Being a Writer is not What you Think – It’s What You do With What you Think

Anyone who can write is a writer.

Being an author is a different story. To be an author, you have to create compelling work.

To create compelling work, you have to spark emotions and cultivate thought-provoking ideas that stir the imagination of your readers.

•  Sparking emotions is a skill that can be perfected through practice.
• Cultivating ideas is likewise an on-going process of refinement.

Anyone who eventually goes on to become an established author has spent a good deal of time writing, honing ideas, and ramping their skillset.

The idea of talent is an illusion that can be as comforting as self-defeating. There is no substitute for hard work.

Keeping this in mind, how should you go about raising the bar on your writing? We have some useful advice along these lines.

[Table of Contents]

-Start collecting and refining your best ideas

-Don’t aim for perfection; aim for completion

-Practice purposeful, deliberate writing in response to a prompt

-Muscle memory and the 10,000 hours road to mastery

-Think about how to best express your ideas before starting

-Be relentless when revising your work, but not unreasonable

Start collecting and refining your best ideas

If you’ve read our free Writer’s Block Course (and if you haven’t, you may want to), you know how strongly we emphasize the habit of routinely collecting ideas, as you go about your everyday life.

By keeping a good stock of interesting and thought-provoking ideas to work from, you will find it much easier to do the writing, whenever you need to.

One of the main reasons that most often frustrate potential writers is the enormous pressure of the blank page.

A simple way to minimize this unpleasant feeling is to collect material whenever inspiration strikes, and jot it down for future reference.

By keeping a good stock of interesting and thought-provoking ideas to work from, you will find it much easier to do the writing, whenever you need to.

By doing this, you will be able to separate the creative side of writing from the practical side of writing.

There are three key benefits to following this approach:

•  You will start looking at everyday life with a new, fresh perspective by allowing inspiration to strike naturally without having to exert pressure upon yourself. Instead, you will start simply seizing inspiration when it happens.
• You will train your mind to produce worthwhile ideas, that you can scribble down very quickly, no matter what is the time or place when they manifest (your smartphone will be a valuable digital notepad since you already carry it around all the time).
• You will be able to write more productively since you can then train yourself to actually sit down and write without putting much thought into it. When you have a good archive of creative ideas to draw from, you can then focus on developing the mechanical skill of just doing the work.

By following this approach, you will actually be able to tear down the mental and emotional blockages keeping from doing your best work.

All too often, creative people are their worst critics. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, because it means you will keep refining your work and making it ever stronger.

But it can be a crippling affair if your perfectionism keeps you from actually doing the work. As the saying goes “great is the enemy of good“.

A simple work-around to this all too a common problem:

Don’t aim for perfection; aim for completion

If you keep hoping you’ll do excellent writing every single time, you will inevitably frustrate yourself. It’s much wiser to create a writing habit that allows you to get into the flow effortlessly.

By keeping a repertoire of ideas you’re looking forward to fleshing out, you will be able to pick and choose whatever you feel like writing. So you can focus on just doing it.

If you want to create a writing habit that allows you to easily sit down and focus, it’s all about the repetition.

From this perspective, you should keep your inner critic aside whenever you sit down to write (leave that for the subsequent revision process), and instead just focus on completing the present task.

Embrace an iterative mindset. Don’t aim to get everything perfect; instead, aim to tread each step in the process the best you can.

Just get in the habit of fleshing out your ideas in writing, on command. The trick to achieving this skill is to focus on completing the writing first and leave the editing and proof-reading for another time.

Remember, your ideas are meant to be the real substance of your writing. Therein lies the nutritional value of your work. That which sticks to the mind of readers and becomes part of them.

The actual words you use and how you put them together, are ultimately superficial flourishings.

Yes, these flourishings matter. But also yes, when there’s a solid structure in place it’s much easier to do the flourishings confidently and effectively.

Remember, your ideas are meant to be the real substance of your writing. Therein lies the nutritional value of your work. That which sticks to the mind of readers and becomes part of them.

Think of your writing as though you were building a house. The ideas are the base structure, and the actual words are just the plaster covering the walls.

When you have the structure firmly established in place, all that is left is to attach plaster across all surfaces.

The notable benefit of collecting your ideas when you’re not writing is, therefore, allowing you to compartmentalize the finer creative aspects of writing from the practical aspect of actually getting the writing done.

By following this approach, you will gradually find it easier, more pleasurable, and even relaxing to just go through the motions of filling up the structure of your ideas with adequate words and sentences.

However, it’s really important to make sure you are actually putting that plaster on the wall – and not dripping it all over the place.

Here’s you you can achieve this when it comes to composing text:

Practice purposeful, deliberate writing in response to a prompt

The effectiveness of a piece of writing is a function of the purposefulness of that piece of writing.

Casual writing can be very relaxing, and it’s very recommendable as self-expression, for a pass-time, or even as a therapeutic tool.

Journaling can be very fulfilling in an of itself, and it’s a step in the right direction for anyone who wants to succeed in their writing.

But if you truly want to build up some muscle as a writer, you will have to go beyond casual writing – you will need to start practicing the art of writing in response to a prompt.

In other words, you need to practice deliberate writing.

You have to think about how to best convey your idea through a piece of writing; you want to then do your best effort in that direction, and by the end, you need to evaluate how effectively you addressed the prompt.

It’s not too different from the kind of assignments you received as you went through school, really. Except now, you have to take it up upon yourself to be both the student as well as the teacher.

As you consistently practice writing in response to a prompt, you’ll find it increasingly easier and enjoyable to articulate the ideas you keep collecting.

Working on blog posts like this one can be a great way to improve your ability to keep consistently refining your purposeful writing.

There are many other options available, really – a personal favorite is social network Quora, since its “question and answers” format along with the quick feedback from users can be very useful to help you discern how effectively you’re managing to convey your ideas.

As you consistently practice writing in response to a prompt, you’ll find it increasingly easier and enjoyable to articulate the ideas you keep collecting.

Regularly practicing this skill will give you a sense of purpose and progress that will make you increasingly more confident in your writing.

It’s worth, however, to keep in mind this a gradual, painstaking process.

As such, you want to ideally stay focused on the practice, not as much as the outcome.

Simply put, regard each piece of writing you put together as a valuable training opportunity.

Muscle memory and the 10,000 hours road to mastery

In a previous article, we’ve already detailed the benefits of persistent practice.

It’s never enough to emphasize this aspect since it amounts to a sense of discipline and diligence that can take a while to take root in the psyche of a writer.

It’s also the very essence of what will allow you to keep ramping up your performance in writing, or in other skill you want to polish.

You may have heard about the concept of how it takes ten thousand hours of focused practice to develop mastery at any given still.

This may sound inspirational… until you do the calculations and realize that 10,000 hours is 1,250 days of consistently practicing 8 hours daily.

That’s nearly four years of full-time labor until a skill truly becomes second nature!

Granted, you don’t have to wait in all that time to do your best work. Sometimes, you just feel inspired and the writing flows. The ideas shine through naturally, and they connect to your readers.

But it’s best to think of these moments as strokes of beginner’s luck.

It will be around the 10,000 hours mark when you start feeling like your best work always flows out naturally, effortlessly, and consistently.

There is no other way to reach mastery of a craft than to practice, and practice consistently, and practice consistently with a focus on improving.

It will be around the 10,000 hours mark when you start feeling like your best work always flows out naturally, effortlessly, and consistently.

What we’re outlining here is a strategy that you can rely on to amass hours of practice without getting bogged down or distracted by your own feelings or expectations.

By taking the time to collect your ideas in advance and structure your writing before you start plastering words together,

you will then be able to approach the writing process more effectively, with minimal waste of time and energy. This will help you stay focused on the practice.

This approach won’t spare you from doing the work, but it will allow you to be much more effective and productive.

So when it comes to actually flesh out the ideas you’ve previously collected; when you start building a muscle through consistent practice; how do you keep raising the bar by weaving those ideas together ever more effectively?

There is actually a simple trick to help you structure your ideas more effectively:

Think about how to best express your ideas before starting

This is also a concept we’ve previously elaborated in detail on a previous article, and it pertains to the idea of crafting compelling outlines.

If your ideas are the structure of your writing, your outlines are the blueprint that allows you to put those ideas together.

It’s much easier to articulate your ideas before you actually start fleshing them out when the writing quickly gets unwieldy from its sheer volume.

To this effect, it can be useful to create a visual map elaborating on the sub-topics that comprise the actual idea. This is what is commonly known as an outline.

The concept here is to always start the writing process by articulating an idea into manageable sub-topics, rather than just plunging through the writing process haphazardly.

The real benefit of doing this is that it makes it dramatically easier to structure your reasoning, by starting with small chunks that look crystal clear in how they connect with one another.

When you decide to develop a new idea in writing, it’s best to begin by breaking it apart in small topics.

If your ideas are the structure of your writing, your outlines are the blueprint that allows you to put those ideas together.

This allows you to look at that idea from different angles until you find the best way to approach it and make your point very clear.

You will then be able to focus on elaborating each topic one at a time, so the final piece looks articulate and consistent while minimizing your struggle in making sure you express all your key points.

• By developing the habit of collecting your best ideas, you will always have interesting material to write about.
• By developing the habit of consistently fleshing out the ideas you’ve collected, you will find it easier to sit down and write.
• By developing the habit of writing from an outline, you will find the act of writing is simpler and more effective.

This workflow will help you find ideas you want to express, as well as making the writing process more seamless and enjoyable.

Is that all it takes to produce your best work? No, it’s only the beginning of the process.

If you follow this process you won’t have a finished product. You will have a diamond in the rough.

What follows next is that you will have to lapidate that diamond until it really shines.

Be relentless when revising your work, but be not unreasonable

It’s never about the words, or even how they’re put together. It’s really all about the ideas backing those words.

We sometimes think of writing as a superficial matter, and it’s anything but.

The actual words are just a gateway and avenue to expressing your ideas, and it’s ultimately the ideas that stick to the readers and work the magic.

So how do you make sure your writing has the intended effect of working magic upon your readers?

You start by making sure you are drawing from interesting and substantial ideas.

You practice consistently in fleshing out those ideas into a finished piece of writing.

You then proceed to polish that piece of writing until it’s as good as possible.

This may involve adding little tidbits here and there – but more often than not, it will involve hacking and slashing your own writing; trimming away the excess fat; polishing everything up to maximum clarity.

It’s not pleasant to hack and slash a text that you wrote. But it’s something you must be willing to do unapologetically if you want to keep raising the bar of your accomplishment.

You need to take every text you write and set it aside, leave it to rest for a little while.

Then you need to go back to it with fresh eyes while wearing your editorial cap.

You need to think along the lines “Is this as clear as I can make it? Is there a better way to express these ideas?”

While doing this, you must be willing to be ruthless and cut out entire paragraphs if they don’t add to the flow of the text.

It’s not pleasant to hack and slash a text that you wrote. But it’s something you must be willing to do unapologetically if you want to keep raising the bar of your accomplishment.

You must be willing to sacrifice entire paragraphs – entire sections, entire works if needed, under the spirit of surpassing yourself.

Think of it as sacrificing your work on the altar of your talent. It may be painful, it may raise unpleasant feelings, but it’s absolutely essential.

On the other hand, you also have to strike a balance that will keep you from obliterating your entire work and falling into creative depression.

It’s always worth keeping in mind that “great is an enemy of good”. At some point, you have to decide you have made a piece of writing as good as you could with what you knew at the time.

The next one will be better. It will be clearer, and stronger. Just as long as you keep collecting your ideas, and doing the work of writing through them, and then revise the whole thing ruthlessly. It’s all training.

You’re all the while learning to be the best writer you can be, through diligent practice and unwavering perseverance. Just stick to the road, keep on walking, and you will get somewhere nice.