out with conflicting motivations, bad dialogue, missing limbs, and possibly even a flaming hat.

See what we mean?

  • The photos were genius and filled out the content.

Many posts can benefit from an image; they add another layer of texture to your words. Photos also help break up a longer post, and are useful for clarifying complex or intangible points. Oliver’s Lego shots took the potentially ephemeral process of developing a fictional character and grounded it in something nearly all of us can identify. Plus, they were cute as heck.

  • The organization and layout made reading easy.

Reading dense blocks of text is difficult enough on the printed page, and even more so on a screen. Smaller paragraphs help readers scan more easily, while headings make a longer post digestible and keep readers from getting lost in your content.

Oliver took full advantage of both guidelines. Paragraphs were short and focused on a single point. Headings broke the process down into four discrete components.

What did you think of this pick? Will you be reading along with Craft and Draft?

For another glimpse into what makes for great Freshly Pressed content, check out the roundup of July’s top 10 posts over at the News Blog or read So You Want to Be Freshly Pressed?

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  1. Just so you know, this is not a sly attempt at getting wordpress recognition and a freshly press… but considering you guys dug this article on character development, I figured you would eat up the post I did on plot construction. Hopefully someone reading this comment sees it and finds it useful. There are no pictures of lego (yet..) so some of you wordpressesers might shy away, but here it is:

    http://endofthegame.net/2011/10/20/plotconstruction/

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      1. Thanks for the critique, it is meant for all writers, but I can see how it would be of most use to beginning writers. I feel it shares more insight on the writing process than the above freshly pressed post though, as it actually outlines a method for creating plot in fiction, whereas the freshly pressed post pretends to give advice, but is really just an excuse to be cute and funny.

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  4. I’m just wondering: what do you do with posts in another language, like Dutch for example? There’s also a Dutch version, so are there Dutch collegues who are doing this?

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    1. As mentioned above, unfortunately not for the time being. Foreign-language blogs are chosen based on stats. But figuring out how to change that is definitely in the pipeline.

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  8. Freshly pressed is for me like an advertisement : many will see what I posted . But I have been never in this part , so I try to get more views by leaving comments to get feedback , or , create tags for searching machines like google . But in the end it’s not how you write a post pimped with hightech high res pics , but were you are talking about . One of my sites is about old photo’s from archives from my neighboorhood , and that attracks hundreds of people . Means for me a job well done 🙂

    Like

  9. ‘no one has offered us enough gold boullion yet’

    Lovely concept – is this where you mix up heavy metals into a French broth! (I guess you meant bullion but it’s much better if you read it as bouillon.)

    Sadly though I’m still not going to offer you any.

    Like

  16. I didn’t hate Craft and Draft at all, but it isn’t the sort of post I enjoy or need. It just wasn’t a kind of humor that makes my beverage shoot out of my nose. And I actually did have trouble reading through the text, probably because it felt like an assignment since I wasn’t enjoying it.

    Like

  17. I’m a guy who writes about society and man’s way of thinking.
    Is there any advice on how to make long and serious reads seem as attractive as shorter and less serious ones?
    Looking forward to read more from the daily post! 🙂

    Like

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  20. I’m curious to know whether the person or people who choose the Freshly Pressed posts take into consideration the rest of the chosen blogger’s blog content? Because many times when I’ve visited Freshly Pressed posts which were otherwise fine, the rest of the content was decidedly ‘off’. I’ve even seen blogs that I would (personally at least) regard as ‘mature’ and that didn’t strike me as being suitable for general readership in their general content with the one Freshly Pressed post being quite out of character – in other words, not very much like the usual content of that blog. I’ve often wondered about contacting someone about it, but didn’t know if I should.

    The other thing I’m concerned about is that – while I know it’s lovely (usually) for the person on the receiving end – many bloggers that I know have been Freshly Pressed two or more times. Is that really fair on the bloggers who never get chosen at all?

    As for ways of choosing it, it seems to be based on tags, so that rules me out as a choice, unfortunately, as my tags and categories rarely seem to show up on the topics page or even wordpress.com search, despite my using pretty normal ones. Oh well… back to the drawing board! 😉

    Like