When I was just getting started as a weblogger at Life Coaches Blog, a tip I read to improve my writing was to write as if I was speaking to a large audience. Now that I look back at my writing on LcB after five years of full-time writing experience, I can see that advice didn’t really work out for me. It was part of the reason that made my writing over at LcB diffused and vapid (the main reason was that I had to mature more as a person).

Thanks to articles like Merlin Mann’s Better (an inspirational building block for this weblog), when I moved to 21 Dragons I resolved to write differently. Instead of imagining myself speaking to a large, faceless audience while writing, I now imagine myself speaking to an audience of one; a good friend whom I love, and whose opinion I respect.

Someone I know who will appreciate good work if I do it, but will also kick my butt if I do other than my best. Someone to whom I can show my writing and not feel embarrassed. A real person to whom I can imagine an article having relevance, not an imaginary crowd with diverse imaginary needs. He or she isn’t a specific person I always imagine, but can be any number of the good friends I have in my life.

As a result, I’ve found myself writing more personally, with a more authentic voice. In my head, it’s the difference between speaking to a group of people while up on a stage, and speaking to a close friend while having drinks in a quiet cafe.

Whereas I aimed for a readership of thousands with Life Coaches Blog, I’m pretty happy if even just one person reads 21 Dragons and appreciates it. To put it more precisely; I’m happier if one person finds 21 Dragons good rather than if a thousand people find it okay.

Writing is easy for me, but writing with authenticity and power is hard, and I constantly have to work to remove barriers to reach that quality of writing. I found that I couldn’t be as truthful speaking to a large crowd as I could speaking to a friend, even if these were just fictions in my head as I was writing. I’m sure that both approaches are valid for different people, and it just depends on which process will help you achieve your goal of better writing more effectively.

(Because the real secret is that you’re not really writing for either a large group of people or a single reader, you’re really writing for an audience of one: You.)

1. Against the Voice of Should
2. The Muse & The Work

Sometimes the writing process is easy. Sometimes it feels like breaking bones.

I wrote a feature about Yahoo! last month. Once I figured out its spine – the central idea – the writing flowed smoothly after.

The feature I just finished about Steve Jobs was hell to write. I wrote and re-wrote multiple beginnings, none of which worked. I couldn’t find where the spine was and I felt my mind going dead on me every time I tried to write.

The deadline was closing in on me and I was forced to just start writing what I knew – what my fingers knew as my mind was a fog – and the middle of a story formed that I didn’t even know was there.

Once I had the middle down, the ending and the beginning came easily. And it turned out all the boring parts that I thought had to be in even though I had no idea how to include them didn’t need to be in at all (another bonus point for writing what you know first).

Some articles are like sipping a cold mojito while lounging on a warm sunny beach. Some articles you have to sweat buckets, sloughing through a muddy maze in the darkness, hoping against desperate hope to find a gem at the end.

1. Looking Back: 21 Dragons’ 2009
2. Speak to an Audience of One
3. The Writer’s Ego

It’s never been easier to start a blog. So why is it so hard to have a wildly successful one?

To cobble the bard; “the fault, dear reader, is not in our blogs, but in ourselves.” It’s easy to start a blog. It’s hard to develop a unique voice and remarkable insight (a phrase I learned from Seth Godin’s book Linchpin: Are You Indispensable?). Without either, you’re just another voice in the crowd. With both, you become indispensable.

To ask how to gain a unique voice and remarkable insight is missing the boat: If there was a step-by-step formula anyone could follow, the end result would be a crowd neither unique nor remarkable. To have both requires personal thought and experience at the very least, both of which you can neither skip the time and effort on to gain. Whichever your blog’s area of expertise, it’s as Apple CEO Steve Jobs said in the context of creativity:

Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they’ve had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people.

Or as Benjamin Franklin succinctly summed up: “Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.”

1. Against the Voice of Should
2. What Color is My Dragon?
3. I Am Not Willing to Let Anything Distract Me

Somewhere in our heads, if you listen hard enough, there is a voice that is the voice of Should. The voice of Should tells us how we should be doing things; how we should talk, how we should dress, how we should respond, how we should go along, how we should tolerate. And in my head, this voice tells me how I should write.

And every time we do, our real voice – our Soul’s voice – gets buried underneath sentences of sentences of what we should say, not what we want to say.

We die each time and we don’t know it.

A Writer’s Search for Meaning

And yet, in the quiet moments, our Soul’s voice finds sustenance. When we allow ourselves to simply speak our hearts – honestly, authentically – even if we break the rules of convention, our words find an audience. It is not the deft manipulation of words that resonate with us, but the touch of recognition one soul feels at listening to another soul’s voice, speaking over the voice of his shoulds. And we, when reading writing like that, aren’t as impressed by the message of the words as we are by its authenticity, because we too, yearn to express our souls like that.

1. A Unique Voice & Remarkable Insight
2. Love Your Words
3. Words Build People

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.

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

Why do I spend weeks on a blog post writing and editing it until I publish it?

The answer’s simple: it’s fun to spend time making something as good as I can make it before I show it to the world. And in a world where deadlines are the norm, taking the time to craft something until I’m happy with it is a pleasure. Because it matters to me that this is about creating something I can be proud of, and presenting that to the world in a way that is good.

The Japanese distinguish between two kinds of quality: atarimae hinshitsu – the idea that things work as they should, and miryokuteki hinshitsu – aesthetic quality on top of atarimae hinshitsu. What I want to do is to write posts that don’t just communicate, but communicate beautifully.

No related posts.

There’s a difference between writing for yourself and writing for your reader, one that’s as clear as night and day.

It’s the difference between what the very smart Kathy Sierra describes as a company that kicks ass, versus a company that helps its users kick ass.

In one, you write to satisfy yourself. In the other, you write to satisfy your reader.

In one, you read your words with your eyes. In the other, you read your words with your reader’s eyes.

In one, you write staggeringly works of heartbreaking genius, and you don’t ever edit dammit because it’s all so mind-numbingly breathtakingly good. In the other, you slay your babies ruthlessly if they don’t serve your reader.

If you’re writing in service of your ego (this blog), anything goes and your ego’s free to write checks your body can’t cash. But that kind of writing is entirely different from writing in service of your reader (my magazine writing day job), where only what’s 100% useful for her gets printed.

As a technology writer with an overinflated opinion of himself, I have to be especially careful not to indulge in verbiage just to stroke my own ego while pushing my dear reader’s head below the heady waters of information overload just one more time because she really needs to know that digital camera sensors only record in black and white, color is added with a overlying color filter, the most common of which is a Bayer filter.

Stroke, stroke, stroke. Push, push, push.

Screw that. If any word doesn’t serve the reader, if it’s not essential, it goes out. Gone, deleted, fucking slayed.

Because you have to decide: are you out here for your ego, or are you out here for your reader. You can’t play both sides with your balls hanging on the fence.

Pick a side.

Write.

1. Speak to an Audience of One
2. The Process
3. 3 Electrifying Secrets™ to a Madly Successful Blog

Someone asked me why I love writing, and I couldn’t answer.

Why do some people like blueberry pie, a jazz solo or the smell of rain in the evenings? You can find a thousand reasons why you fall in love, but there’s only one real reason: you fall in love because you fall in love.

1. The Curious Case of the Missing Dragons
2. Perfection in Motion
3. Speak to an Audience of One