How to Write Good: 5 Tips from a Paid Writer

This post is for a friend whom I know has great stuff to share and just needs to write it all down. I hope it helps. Get your book out already, dude!

1. The Ulti­mate Secret to Writing

The ulti­mate secret to writ­ing is the one that most peo­ple don’t seem to want to hear. And it’s sim­ply this: keep work­ing your ass off.

Are there freak geniuses that wake up in the morn­ing, eyes blaz­ing with divine inspi­ra­tion who knock out thou­sands of pages before break­fast? Maybe, but I’m not one of them. I have to sit my ass down and sweat words before they even look halfway decent, writ­ing even when I don’t feel like writ­ing and churn­ing para­graphs of rub­bish. It’s hard.

But then, some days it isn’t hard. It’s grace­ful pirou­ettes all the way instead of thun­der­ing tum­bles. Them’s the crazy breaks of the cre­ative life. But you have to work regard­less, whether it’s beau­ti­ful bal­le­rina day or clumsy hippo night. Just sit your­self down, and keep typ­ing, keep typ­ing, keep typing.

2. Be Okay with Suck­ing Horrendously

You are not the lovechild of Shake­speare, Ein­stein and Amelia Earhart. Do not expect your first draft to be any­thing but shit. The good news is that gor­geous isn’t what you’re aim­ing for when you’re doing the first draft, the first draft is what you’re aim­ing for when you’re doing the first draft.

The shitty first draft isn’t optional, it’s the com­pul­sory first step towards get­ting your final, beau­ti­ful thing shaped and crafted. It’s like sculpt­ing – not that I’ve ever sculpted any­thing in my life. In the begin­ning, you chip off chunks and end up with a rough mess that’s noth­ing like the final prod­uct you see in your mind. But it’s okay. Chillax. Because mak­ing that mess just got you closer to the fin­ished work.

3. ‘Cus You’re Just Get­ting Started

You wouldn’t expect an Olympic-class sprinter to roll out of bed, head straight to the tracks and blaze a record in his paja­mas would you? Same thing for writ­ing; don’t expect magic to come out of your fin­gers imme­di­ately, you have to get your­self warmed up first. Your fin­gers have to make the clack­ity noise for a while before your brain gets that you’re try­ing to type the next mega-bestseller. Switch off the MSN. Close the door. Be pre­pared to sit your ass down for a while. Start typ­ing, your mus­cles are start­ing cold and it’s hard, but the longer you go on, the eas­ier it’ll get.

4. Keep the Critic Waiting

If you’re like me, you hear a vicious, evil voice in your head when­ever you make some­thing that goes “you suck at this, you’ll never make any­thing good, what makes you think any­one wants to read what you’re writ­ing?” It’s nor­mal (I hope). Every cre­ative per­son strug­gles with this inner demon (I hope). The impor­tant thing here is you have to learn to ignore the hell out of it when you’re writ­ing or it will kill your child.

(By child I meant your man­u­script. Sorry for being melodramatic.)

You need to learn that being cre­ative and being crit­i­cal are two essen­tial but sep­a­rate stages in the cre­ative process. This is crit­i­cal. There’s a place for this demon critic and it’s after you’ve fin­ished your first draft, not before. When you’re done with that, let it go to town and rip your draft to shreds. That’s what it’s good for, lis­ten to it then and it’ll help you see where your text sucks and help you make the revi­sions you need to make so it don’t suck no more. But never edit when you’re writ­ing, because that opens the door for the demon to come in and destroy any cre­ative spark you’re nur­tur­ing (and you need every cre­ative spark you’ve got to make your words happen).

Keep the cre­ative and crit­i­cal parts of you sep­a­rate, it’ll help you get your work done and keep you sane.

5. Start with What You’ve Got

Don’t know how to start? Me nei­ther, but I still write pages and pages month after month. The trick is to start with what you’ve got; while your book needs a begin­ning, mid­dle and end, nobody said you had to write in that order. Some­times all I have is the mid­dle, and I have no idea how to phrase the begin­ning, so instead of strug­gling, I write what I’ve got first. The crazy thing is that after I fin­ish with what I’ve got, the rest of it comes a lot easier.

Not Con­vinced?

What’s that? Not con­vinced that your buddy who gets paid for his word­smithory knows what he’s going about? Need to learn more? That’s cool. We all can do bet­ter and learn some­thing new every step of the way, just don’t let the thought that you need to learn more stop you from start­ing. This isn’t rocket sci­ence. Peo­ple have been writ­ing since the first alpha­bet was invented. If you have a mind, pen and paper, you already have all the tools Shake­speare had at his dis­posal to write his masterworks.

These are the books I like. About writ­ing and the cre­ative process, I rec­om­mend The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Cre­ative Bat­tles by Steven Press­field. To improve your writ­ing, I rec­om­mend On Writ­ing Well: The Clas­sic Guide to Writ­ing Non­fic­tion by William Zinsser and On Writ­ing by Stephen King (yes, that Stephen King). About the cre­ative process, read The Cre­ative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life by Twyla Tharp. Read Mer­lin Mann’s 43 Fold­ers newer blog posts for free. And watch this talk by mega-bestselling novel Eat Pray Love’s author Eliz­a­beth Gilbert about cre­ative work; she speaks with expe­ri­ence, insight and humor.

Namaste. I hope this helps you give your gift to the world. Get your ass to work.

Related Posts

1. Write with Your Foot Down
2. To Write Like Nobody But Yourself
3. Favorite Blogs of 2009