Working On Your Writing Weaknesses
Today’s article is going to be about something that we can all do as writers. It’s my process for getting better at writing aspects which I am pretty flawed in.
It’s in five steps:
- Recognise the flaw.
- Find good examples and hand copy them.
- Backwards engineer to create your own.
- Create a ton of examples.
- Integrate into your actual work.
Those are pretty straightforward and you could probably just stop reading now, but for the sake of explanation, I’ll go through them all in detail.
Recognise The Flaws In Your Writing
The first thing to do when it comes to improving is to find out what you’re doing wrong. This will be an individual challenge, so I can’t give too many pointers about specific things. However, the process will be the same. Generally, I recognise weaknesses in a few ways.
Firstly, if there’s anything I’m uncomfortable with, I’ll make a note of it mentally as I do it. For instance, I’m not so great at writing dialogue. It’s something I’ll avoid whenever I can. This is true of writing dialogue in fiction and non-fiction.
Secondly, I’ll make note of things if they’re constantly coming up during my brief editing process. This tends to be simple things like spelling mistakes or sentence ordering, but you’ll have your own particular weaknesses that you can find. At this point, we’re not worrying about correcting these things, though with simple stuff, you’ll find that just being aware of them is probably enough to eliminate them.
Thirdly, I’ll go back after a period of time and read older works. When you’ve written something and it’s fresh in your mind, you won’t notice problems with the style. That’s because you’ve written it and you can still remember the thoughts you were trying to express, and that’s what you’ll read as opposed to the words on the page. After the writing has left your conscious mind, you won’t have this problem.
Find Good Examples And Hand Copy Them
In most academic and creative writing courses, they’ll tell you that the best way to improve is to read a lot. Whilst reading a lot is good for you and you should read a lot, it’s not going to help you correct your mistakes. It’s too passive.
The absolute best way to correct your mistakes along these lines is to copy out what you’re reading. If you’ve got an author whose style you like, or a particular thing you’re rubbish at (such as dialogue, or calls to action,) then copy good examples.
Do this until you can imagine the good examples coming from your own brain. Then move on. Side note: This is a wishy-washy description, but if you hand-copy stuff on a regular basis, you’ll understand what I mean. You internalise things after a while. Just do it and see.
Backwards Engineer What You’ve Learned To Create Your Own Framework
Most writing follows a particular structure. Whether it’s an advert or a novel, there’ll be elements which are always present.
If you’ve done the above, you’ll have internalised what makes good writing good on a subconscious level. This does not mean you’re at the point where you can do it yourself. You’re going to understand the language and be able to ape it, but you need to learn the structure and how to apply it to your own work as well.
The way to do this is to take a piece of work, and create an “homage” to it. If you’re a copywriter, then literally take a sales letter from your favourite guy and create it anew. If you write fiction, then do the same with a short story. (you could do it with a novel, but it’ll take forever.)
So, if you sell WordPress themes, take a sales letter from Gary Halbert and recreate it but selling a WordPress theme instead.
After this, you’ll have the basics of everything you need to rebuild a better quality writing piece without the mistakes. Move on to the next step.
Create A Ton Of Examples Using That Framework
Practice makes perfect. If you were terrible at writing calls to action, then by following the steps above, you’ve got all the knowledge and skill to correct that problem forever.
Spend a couple of hours sitting and writing different calls to action (or, whatever your weakness is) until it’s internalised. Don’t worry about these examples being the best things in the world – it’s practice. Do it and do it again until you can write these things at a natural speed.
You’re almost there at this point.
Integrate It Into Your Actual Work
At this point, you’ve learned about a weakness. You’ve found out how great people do things and internalised both their language and their structuring. You’ve then written out ten, twenty or more examples and made the new skill your own.
There’s not much to it now. You put these things into your work, and treat them as you would any other aspect of your writing.
If you’re unsure as to whether you’ve gotten rid of your weakness, you can always split-test at this point, and see which things you’ve done succeed or fail. Then analyse them accordingly.
You might be tempted to do this without following the other steps. That’s a mistake. If you are rubbish at writing a call to action and you split test one call to action that gets you a 0.001% conversion rate versus one which gives you a 0.002% conversion rate, one might be better than the other, but they’re both rubbish anyway.
Final Words
The great thing about being a writer is that there’s no end to learning and improving. Whilst that might seem like a terrible thing, it’s really not.
For instance, if I’d decided to be a basketballer, I could work on my skills every single day forever, and I’d still be terrible, because I’m not 6’6 and gifted with amazing hand-eye co-ordination.
On the other hand, writing is different; there are very few obstacles for the average guy or girl when it comes to improving.
Also, you’ll find that with writing, you can make incremental gains as well as exponential ones. Sometimes, you’ll go through the above process and your writing will look slightly more polished. Sometimes, you’ll go through this process and you’ll find your writing is on another level entirely once you’ve integrated a new aspect to it.