What are some tips for advanced writers?
The tips in How can I improve my writing skills? are wonderful, but they are a starting point. Let's say that you're a competent writer (maybe even a bit more than just competent). How do you push your writing into "excellency" territory?
26 Answers
Venkatesh Rao
Updated 279w ago · Upvoted by Barry Saiff, 30+ years experience in technical communications, CEO of Saiff Solutions, Inc. and Sheri Fresonke Harper, Sheri started writing poetry 20 years ago and started taking courses through the University of Wash…
I just published a book and a friend, another book writer, privately complimented me on the "poetic grace" of my book. The comment made my day. So I'll take that as my claim to being an "medium advanced" writer.
But though I will offer some sincere tips here, I would never offer a writing class. Why? Because I am not trying to develop writing skills. I am trying to develop thinking skills.
The two are the same thing in beginner stage, but differ in the advanced stage, even though the medium remains the same for both (words).
So the first advanced writing skill is to recognize your natural talents and choose to either go with or against your grain.
Do you want to be a writer or a thinker? One lifetime normally isn't enough to be both.
Writers vs. Thinkers
You have to choose.
The divide between thinkers and writers is more important than the one between fiction and non-fiction writers. You could divide the world of advanced writers into a 2x2, based on whether they are prioritizing developing their thinking or their writing, and whether they are focusing on fiction or non-fiction.
My hypothesis (I haven't yet gotten to a stage where I can check this) is that it is easier to cross the fiction/non-fiction divide than it is to cross the writing-first/thinking first divide.
J. K. Rowling is a thinking-first fiction writer. David Foster Wallace was a writing-first fiction writer.
I am a decent thinking-first non-fiction writer. I'd say Marc Levinson, author of The Box is an good example of a really good thinking-first non-fiction writer.
The fourth quadrant is rather empty, since there aren't many writing-first nonfiction writers. Many academic analytical philosophers qualify, but their writing is not generally read by ordinary people.
I think I could pull off a decent pastiche of JKR (many people can and have), though I primarily write non-fiction.
I have no hope in hell of ever getting to even 10% of DFW's skill as a writer. I'll explain why in a bit.
But as a thinker (based on his non-fiction pieces), I think I may already be better than him in some ways. Which isn't saying much, since as a thinker he was not very good actually. Many bloggers think better than him.
How Good Are You?
The first skill you need to develop as an "advanced" writer is the ability to accurately measure how good you are, and how fast you are getting better.
Readers' comments help you measure the popularity of the things you write about, but aren't much help in understanding your own skill levels, since they are simply not sensitive to writing skill beyond a certain level. They can tell beer apart from wine, but cannot tell varieties of wine apart.
Sounds snooty, but it is true. If I gave an average reader two of my sentences, one that I just shot off without much thought, and another that I rewrote a 100 times to get just right, most of them wouldn't be able to tell. But other serious writers can usually tell.
And actually only writers can tell. Not even very good editors who don't themselves write, can tell. It's because your measurement systems themselves improve mainly with writing. Reading alone won't do.
You have to triangulate your skill from two directions.
First, you have to sensitize yourself to good writing.
Studies show that artists look at art differently compared to non-artists (eyeball trackers show them looking at different things). This is what it means to "see" like an artist.
It is harder to measure, but writers read differently. The best exploration of (and instruction manual for) "reading like a writer" is the book of that name by Francine Prose. If you are a serious writer, buy and read that book now.
The second thing you have to do is learn to assess your own progress. Having other writers react to your work is part of it, but since writers (outside of genres) have very different interests, this is of limited value. You need to develop an inner sense of how good you are.
This is hard because one of the things that happens as you evolve as a writer is that you increasingly become blind to your own style, or that you even have a style. To others it may be obvious that you overuse certain words for example. It will not be obvious to you.
So you need an indirect and objective measure. The secret lies in a single word I have already used. Any guesses which one?
Counting to 10,000 Hours
Writing is a skill like any other, and the famous 10,000 hour rule should apply, and it does, but not in the way you might assume. A prolific writer can usually churn out about 1000 reasonably decent words in an hour, so if you count in words, it might seem like 10 million words would be enough. Or at 4 hours a day, 250 days a year, about 10 years.
The problem is everybody writes. And yes, things like emails count. So any idiot can clock that many words in 10 years even if they only do a lot of casual/work email and texting. You don't even need to throw up verbal puke in a journal/blog regularly like many horrible wannabe writers do.
What matters is not how much you write, but how much you rewrite.
"Rewrite" is the magic word (actually it is my shorthand for "read aloud and rewrite" ... reading aloud vastly increases the effectiveness of your rewriting).
And rewrite hours are far harder to log, as you will see if you try an exercise I will suggest in a minute.
The HUGE difference between everyday writing that everybody does and serious writing is the proportion that is re-writing. I'd estimate that for non-writers, rewriting accounts for maybe 10-20% of their writing.
For serious writers, it accounts for anywhere between 50-90% depending on how critical the particular piece is. This Quora answer is not very critical for me, so I'd say it'll hit 50% by the time I am done. There are single paragraphs in my book though that took 5 minutes to write down initially, and then cost me hours to whip into shape, so that's like 99% rewriting. For my for-pay work, I probably average about 75%. For my own blog, I am erratic. Some pieces hit book-like 99% levels. Other pieces are at 70%. I don't think I've ever hit more than 65% on Quora.
People often ask me how I am so prolific. To be blunt, that's so easy for me, it is not much harder than just breathing. But rewriting is hard. It is torture. Since one measure of rewriting progress is words eliminated, I often joke that I write for free but charge for eliminating words.
But rewriting is the only kind of writing that counts. If you aren't rewriting, you aren't developing as a writer.
When you hit 10,000 hours of rewriting, you'll be a skilled writer or a skilled thinker with the written word. If you want to be both, it'll take you 20,000 hours.
Like I said, one lifetime normally isn't enough. That's why so few people make it past that bar.
Shakespeare is one of them.
If you never understood why writers especially revere him, this is why. You need to spend 2000-3000 hours merely to appreciate how spectacularly good he was at both. In fact one of my litmus tests for whether you have advanced writing skills is whether you can write an interesting and original and personal essay discussing why you like 4-5 of your favorite Shakespeare verses.
An example of a modern writer who achieves a Shakespeare-like writing/thinking balance is Paul Graham. I'd rate him at one milli-Shakespeare. Most people can't be measured on that scale because they are not balanced biathletes.
Back on earth, there are two kinds of rewrites. Rewrites that help you become a better thinker, and rewrites that help you become a better writer.
How Good a Rewriter Are You?
First, try a little test to see if you can rewrite at all. Take a good passage of about 1000 words that you've written (and are reasonably happy with) and have at it.
Start rewriting.
Keep going until you are down to thinking about one last teeny decision, like a specific word choice or a decision about whether or not to remove a comma. Be as OCD about it as you can be.
How long did it take you to get there? If you hit comma-level diminishing marginal improvements in less than 4-5 hours, you are not an advanced writer.
Assuming you do care about your skills and the ideas/story the passage was about, if you can't sustain 4-5 hours of rewriting (remember, this is about 4000-5000 words of first-dump writing), it means you can't see potential areas for improvements and/or don't know how to execute those improvements.
I hope I helped you prove to yourself that rewriting is NOT tedious, brainless grunt-work. It's actually what I call "first-dump writing" that is tedious brainless grunt-work (though as you improve, your first-dump quality will improve as well, and eventually you will be able to hit magazine quality at first dump. And on occasion, serious inspiration will strike, and a piece of writing will be born first-dump perfect).
Rewriting takes skill. If you merely schedule 5 hours to do rewriting work on a 1000 word piece, and don't have the skills to fill those 5 hours, you cannot log them. When you are starting out on your 10,000 hours of deliberate practice, you will initially only be able to achieve about 10% rewriting. As you improve, so will your rewrite capacity.
I estimate that it will take a serious writer about 20 years to hit 10,000 rewrite hours at an average pace. If you start at age 13 (a typical age for discovering a love for writing) and go like crazy, you could be a skilled writer/word-thinker in 10 years. So yeah, you can "arrive" as young as age 23.
The Two Types of Rewrites
If you actually tried the exercise, you probably noticed that some of your rewriting was about the ideas (including/excluding ideas, compressing them, clarifying them) and that some of it was about the language (word choice, sentence structure, paragraph breaks...)
The first kind is thinker-rewrites. It is about the accuracy of the content with respect to the pre-verbal ideas you are trying to capture.
The second kind is writer-rewrites. It is about the precision with which you express the ideas.
At the level of typing you cannot tease them apart. It is a subconscious mix.
But at the deliberate learning level, you can. To become a better word-thinker, you have to constantly be reading (reading like a writer, in the sense of Francine Prose) about more complicated ideas from different domains and even other media. Programming and math can help, as can visual thinking. You should constantly be picking up intellectual tricks, clever metaphors and frames, interesting ways of dissolving dichotomies, subtle rhetorical devices. Things like that.
I won't say more about thinking-rewrites, since this question isn't about becoming a better word-thinker (my book IS about that, hint hint).
So let me elaborate on what I have seen of the path I have not taken, to the extent that I can see ahead from the fork in the road.
Writer Rewrites
To become a better writer, you have to read people with a much better ear for language itself.
The range of suitable input material is much narrower. You may pick up some decent thinking tricks even from a bad writer/thinker like Thomas Friedman (his success is more due to his boundless energy and enthusiasm), but you will pick up no writing tricks.
Great fiction, poetry and some very precise kinds of philosophical writing are what you need to consume. Screeplays and plays are great too. The key here is that all these types of writing impose severe constraints on form, so it makes sense that to work with these types, you have to improve your formal precision with language.
There are two main sub-skills: semantic precision and grammatical precision.
Semantic precision is easiest to see at the word level. When I read a DFW passage, it is like looking at a pinprick-sharp photograph, compared to my own blurry photographs. He unerringly picks words to use that simply work 100x better than my choices. It's like he has a 15 megapixel camera and a tripod, while I am using a 3 megapixel point-and-shoot. A bigger vocabulary isn't enough. The skill lies in matching words to needs.
In fact his language is so precise that it makes his writing almost too rich to read. I've never finished any of his novels because they are too rich for me. My brain can't handle it.
And this isn't just at the word level. His sentences, paragraphs and chapters are massively precise as well. James Joyce is another example. His prose has been described as having the precision of poetry (an amazing feat, given that typical good poetry is generally 100x more precise than typical good prose, and Ulysees is HUGE).
Grammatical precision isn't about knowing the rules. It is about knowing what to do where there are no rules. It is an instinctive sense of evolutionary direction in your chosen language and being ahead of the curve with respect to the Grammar Nazis. They codify, legitimize and enforce the rules you make up. Great writers don't just push the boundaries of language and get away with it. They actually move the language itself and create and destroy jobs in the Grammar Nazi labor market.
I'll stop here. I haven't directly answered the question because tips aren't really what help at an advanced level. That's like giving a man fish when what is needed is a lesson in fishing. Hopefully this served that purpose.
Happy rewrites!
But though I will offer some sincere tips here, I would never offer a writing class. Why? Because I am not trying to develop writing skills. I am trying to develop thinking skills.
The two are the same thing in beginner stage, but differ in the advanced stage, even though the medium remains the same for both (words).
So the first advanced writing skill is to recognize your natural talents and choose to either go with or against your grain.
Do you want to be a writer or a thinker? One lifetime normally isn't enough to be both.
Writers vs. Thinkers
You have to choose.
The divide between thinkers and writers is more important than the one between fiction and non-fiction writers. You could divide the world of advanced writers into a 2x2, based on whether they are prioritizing developing their thinking or their writing, and whether they are focusing on fiction or non-fiction.
My hypothesis (I haven't yet gotten to a stage where I can check this) is that it is easier to cross the fiction/non-fiction divide than it is to cross the writing-first/thinking first divide.
J. K. Rowling is a thinking-first fiction writer. David Foster Wallace was a writing-first fiction writer.
I am a decent thinking-first non-fiction writer. I'd say Marc Levinson, author of The Box is an good example of a really good thinking-first non-fiction writer.
The fourth quadrant is rather empty, since there aren't many writing-first nonfiction writers. Many academic analytical philosophers qualify, but their writing is not generally read by ordinary people.
I think I could pull off a decent pastiche of JKR (many people can and have), though I primarily write non-fiction.
I have no hope in hell of ever getting to even 10% of DFW's skill as a writer. I'll explain why in a bit.
But as a thinker (based on his non-fiction pieces), I think I may already be better than him in some ways. Which isn't saying much, since as a thinker he was not very good actually. Many bloggers think better than him.
How Good Are You?
The first skill you need to develop as an "advanced" writer is the ability to accurately measure how good you are, and how fast you are getting better.
Readers' comments help you measure the popularity of the things you write about, but aren't much help in understanding your own skill levels, since they are simply not sensitive to writing skill beyond a certain level. They can tell beer apart from wine, but cannot tell varieties of wine apart.
Sounds snooty, but it is true. If I gave an average reader two of my sentences, one that I just shot off without much thought, and another that I rewrote a 100 times to get just right, most of them wouldn't be able to tell. But other serious writers can usually tell.
And actually only writers can tell. Not even very good editors who don't themselves write, can tell. It's because your measurement systems themselves improve mainly with writing. Reading alone won't do.
You have to triangulate your skill from two directions.
First, you have to sensitize yourself to good writing.
Studies show that artists look at art differently compared to non-artists (eyeball trackers show them looking at different things). This is what it means to "see" like an artist.
It is harder to measure, but writers read differently. The best exploration of (and instruction manual for) "reading like a writer" is the book of that name by Francine Prose. If you are a serious writer, buy and read that book now.
The second thing you have to do is learn to assess your own progress. Having other writers react to your work is part of it, but since writers (outside of genres) have very different interests, this is of limited value. You need to develop an inner sense of how good you are.
This is hard because one of the things that happens as you evolve as a writer is that you increasingly become blind to your own style, or that you even have a style. To others it may be obvious that you overuse certain words for example. It will not be obvious to you.
So you need an indirect and objective measure. The secret lies in a single word I have already used. Any guesses which one?
Counting to 10,000 Hours
Writing is a skill like any other, and the famous 10,000 hour rule should apply, and it does, but not in the way you might assume. A prolific writer can usually churn out about 1000 reasonably decent words in an hour, so if you count in words, it might seem like 10 million words would be enough. Or at 4 hours a day, 250 days a year, about 10 years.
The problem is everybody writes. And yes, things like emails count. So any idiot can clock that many words in 10 years even if they only do a lot of casual/work email and texting. You don't even need to throw up verbal puke in a journal/blog regularly like many horrible wannabe writers do.
What matters is not how much you write, but how much you rewrite.
"Rewrite" is the magic word (actually it is my shorthand for "read aloud and rewrite" ... reading aloud vastly increases the effectiveness of your rewriting).
And rewrite hours are far harder to log, as you will see if you try an exercise I will suggest in a minute.
The HUGE difference between everyday writing that everybody does and serious writing is the proportion that is re-writing. I'd estimate that for non-writers, rewriting accounts for maybe 10-20% of their writing.
For serious writers, it accounts for anywhere between 50-90% depending on how critical the particular piece is. This Quora answer is not very critical for me, so I'd say it'll hit 50% by the time I am done. There are single paragraphs in my book though that took 5 minutes to write down initially, and then cost me hours to whip into shape, so that's like 99% rewriting. For my for-pay work, I probably average about 75%. For my own blog, I am erratic. Some pieces hit book-like 99% levels. Other pieces are at 70%. I don't think I've ever hit more than 65% on Quora.
People often ask me how I am so prolific. To be blunt, that's so easy for me, it is not much harder than just breathing. But rewriting is hard. It is torture. Since one measure of rewriting progress is words eliminated, I often joke that I write for free but charge for eliminating words.
But rewriting is the only kind of writing that counts. If you aren't rewriting, you aren't developing as a writer.
When you hit 10,000 hours of rewriting, you'll be a skilled writer or a skilled thinker with the written word. If you want to be both, it'll take you 20,000 hours.
Like I said, one lifetime normally isn't enough. That's why so few people make it past that bar.
Shakespeare is one of them.
If you never understood why writers especially revere him, this is why. You need to spend 2000-3000 hours merely to appreciate how spectacularly good he was at both. In fact one of my litmus tests for whether you have advanced writing skills is whether you can write an interesting and original and personal essay discussing why you like 4-5 of your favorite Shakespeare verses.
An example of a modern writer who achieves a Shakespeare-like writing/thinking balance is Paul Graham. I'd rate him at one milli-Shakespeare. Most people can't be measured on that scale because they are not balanced biathletes.
Back on earth, there are two kinds of rewrites. Rewrites that help you become a better thinker, and rewrites that help you become a better writer.
How Good a Rewriter Are You?
First, try a little test to see if you can rewrite at all. Take a good passage of about 1000 words that you've written (and are reasonably happy with) and have at it.
Start rewriting.
Keep going until you are down to thinking about one last teeny decision, like a specific word choice or a decision about whether or not to remove a comma. Be as OCD about it as you can be.
How long did it take you to get there? If you hit comma-level diminishing marginal improvements in less than 4-5 hours, you are not an advanced writer.
Assuming you do care about your skills and the ideas/story the passage was about, if you can't sustain 4-5 hours of rewriting (remember, this is about 4000-5000 words of first-dump writing), it means you can't see potential areas for improvements and/or don't know how to execute those improvements.
I hope I helped you prove to yourself that rewriting is NOT tedious, brainless grunt-work. It's actually what I call "first-dump writing" that is tedious brainless grunt-work (though as you improve, your first-dump quality will improve as well, and eventually you will be able to hit magazine quality at first dump. And on occasion, serious inspiration will strike, and a piece of writing will be born first-dump perfect).
Rewriting takes skill. If you merely schedule 5 hours to do rewriting work on a 1000 word piece, and don't have the skills to fill those 5 hours, you cannot log them. When you are starting out on your 10,000 hours of deliberate practice, you will initially only be able to achieve about 10% rewriting. As you improve, so will your rewrite capacity.
I estimate that it will take a serious writer about 20 years to hit 10,000 rewrite hours at an average pace. If you start at age 13 (a typical age for discovering a love for writing) and go like crazy, you could be a skilled writer/word-thinker in 10 years. So yeah, you can "arrive" as young as age 23.
The Two Types of Rewrites
If you actually tried the exercise, you probably noticed that some of your rewriting was about the ideas (including/excluding ideas, compressing them, clarifying them) and that some of it was about the language (word choice, sentence structure, paragraph breaks...)
The first kind is thinker-rewrites. It is about the accuracy of the content with respect to the pre-verbal ideas you are trying to capture.
The second kind is writer-rewrites. It is about the precision with which you express the ideas.
At the level of typing you cannot tease them apart. It is a subconscious mix.
But at the deliberate learning level, you can. To become a better word-thinker, you have to constantly be reading (reading like a writer, in the sense of Francine Prose) about more complicated ideas from different domains and even other media. Programming and math can help, as can visual thinking. You should constantly be picking up intellectual tricks, clever metaphors and frames, interesting ways of dissolving dichotomies, subtle rhetorical devices. Things like that.
I won't say more about thinking-rewrites, since this question isn't about becoming a better word-thinker (my book IS about that, hint hint).
So let me elaborate on what I have seen of the path I have not taken, to the extent that I can see ahead from the fork in the road.
Writer Rewrites
To become a better writer, you have to read people with a much better ear for language itself.
The range of suitable input material is much narrower. You may pick up some decent thinking tricks even from a bad writer/thinker like Thomas Friedman (his success is more due to his boundless energy and enthusiasm), but you will pick up no writing tricks.
Great fiction, poetry and some very precise kinds of philosophical writing are what you need to consume. Screeplays and plays are great too. The key here is that all these types of writing impose severe constraints on form, so it makes sense that to work with these types, you have to improve your formal precision with language.
There are two main sub-skills: semantic precision and grammatical precision.
Semantic precision is easiest to see at the word level. When I read a DFW passage, it is like looking at a pinprick-sharp photograph, compared to my own blurry photographs. He unerringly picks words to use that simply work 100x better than my choices. It's like he has a 15 megapixel camera and a tripod, while I am using a 3 megapixel point-and-shoot. A bigger vocabulary isn't enough. The skill lies in matching words to needs.
In fact his language is so precise that it makes his writing almost too rich to read. I've never finished any of his novels because they are too rich for me. My brain can't handle it.
And this isn't just at the word level. His sentences, paragraphs and chapters are massively precise as well. James Joyce is another example. His prose has been described as having the precision of poetry (an amazing feat, given that typical good poetry is generally 100x more precise than typical good prose, and Ulysees is HUGE).
Grammatical precision isn't about knowing the rules. It is about knowing what to do where there are no rules. It is an instinctive sense of evolutionary direction in your chosen language and being ahead of the curve with respect to the Grammar Nazis. They codify, legitimize and enforce the rules you make up. Great writers don't just push the boundaries of language and get away with it. They actually move the language itself and create and destroy jobs in the Grammar Nazi labor market.
I'll stop here. I haven't directly answered the question because tips aren't really what help at an advanced level. That's like giving a man fish when what is needed is a lesson in fishing. Hopefully this served that purpose.
Happy rewrites!
Marcus Geduld,
Updated 99w ago · Upvoted by Sheri Fresonke Harper, Sheri started writing poetry 20 years ago and started taking courses through the University of Wash…
It helped me to spend a year writing exclusively in E-prime.
http://en.wikipedia.org/w
You are not allowed to use any form of the verb "to be." David Bourland invented e-prime for philosophical reasons, which might interest you (follow the link, above), but I used it because I knew it would improve my writing. And I decided not to tell anyone about my experiment, so I had to write in an unforced, natural way, despite the constraint.
(I wrote this post in E-prime.)
Another pro tip: good writing, fiction or non-fiction, excites the SENSES. Set yourself the challenge of writing sensually, especially when you're writing about abstractions, because humans only grasp the world through their eyes, ears, mouth, nose and skin. I try, when redrafting, to force a sensual detail into every sentence. I want every sentence to evoke a smell, sound, sight, etc. I fail at this, of course. But I try really hard.
http://en.wikipedia.org/w
You are not allowed to use any form of the verb "to be." David Bourland invented e-prime for philosophical reasons, which might interest you (follow the link, above), but I used it because I knew it would improve my writing. And I decided not to tell anyone about my experiment, so I had to write in an unforced, natural way, despite the constraint.
(I wrote this post in E-prime.)
Another pro tip: good writing, fiction or non-fiction, excites the SENSES. Set yourself the challenge of writing sensually, especially when you're writing about abstractions, because humans only grasp the world through their eyes, ears, mouth, nose and skin. I try, when redrafting, to force a sensual detail into every sentence. I want every sentence to evoke a smell, sound, sight, etc. I fail at this, of course. But I try really hard.
Alexandra Pell,
Written 241w ago · Upvoted by Barry Saiff, 30+ years experience in technical communications, CEO of Saiff Solutions, Inc. and Sheri Fresonke Harper, Sheri started writing poetry 20 years ago and started taking courses through the University of Wash…
Take my answer with a grain of salt since I don't have any meaningful publications to point you to. However, based on personal factors involving outside feedback from meaningful sources, I'm aware that, while not being a genius, I'm not a beginner either. Take that as you will.
Venkatesh Rao mentioned quite a few excellent ideas, but I'm going to be more personal here. I'll tell you what's helped me.
Be obsessive. Really, really obsessive.
I pay an incredible amount of attention to what I read. Venkatesh was so right to mention Reading Like a Writer, but I stumbled upon that vague idea before I'd ever read that book.
When I was fifteen, I realized (a friend pointed this out to me) that I mainly summarized in my writing. I'd been wondering why all the chapters I'd been writing were so short -- I was covering so much ground, and yet the chapters were measly. She pointed out all the places, and I mean ALL the places, I could have elaborated. I was basically doing a SparkNotes version of what was happening in my head. So I pulled out I Capture the Castle (don't ask me why it was that book -- I just pulled it off my shelf at random, I think, aside from the fact that I was aware that it paid more attention to detail than I did when writing) and read carefully through. Do you know what I did? I wrote down the purpose of every. single. sentence. I wrote down what every sentence did. At the end of a paragraph, I used a different colored pen to write down what the whole paragraph did. Then, at the end of a section/chapter, I used yet another pen to write down what the whole thing did.
Since then, I've done this with hundreds of books. Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee, American Pastoral by Philip Roth, Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov, and Abbe Mouret's Transgression by Emile Zola come to mind first.
I take notes about books. I save special passages, noting what's brilliant about them. This isn't bad. It's not cheap, it's not sell-out. It's synthesizing everything I've learned into one great whole. It doesn't make my writing mechanical; it gives me a greater tool-set to use.
I pay attention to wording. I view writing as art and, as Venkatesh noted artists do, I view it differently than most people. I read (from Mrs. Dalloway) the following:
"You could wear them at Hatfield; at Buckingham Palace. She had worn them at Hatfield; at Buckingham Palace."
And I think deeply about the repetition, and how it suggests monotony and familiarity. It suggests the sadness and pointlessness of the useless privilege of her life. It suggests more, so much more that it's hard to explain. The sentences are so simple, too. And those semi-colons -- they separate ideas more than a simple comma, which is casual and makes things sound like throw-away tangents. Those semi-colons turn it into separate thoughts that are sewn together like sisters but are nonetheless different, each standing out separately. Then there's the difference between "you" and "she"... the class assumptions, the attitude that allows these sentences to express something special as being typical. And that's only the beginning. Those two sentences spin off in ten thousand directions in my head. Maybe part of that is ADD.
Think. Think. Think. Pay attention.
I also do this exercise where I take a paragraph from a brilliant book and re-write it in as many "voices" as I can think of.
Some people I know refrain from reading very much when they are writing a lot. They say they don't want to be too influenced. They're wrong. The more you can be influenced by brilliance, the better off you are. Don't worry about sounding too much like Nabokov. You never will. And that's a pity.
In addition to that, be moved. Thinking and paying attention will never make up for a lack of being moved, overwhelmed, overtaken by beauty as if the beauty is a thing washing you away to sea while you drown in it. When I read something I've written, I feel ashamed, thinking about what James Joyce would think if he read it, what Nabokov would think, and so I make it better and better and better. I'm not good enough at making things better, and none of us ever will be, but I try.
Venkatesh Rao mentioned quite a few excellent ideas, but I'm going to be more personal here. I'll tell you what's helped me.
Be obsessive. Really, really obsessive.
I pay an incredible amount of attention to what I read. Venkatesh was so right to mention Reading Like a Writer, but I stumbled upon that vague idea before I'd ever read that book.
When I was fifteen, I realized (a friend pointed this out to me) that I mainly summarized in my writing. I'd been wondering why all the chapters I'd been writing were so short -- I was covering so much ground, and yet the chapters were measly. She pointed out all the places, and I mean ALL the places, I could have elaborated. I was basically doing a SparkNotes version of what was happening in my head. So I pulled out I Capture the Castle (don't ask me why it was that book -- I just pulled it off my shelf at random, I think, aside from the fact that I was aware that it paid more attention to detail than I did when writing) and read carefully through. Do you know what I did? I wrote down the purpose of every. single. sentence. I wrote down what every sentence did. At the end of a paragraph, I used a different colored pen to write down what the whole paragraph did. Then, at the end of a section/chapter, I used yet another pen to write down what the whole thing did.
Since then, I've done this with hundreds of books. Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee, American Pastoral by Philip Roth, Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov, and Abbe Mouret's Transgression by Emile Zola come to mind first.
I take notes about books. I save special passages, noting what's brilliant about them. This isn't bad. It's not cheap, it's not sell-out. It's synthesizing everything I've learned into one great whole. It doesn't make my writing mechanical; it gives me a greater tool-set to use.
I pay attention to wording. I view writing as art and, as Venkatesh noted artists do, I view it differently than most people. I read (from Mrs. Dalloway) the following:
"You could wear them at Hatfield; at Buckingham Palace. She had worn them at Hatfield; at Buckingham Palace."
And I think deeply about the repetition, and how it suggests monotony and familiarity. It suggests the sadness and pointlessness of the useless privilege of her life. It suggests more, so much more that it's hard to explain. The sentences are so simple, too. And those semi-colons -- they separate ideas more than a simple comma, which is casual and makes things sound like throw-away tangents. Those semi-colons turn it into separate thoughts that are sewn together like sisters but are nonetheless different, each standing out separately. Then there's the difference between "you" and "she"... the class assumptions, the attitude that allows these sentences to express something special as being typical. And that's only the beginning. Those two sentences spin off in ten thousand directions in my head. Maybe part of that is ADD.
Think. Think. Think. Pay attention.
I also do this exercise where I take a paragraph from a brilliant book and re-write it in as many "voices" as I can think of.
Some people I know refrain from reading very much when they are writing a lot. They say they don't want to be too influenced. They're wrong. The more you can be influenced by brilliance, the better off you are. Don't worry about sounding too much like Nabokov. You never will. And that's a pity.
In addition to that, be moved. Thinking and paying attention will never make up for a lack of being moved, overwhelmed, overtaken by beauty as if the beauty is a thing washing you away to sea while you drown in it. When I read something I've written, I feel ashamed, thinking about what James Joyce would think if he read it, what Nabokov would think, and so I make it better and better and better. I'm not good enough at making things better, and none of us ever will be, but I try.
Your writing needs to be compelling, well-written, and shareable. Most importantly, your post has keep people reading. In the information age, people have a terribly short attention span. Hold their attention, keep it and you will be writing your own checks. Which is probably the best thing you could write. There are some choice examples in Robert Beadle’s article, “How to Write Persuasive, Compelling Website Copy That Sells, Without Appearing to be Selling.”
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Courtesy of Hunter’s Writings.
Content Writer For Hire: How To Get Hired NOW
- Writers start as readers: Did you know that 99% of millionaires have college degrees? That the very educated are also wealthy in many different ways? It is because reading enriches your mind. Reading opens you up to new ideas, new styles of writing and connects you to others who have the same interests.
- Develop a system: If you write for a living, eventually you will figure out little hacks that are unique to you. From how you put together a piece to where you like to write, developing a system streamlines the process. This helps because you don’t waste valuable time and energy figuring out how to get things done; you just sit down and do them.
- Be clear and concise: Yes, we heard this a lot in English class, but it is so true. You can reference this section of the Writer’s Handbook from the University of Wisconsin. When you are writing, stick to the subject. Unless your readership are rocket scientists, Harvard scholars or novelists, don’t clutter your writing with flowery language or dictionary-level vocabulary. Cut it down like an overgrown bush.
- Build a connection with your readers: If you know your target audience, this should be much easier. Oh, you don’t have a target audience? Then sit and think about who you want as a client. Then, think about sitting with this person in a room. How would you talk to them? What would you be doing? What experiences do you share? Connect, connect, connect.
- Spell correctly and write grammar like a boss: If your English teacher would faint at the sight of your grammar and spelling, then it is time to clean it up. Shoot for 100% accuracy. This is a given. You aren’t texting, you are writing.
- Consider the forum: If you are writing on a blog, it is different from writing a technical manual which is also different from writing a status update. Also, you may have more than one target audience you are writing for, especially if you are writing for a client’s target audience. Example? You would wouldn’t write, “Then I totally said whatev and blew that chick off. What u think?” in a newsletter for senior citizens. They would think you had a stroke and you were very rude about it. You don’t want that. This goes back to connecting with your audience. You also want to make sure you do not alienate them.
Content Writer For Hire: How To Get Hired NOW
James Altucher,
Written 104w ago · Upvoted by Sheri Fresonke Harper, Sheri started writing poetry 20 years ago and started taking courses through the University of Wash…
When I was seven years old I plagiarized stories from science fiction magazines so my teachers would think I was smart.
When I was 22 years old I thought girls would like me if I wrote a novel. I spent so much time writing that I was thrown out of graduate school.
My first book caused me to get fired when my boss thought I stole all his ideas.
My blog posts have caused me to lose my sister and mother and many friends who no longer speak to me. My sister wrote me, "you're a horrible person".
But I still want people to like me.
Tip #1: NOBODY IS AN ADVANCED WRITER. Everyone needs to improve. I've written 13 books. Some bestsellers. I write every day. I've written for many different media. The more success someone has, the more they think they are a horrible writer.
Tip #2: READ OUT LOUD. Read every sentence you write out loud. If it sounds boring, kill it.
Tip #3: TAKE A STORY YOU LOVE AND WRITE IT OUT. It has to be a great story you love. I like the story "Emergency" by Denis Johnson. I write it out over and over as if I'm writing it. I don't know why this works and maybe it doesn't (see Tip #1) but I like doing it.
Tip #4: STEAL. If you see a line you like in another book, figure out how you would rewrite it, even slightly, and then steal it. It's still beautiful.
Tip #5: I TOOK IT OUT WHEN I REWROTE THIS. It was bullshit.
Tip #6: READ. Read writers who write exactly how you want to write. Because then you will pretty close to them. But then mix it up. Read different writers every day.
Tip #7: THE 2 DAY RULE: If you don't write for 2 days in a row then you'll be a bad writer again and have to build up.
Tip #8: WAITER'S PAD. Any semi-interesting thing that happens to you or you think about, quickly write it down on a waiter's pad. YOU WILL ALWAYS FORGET IT if you don't.
Tip #9: SOMEONE DIES IN THE FIRST LINE. Even in a non-fiction essay about bioplastics, make sure YOU bleed in the first line. Else, people switch screens to Twitter.
Tip #10: THE F RULE. People read screens in an "F" pattern. They read the first line or two. Then they read down the left (hence list posts are so popular). So make sure you keep bleeding so they read more.
People are reading vampires. They only feed off the blood.
Tip #11: HUMOR. Kids laugh 300 times a day. Adults laugh only...5 times a day. Make an adult feel like a kid again. To "acquire" humor I often read something funny or watch standup. Humor isn't ON all the time.
Tip #12: THE 30% RULE: When you are finished with your masterpiece, don't stop rewriting until you have cut at least 30%.
Tip #13: URGENT. If a line is not urgent, take it out.
Tip #14: USEFUL: If your piece is not useful, or if it just repeats the boring stuff everyone else says, then don't do it. Even if it's fiction.
Tip #15: THE BILLIONAIRE RULE. If a girl barely out of her teenage years is not physically dominated by a billionaire who is plagued by emotional issues stemming from his father then chances are most of the world won't read it.
Tip #16: THE LEARNING RULE: Everything you do, everything you read, everything you watch, write down 10 things you learned from it. This gives you something to write about.
Tip #17: GET PAID, GET LAID, LOSE WEIGHT. If you write non-fiction, those are the three things people like to read most.
Tip #18: BLOOD TRANSFUSION. Even though you're bleeding your own blood, make sure it's the same color as everyone else's blood.
Tip #19. COFFEE: Drink coffee 20 minutes before you write. Sets your brain on fire. Makes you go to the bathroom. Cleans your body out before you set your heart on fire.
Tip #20: ABS: Always Be Storytelling. The story is how you were scared and you wanted something. Then you did something. Then you found something you needed.
Tip #21: BE VERY AFRAID: Don't hit publish unless you're scared what people will think of you.
Tip #22. BE A CRIMINAL. Break all of the rules. Not the above rules. EVERY rule. Artists steal, kill, lie, and play. Isabelle Allende says, "once a writer is born into a family, the family is over." Be a killer.
And then I met the girl and she fell in love with me and we lived happily ever after.
When I was 22 years old I thought girls would like me if I wrote a novel. I spent so much time writing that I was thrown out of graduate school.
My first book caused me to get fired when my boss thought I stole all his ideas.
My blog posts have caused me to lose my sister and mother and many friends who no longer speak to me. My sister wrote me, "you're a horrible person".
But I still want people to like me.
Tip #1: NOBODY IS AN ADVANCED WRITER. Everyone needs to improve. I've written 13 books. Some bestsellers. I write every day. I've written for many different media. The more success someone has, the more they think they are a horrible writer.
Tip #2: READ OUT LOUD. Read every sentence you write out loud. If it sounds boring, kill it.
Tip #3: TAKE A STORY YOU LOVE AND WRITE IT OUT. It has to be a great story you love. I like the story "Emergency" by Denis Johnson. I write it out over and over as if I'm writing it. I don't know why this works and maybe it doesn't (see Tip #1) but I like doing it.
Tip #4: STEAL. If you see a line you like in another book, figure out how you would rewrite it, even slightly, and then steal it. It's still beautiful.
Tip #5: I TOOK IT OUT WHEN I REWROTE THIS. It was bullshit.
Tip #6: READ. Read writers who write exactly how you want to write. Because then you will pretty close to them. But then mix it up. Read different writers every day.
Tip #7: THE 2 DAY RULE: If you don't write for 2 days in a row then you'll be a bad writer again and have to build up.
Tip #8: WAITER'S PAD. Any semi-interesting thing that happens to you or you think about, quickly write it down on a waiter's pad. YOU WILL ALWAYS FORGET IT if you don't.
Tip #9: SOMEONE DIES IN THE FIRST LINE. Even in a non-fiction essay about bioplastics, make sure YOU bleed in the first line. Else, people switch screens to Twitter.
Tip #10: THE F RULE. People read screens in an "F" pattern. They read the first line or two. Then they read down the left (hence list posts are so popular). So make sure you keep bleeding so they read more.
People are reading vampires. They only feed off the blood.
Tip #11: HUMOR. Kids laugh 300 times a day. Adults laugh only...5 times a day. Make an adult feel like a kid again. To "acquire" humor I often read something funny or watch standup. Humor isn't ON all the time.
Tip #12: THE 30% RULE: When you are finished with your masterpiece, don't stop rewriting until you have cut at least 30%.
Tip #13: URGENT. If a line is not urgent, take it out.
Tip #14: USEFUL: If your piece is not useful, or if it just repeats the boring stuff everyone else says, then don't do it. Even if it's fiction.
Tip #15: THE BILLIONAIRE RULE. If a girl barely out of her teenage years is not physically dominated by a billionaire who is plagued by emotional issues stemming from his father then chances are most of the world won't read it.
Tip #16: THE LEARNING RULE: Everything you do, everything you read, everything you watch, write down 10 things you learned from it. This gives you something to write about.
Tip #17: GET PAID, GET LAID, LOSE WEIGHT. If you write non-fiction, those are the three things people like to read most.
Tip #18: BLOOD TRANSFUSION. Even though you're bleeding your own blood, make sure it's the same color as everyone else's blood.
Tip #19. COFFEE: Drink coffee 20 minutes before you write. Sets your brain on fire. Makes you go to the bathroom. Cleans your body out before you set your heart on fire.
Tip #20: ABS: Always Be Storytelling. The story is how you were scared and you wanted something. Then you did something. Then you found something you needed.
Tip #21: BE VERY AFRAID: Don't hit publish unless you're scared what people will think of you.
Tip #22. BE A CRIMINAL. Break all of the rules. Not the above rules. EVERY rule. Artists steal, kill, lie, and play. Isabelle Allende says, "once a writer is born into a family, the family is over." Be a killer.
And then I met the girl and she fell in love with me and we lived happily ever after.
