5 Ways To Drastically Improve As A Writer

I have never been one of those very studious writers, slaving over writing exercises printed off the Internet or furiously annotating short stories. I read a good amount, and I write—a lot.

In the past few years, I think I have written over 1,500 blog posts, columns, Quora answers, and guest blogs; and that’s not counting the few hundred pieces I have ghostwritten for other people.

I have also been keeping an active journal since 2010, with a new one starting at the beginning of the following year. Most journals end up around the length of a novel, 80,000 words or more.

In order to become a better writer, however, and as much as I stand by the need for every writer to keep a journal (if for no other reason than to get their most uncensored self out somewhere), the advice that you “just need to write a lot” is, in my eyes, insufficient.

Far better advice is this:

1. You have to write in public.

LinkedIn is a perfect example. I am writing this, and when I am done I am not going to sit on it for two weeks. I am not going to obsess over it, make tiny little adjustments or worry over what people will think of it. This writing, and the way I treat LinkedIn, is practice. Writing here, where people can comment, and I can actually receive feedback both from readers and by seeing how many views any given piece receives, is how I become a better writer. It helps avoid the vacuum that swallows every aspiring writer, sitting at their desk never sharing their work, forever wondering if they’re moving in the right direction.

In order to improve as a writer, you have to write in public. You have to be OK with people watching your process. If I were to go back and read my first hundred Quora answers, I’d probably cringe. But I’d also thank myself for having had the guts to do it in the first place, since those first 100 are what got me to where I am right now.

Practice, in itself, I do not believe is enough. I have tried doing that. For many years, I tried. I kept my writing solely to myself, and it ended up causing me more distress than motivation.

2. You have to practice the habit.

The second challenge every writer faces is the discipline of it all. Sitting down in silence to write is as demanding as asking yourself to meditate for long periods of time. It’s not something you do well the first time, or the second time, or the thousandth time. It’s a commitment. A practice.

The reason I continue to write on websites like Quora is, in a sense, to practice the art of practice. So not only am I practicing writing in public, but I am practicing sitting down in silence and entering that quiet state required to write in the first place, every single day—or as many days in a week as I can.

If you call yourself a writer but only write when inspiration strikes, you are not a writer. You are a hobbyist, at best. And I don’t say that to be condescending. I say that so you can reset your expectations. No established writer reads every single thing they write and says to themselves, “Well aren’t you just a talented young gun.” Truthfully? I have trouble liking most of the things I write. And especially with my longer works, I struggle to see it for what it really is in the process. The enjoyment part of writing tends to come long after it’s finished—sometimes months, sometimes years. It took me 5 years to write Confessions of a Teenage Gamer. That book wouldn’t have gotten finished if I had not, quite literally, forced myself to mold my entire schedule around writing time dedicated to that project. Fun fact: I literally did not allow myself to get Internet in my apartment until I finished it. 3 years, I went without Internet. Just because I wanted to remove as many distractions as possible, and build the habit of sitting down at my desk to write.

3. You have to write with intention—and judge yourself on that intention.

It’s useless to say one writer is “good” and another writer is “bad.” Those words don’t really help cultivate a very insightful discussion. You may “like” a writer, or their style, and you make “dislike” someone else. But “good” and “bad” are not universal terms. They are specific to the intention behind that which is being judged.

For example: Let’s say you asked Ernest Hemingway to write you a short story. That would probably be a “good” story because the intention is for him to write a short story, and based on that intention he executed his task well. But if you asked Ernest Hemingway to write you an essay on entrepreneurship, he may not perform as well as an essayist in that category. That does not mean Hemingway is a bad writer.

Too often, aspiring writers judge themselves and their work based on faulty premises. They write without intention, and then say to themselves, “I am not a good writer.” But that’s not very helpful feedback (to yourself). You have to understand what you’re driving toward. Why are you writing what you’re writing? And then judge your work based on that specific goal.

Take this LinkedIn article as a perfect case-in-point. My intention here is to explain how you can improve as a writer. If that goal is achieved, technically I am a “good” writer. If a reader reads this piece and feels like they have learned something important, my goal was achieved and they may consider me a “good” writer in the process. Similarly, if my goal with this LinkedIn article was to show off my writing chops, but I did a horrible job answering the question, a whole bunch of readers might comment, “Your writing is terrible. You didn’t even answer the question.”

Writing, yes, but art period is inherently subjective. So it’s up to you to understand how you are measuring your own success.

4. If you’re not reading, you’re going to run dry.

This is something that took me a very long time to learn.

In the same way you can’t be a musician without listening, or a painter without looking, you can’t be a writer without reading.

Writing is relationship-dependent upon input and output. You need to be giving yourself enough material to learn from and study in order to keep your output flowing.

More importantly, reading other people’s work is what will open new doors of thought for yourself and your own work. Especially in the beginning, one of the best things an aspiring writer can do is imitate another writer’s style that they like or find engaging. The act of imitation teaches you a lot about how a style is created in the first place, and at some point you will find yourself at a juncture where your own style will begin to take shape.

5. You have to judge yourself over years—not days and weeks.

Any craft as longstanding as writing takes years in order to acquire true skill. Not days. Not weeks. Not months. Years.

I think about when I started playing classical piano as a kid. It took me years just to learn how to navigate my fingers on the keyboard, let alone understand how to play a piece with expression. Then it took years to take that expression and refine it. Then it took years to understand, after I had studied the works of other composers, how to create my own melodies, sounds, and stories. I studied classical piano for over a decade.

Writing is no different. When you’re first starting out, you’re still thinking in terms of words. Word. Word. Word. Word. Word. It’s like watching yourself try to build a Lego tower, slowly stacking blocks that don’t quite match, and sometimes don’t fit right, and when you’re done you step back and want to kick the entire thing over.

After those first few years, and once you start to understand the building blocks, you move from thinking about words to thinking about sentences. Instead of thinking Word, Word, Word, you’re now thinking, Word That Comes After Word Before One Last Word And Then Word. You can hear the rhythm and flow in your head. This is where imitation occurs, and slowly you begin to find your own style.

Until finally, sentences become so fluid that you can let them sing without even trying. Your stream of consciousness is effortless. That is when you begin to move beyond actual sentence structure and into ideas. You approach writing from a very macro view, thinking hard about what it is you want to convey, what emotion you want to capture, what thought you want to instill in the reader’s mind. The sentences just seem to flow, and the Words, the building blocks, all fall into place.

When you’ve gotten to that point, you’ve spent years upon years practicing your craft. Which means you’re also hyper-aware of how, even though you’ve improved so, so much, you still have decades more to go.

So, you cannot write for two weeks and expect yourself to be good. I have been writing online for almost ten years now. At 17 years old, I wrote my first blog post. I am about to turn 27 here in two months. And even I, where I am now, look at whatever it is I am writing right now and ask myself, “Hmm… How can I make this better?”

It never ends. Ever.

The only thing you need to worry about is if you sat down and wrote something today. And just know, you’ll improve a lot faster if that something was written in public.

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