How To Write More While Getting Better At It

After yesterday’s momentarily lapse in confidence and resulting self-flagellation, I decided that it’s not acceptable to post the silly little “placeholder” posts just to say I’ve written something for the blog.

Of course, that’s not true; my blog, I can say whatever I want, etc.

However…

The whole idea of blogging again was to solve the issues I’ve been facing of late;

• No direction
• A desire to do better, “level up” etc.
• There’s no meaning to my anonymous work

So, allowing myself to be lazy (and write little posts) while I have the solution in front of me, (relaunch the blog that changed my life by forcing me to solve problems and share the solutions) is counterproductive to the overall goals.

In shorter words; if you’re going to write crap, why write at all?

The answer isn’t to stop writing though.

How To Level Up

Just this morning, I got sent a “thank you” message on a writer’s discord I’m a part of. A writer told me that my advice about templates and generators for writing had helped them immensely and “changed their life.”

You’re welcome.

This led me to remember a couple of things:

1. When on my game, I’m an incredibly prolific and, by-the-numbers, powerful writer
2. Most of my effectiveness was based on a couple of principles

So I spent about 30 minute this morning writing a list of things I could do to get over myself and start writing good material – and lots of it – again.

The rules I gave myself were:

• There’s no such thing as a bad idea when you’re brainstorming
• No excuses – we can’t do this, we’ll do this later, but…
• We need big ideas, small processes
• The time to start is now

There were a few other guidelines, but the basic gist was, “You’re a writer. Start writing now. Write down things we can do immediately and how we can get them done. And don’t make any excuses about what we can and can’t do.”

Here are a few ideas. (I’m racing to write this and I know the above needs fleshing out and explaining. I’ll come to that later.)

The Battle Is Knowing What To Write, And…

The advice I gave to the writer above is two-fold: Most writer’s block can be solved by knowing what you’re going to write and how to write it.

Ergo, if you suffer writer’s block, it’s not usually a crisis of imagination like you think it is. Be honest with yourself, you have plenty of ideas. More ideas than you’ll ever have time to explore. (This isn’t just limited to writing.)

So what you’re really struggling with is knowing what to write, as in, turning those ideas that obviously exist into a piece of writing, and knowing how to write it, as in, quite literally putting the words on the page in the best way. (Or, any way.)

Let’s talk about learning challenges.

Learning Challenges

Throughout the history of the blog, from the very first few articles in 2016 through to one I wrote last week, I’ve focused on a couple of things:

1. Learning new things and sharing what I’ve learned on the blog
2. Finding the world’s great challenges as well as creating my own

Within the discipline of writing, there are a lot of challenges you can do.

I’m personally doing the Ray Bradbury Challenge this year, and on my little brainstorming session from earlier, I wrote two things:

1. I can use this for blog fodder – write a weekly, “What I’ve read list”
2. I could put together a product that goes through the history of all the stuff and turn that into something useful for everyone

The latter, it’s a lot of work; the thing with reading a lot of short stories, essays etc. is that hunting down good ones and putting them together is a pain, and it’s even more work to have it have a useful direction. At the moment, I’m just reading randomly and it’s not a useful learning experience.

Back to the point of the article; if you want to get better at knowing what to write or the skill of writing, there are a ton of challenges to set yourself. (Or, not saying you can count on me – but I’ll put some together with the Vault bits as I do them myself.)

Writing Challenges (Work)

Learning is all good, but I’ve found that it’s very easy to get caught in the trap of always wanting to learn more before you start. This is not only unhelpful, but entirely counterproductive.

I’d argue there are two approaches to fixing this:

1. Every “learning challenge” you undertake must contain an element of output – as in, learning how to dance should end up with you being able to go to a dance social and dance, not just knowing the steps
2. Or, every learning challenge you undertake should have a corresponding challenge that focuses entirely on action

So, for instance, there are two examples that come to mind. Let’s say you want to write highly effective sales copy. If you just write a sales letter every day, (like I’ve recommended in the past) you won’t get very far.

Why?

Because you need to learn how to write as well as actually do the writing.

On the other hand, reading fifty books on writing sales letters will get you nowhere fast either.

So, you couple a reading challenge and a writing challenge.

And, similarly, this works for writing fiction, photography, going to the gym, cooking high-end food, and so on.

Final Thoughts

This approach doesn’t work for everyone, but you’ll find that if you’re somewhat cognitively built as I am, that the approach above is a surefire way to get more material to write about than you will ever have the time to type out. Built into this system is also the fact that you’ll force yourself into becoming a better, more productive writer as well.

More on this to follow.