15 Things I Learned in My First Year of Writing
Last year I set a goal to write one article per month. While that doesn’t sound like much, it was a daunting goal for someone who had never written an article before.
Sure, I had written dozens of book reviews, but there is something uniquely horrifying about birthing your own ideas into the world — publishing them for the world to see, critique, and judge.
I’m happy to say I surpassed my goal, and writing has become much easier the more I’ve done it. I’ve gleaned insights from other writers, consumed numerous books about the creative process, and learned from experience by writing articles and seeing which ones connect with readers.
These are the top lessons I’ve learned about writing this past year:
1. Writers write.
“Lots of people want to be the noun without doing the verb.” -Austin Kleon
Maybe you’re someone who has always wanted to write, but you’ve never actually written anything. You aspire to become an author, but you haven’t yet taken the plunge.
That was me one year ago. One of my best friends called me out when I told him I wanted to be a writer but hadn’t written anything yet.
His thoughtful response: “I don’t know much about writing, but what I do know is that if you want to be a writer, you have to write.”
Boom.
I wanted to be the noun (writer) without doing the verb (writing). I wanted the status without putting in the hours.
That’s not how it works. Writers write.
Even one article per month is better than nothing. That’s how I started, and I’ve slowly increased my output from there. You need to start somewhere.
2. Getting started is the most important part.
“We don’t tell ourselves, ‘I’m never going to write my symphony.’ Instead we say, ‘I’m going to write my symphony; I’m just going to start tomorrow.’” -Steven Pressfield
In college, I used to joke with friends that I was halfway done writing a paper as soon as I had typed my name at the top of the page.
There is magic in just getting the wheels moving. Ideas are worth nothing until they’re turned into action. You must turn your thoughts into words.
Get started. Do it today.
3. You will be tempted to say 100 things, but you can only say 1 thing.
“When you write a story, you’re telling yourself the story. When you rewrite, your main job is taking out all the things that are not the story.” -John Gould
Last year I invited my friend Dan to breakfast to ask what he’s learned from writing various books and articles.
His advice: “When you’re writing, you will want to say one hundred things, but you need to say just one. Don’t try to say too much in one article.”
I’ve returned to that advice dozens of times as I noticed myself trying to cram a million thoughts into a single article.
Recently, I remembered Dan’s advice while writing an article about my favorite books of 2018. After an hour of writing, I looked down at what I had written and realized I had spent four paragraphs raging about how social media distracts people from doing more important things like reading.
After I realized I had diverted from the main topic of the article, I promptly opened a new tab, cut and pasted my social media diatribe into a new post, and started working on the social media article as a standalone piece.
As a writer, if you lose focus, your audience will lose interest.
Prune anything that doesn’t drive home your core message.
4. Often you won’t know what you want to say until you start writing.
“Writing is an act of discovering what you think and what you believe.” -Daniel Pink
In the story above, I didn’t know that I wanted to write about social media until I sat down and started writing.
Sometimes we buy into the myth that every “real” writer works from a meticulous outline (either on paper or in their head) and the words flow out in brilliant prose.
Bullshit.
It doesn’t work like that (at least for most people), and that’s okay. Writing is a process of self-discovery. The very act of writing unlocks your ideas and passions.
5. You can find inspiration everywhere.
“So much of writing is about sitting down and doing it every day, and so much of it is about getting into the custom of taking in everything that comes along, seeing it all as grist for the mill.” -Anne Lamott
When I first started writing, I was worried I would burn through all of my good ideas in a few months and run out of articles to write.
The opposite happened. Once I started writing, I began thinking like a writer. I started seeing inspiration everywhere.
A conversation with a friend about my reading habits turned into an article about the techniques I use to remember what I read. A few tough conversations at work inspired an article about how to deliver effective feedback. An observation on a Hawaiian vacation provided the insight I needed to finish an article about unhealthy phone habits.
Now I have a notebook loaded with ideas for future articles.
Rest assured, there are far more ideas than you or I could ever write about. The key is to begin writing, which will rewire your brain to look for source material everywhere in your daily life.
6. Sometimes you will spend thirty minutes on a single sentence.
“Remember that bad writers think that writing is easy; good writers think writing is hard, and I think there is a lesson in there somewhere.” -Bill Glavin
Some days, writing is easy. I sit at my computer and my fingers deftly translate my thoughts into words.
Other days, I sit down to write and nothing comes easily. Every sentence looks awkward. I spend hours reworking a single idea, making incremental improvements until I’m finally satisfied.
In short, writing is extremely difficult. It’s much harder than I expected.
And yet, it’s also much more fulfilling than I expected. Although it’s not fun to rewrite the same sentence dozens of times, the final output makes the endeavor worthwhile. The challenge creates deeper meaning and satisfaction.
7. It takes a lot of work to make writing look effortless.
“You’d be surprised how much it costs to look this cheap.” -Dolly Parton
High school students read the work of authors like Hemingway and Orwell, then question why those authors are highly esteemed. After all, their writing looks so elementary — so simple.
That’s the point.
Your job as a writer is to make life as easy as possible for your readers, which requires a lot of hard work. Put in the time to save them time.
8. Don’t use fancy words. Stick with your standard vocabulary.
“Classic writing, with its assumption of equality between writer and reader, makes the reader feel like a genius. Bad writing makes the reader feel like a dunce.” -Steven Pinker
Don’t needlessly inject long, fancy words into your writing. Your job is not to make yourself look smart.
The best writers are so good you don’t even know they’re there. Their words are so simple and precise that you don’t stumble over them. The writer fades into the background.
In his book The Sense of Style, Steven Pinker encourages writers to think of themselves as a clear window that the reader peers through to watch the action unfold. The fancier the words, the foggier the window.
As a reader, think about the types of words that make you stumble. Personally, I trip over foreign words (c’est la vie), long words (parsimonious), medical words (myocardial infarction), and words that people don’t commonly say aloud (bibliophile).
Avoid words like that. Substitute simpler words or phrases that adequately relay the concept, such as that’s life, frugal, heart attack, and book lover.
9. You have brilliance inside you.
“You don’t have to be a genius to make genius — you just have to have small moments of brilliance and edit out the boring stuff.” -Ryan Holiday
Before I started writing, I’d look at the work of writers I admired and think to myself, “That person is a genius. I could never write like that.”
Then something clicked. I realized those authors had spent countless hours editing out the crap from anything they had written. After those edits, all that remained was brilliant work.
While I still feel that many writers possess otherworldly powers, I now recognize that with enough dedication, time, and editing, it’s possible for anyone to sound like a genius.
10. Beware the curse of knowledge. Explain concepts incrementally.
“The curse of knowledge is the single best explanation I know of why good people write bad prose.” -Steven Pinker
Chip and Dan Heath’s book Made to Stick introduced me to the curse of knowledge. In their words: “Once you know something, it’s hard to imagine not knowing it. And that, in turn, makes it harder for you to communicate clearly to a novice.”
The curse of knowledge is the bane of every teacher, salesperson, subject matter expert, public speaker, and writer. We forget what it was like to first learn something, which inhibits us from articulating concepts in a simple way.
Break complex ideas down into smaller chunks. Avoid industry jargon, undefined acronyms, and unexplained assumptions. Use analogies and metaphors whenever possible to explain topics in terms your audience will understand.
Start in the shallow end of the pool, then gradually lead your readers into the deep end.
Remember that although you have a narrative in your head, your audience cannot see that narrative. They can only see what is on the page.
11. Utilize strong verbs and short sentences.
“The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak.” -Hans Hofmann
Bernadine Healy served as the first female director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). As described in Malcolm Gladwell’s “Revisionist History” podcast, Healy faced many struggles as a woman in the medical field.
Her Harvard Medical School class was 90 percent male. According to Healy, “Women had to have, I think, better academic credentials and often go through much tougher screening” in order to succeed.
Healy’s secret weapon? “Strong verbs, short sentences.” She propelled her career with strong, concise language that emphasized her confidence and competence.
Healy’s advice applies to both the written and spoken word. Long sentences confuse readers, and weak verbs bore them. Avoid both in your writing.
12. Reading is fuel for writing.
“If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot. There’s no way around these two things that I’m aware of, no shortcut.” -Stephen King
The best writers are voracious readers. They consume books to learn from other talented writers. They pay attention to how those authors build suspense, resolve conflict, and simplify complexity.
Reading great writing is an author’s way of tuning their instrument. It helps you calibrate and recognize the sound of great writing.
Even reading bad writing is worthwhile, as it helps you identify things you want to avoid in your own work.
Determine your appropriate balance between creation and consumption. Consuming others’ work will give you inspiration, while creating your own will help you learn from personal experience. You must do both in order to be successful.
13. Readers want stories that are honest and vulnerable.
“If something inside you is real, we will probably find it interesting, and it will probably be universal. So you must risk placing real emotion at the center of your work. Write straight into the emotional center of things. Write toward vulnerability…Risk being unliked. Tell the truth as you understand it. If you’re a writer, you have a moral obligation to do this. And it is a revolutionary act — truth is always subversive.” -Anne Lamott
Stories are memorable and relatable. People learn best through stories, and if you want to succeed as a writer, you will need to become a master storyteller.
The best stories are not only honest, but also vulnerable. They serve as a window into the soul of you or your characters.
If you write nonfiction, incorporate your own experiences into your writing. Be honest about your struggles and what you learned from them. For example, my top-performing blog article described lessons that others could learn from my past leadership mistakes. Why did that article perform so well? Because vulnerability and honesty are compelling. Your readers want to hear something authentic.
If you write fiction, be true to your characters. Spend enough time with each of them to know how they think and how they would respond in a given situation. If your protagonist is a hardened criminal who has murdered his way to the top of a drug cartel, he likely would not spare the life of a witness. Your personal preference for a happy ending is less important than your mandate to be true to your characters and what they would actually do. Let the bullet fly.
14. 2nd draft = 1st draft - 10%
“Creation is a two step process. First, you add, and add and add. Then, you subtract, and subtract and subtract. Your work is complete when there is nothing left to remove.” -David Perell
In his book On Writing, Stephen King suggests that your second draft should be roughly ten percent shorter than your first draft. Editing is a process of addition by subtraction.
Eliminate tangents that detract from the primary purpose of the story. Shorten sections that take too long to develop. Omit needless words.
It is remarkable how long editing and rewriting can take. Harper Lee spent over two years reworking To Kill a Mockingbird after receiving recommended edits from her editor. The result was a timeless classic.
In a rare situation, readers had the opportunity to see what the book would have been like if Lee hadn’t spent those two years editing her work. After the author’s death, HarperCollins published Go Set a Watchman, which was allegedly Lee’s earlier draft of To Kill a Mockingbird.
Critics panned Go Set a Watchman. Alexandra Petri from The Washington Post ridiculed the book: “It is an inchoate jumble…Go Set a Watchman is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a good, or even a finished book…[T]he writing is laughably bad.” Maureen Corrigan from NPR called it “a mess that makes us reconsider a masterpiece.”
For Harper Lee, two years of rewriting separated a mess from a masterpiece.
15. Seek feedback from others.
“Remember: When people tell you something’s wrong or doesn’t work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.” -Neil Gaiman
You cannot effectively edit your own work. Only someone with fresh eyes can identify gaps in your rationale and instances of the curse of knowledge.
No, you don’t need to hire a professional editor. You often don’t even need to find someone who is a great writer. You just need somebody with a critical eye who is comfortable telling you honestly where you can improve.
Identify one or two friends who are willing to read your articles before you post them. Their feedback will be immensely valuable, and you can always decide if and how to act upon that feedback.
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