I’ve been writing since 2020. It took me years and two viral posts to understand why some stories land and most don’t.
This is what I found.
There are exactly two things that make a story impossible to stop reading. Just two. Everything else, your vocabulary, your structure, even your grammar is secondary.
The first is Connection.
Connection is when your reader finishes your line and remembers their own moment. You didn’t give them information. You triggered a memory they already had.
When I wrote about Sualeh Asif, I wasn’t really writing about Sualeh. I was writing about every Pakistani who has ever watched someone succeed abroad and felt that complicated mix of pride and pain. Readers didn’t share that post because of Sualeh. They shared it because it said something they had been feeling but couldn’t put into words.
That is connection. Your story becomes a mirror.
The second is Emotion.
Not describing feelings. The specific detail that carries the feeling without you naming it.
“I felt ashamed” is information.
“She walked home alone and we celebrated” is emotion.
The reader feels the shame themselves. You didn’t tell them to feel it. The detail did the work.
Now here is the part people get wrong.
Both of these things, connection and emotion can only come from one place. Your real experiences. Your actual memories. The specific uncomfortable details that only you carry.
This is why I want to address something honestly. People comment on my posts that I use AI to write. Yes, I do. For grammar and English corrections. English is not my first language. Before AI, I used Google Translate. This has been my process since 2020 and I have no shame about it.
But let me explain what AI actually is in my writing process.
Imagine you have a car. But you decide to walk everywhere because you want to feel like you truly earned the journey. That is not discipline. That is ego. The car exists. Use it. Just understand one thing, the car takes you to the destination. It does not decide where you are going.
AI is my car for grammar. The destination, the real memory, the specific detail, the emotion that only I carry, that comes from me. I write my points first. The uncomfortable ones. The ones with real names and real moments. Then I clean the language after. The story is mine. The grammar check is the tool.
Here is what happens when you do it the other way. When you hand AI your topic and ask it to write. It will give you something neat, structured and completely empty. Because AI does not have your memories. It cannot feel guilty about something that happened in sixth grade. It cannot carry the weight of a real moment. That weight is exactly what makes people read till the end.
Here is something I realized recently.
Your goal as a storyteller is not what people reply to you. Your goal is that they read.
Some people who found my posts came to argue. Some came to abuse. But every single one of them read till the last line before they typed their comment. Even people who came angry finished the story. That is the real measure of whether your storytelling worked.
A share is great. A comment is great. But a stranger who could not stop reading even when they wanted to, that is the achievement.
So how do you build this?
Practice. Not practice writing perfectly. Practice writing honestly.
Sit with your real moments. The ones you are not sure you should share. The ones with specific names and specific details and specific feelings you can still feel. Write those points yourself before you use any tool. Let the mess stay in. The mess is where the emotion lives.
Connection and emotion cannot be prompted. They can only be remembered.
Your memories are your real competitive advantage as a storyteller. Nobody else has them.
Umar H.
Originally posted on Facebook on 28 April 2026.
