Group items tagged

If you sit down at a blank screen every day and simply do nothing then you are a writer. If you write one word, even better. Some people will disagree. Maybe you will disagree. That's fine. We also can all disagree. Meanwhile, our DNA is telling us we are pretty much exactly the same.

I try to read pieces or chapters in 3-4 books a day or more. I read at least from one non-fiction, one or two quality fiction, and one inspirational. I try to read at the level I want to write. I do this in the morning before I start writing.

Destroy every gatekeeper.

Every day in January, write for 20 minutes. By every day, I mean every day. Including weekends. Including the Martin Luther King holiday. Including the days that get crazy.

To become a better writer (whether it’s for text, podcast scripts, video scripts, or anything else that needs words to be strung together effectively), you need to write. And the best way to write more is to build the habit of writing every day. Give it a try for 31 days, and let us know how it’s going! And if you’ve ever tried a daily writing practice, we’d love to hear about it in the comments.

The easiest way to write well is to edit your writing. The best person to edit a manuscript, article or blog post is the author herself.

Leave your writing alone for a while

Pay attention to what jumps out at you as awkward.

While visualizing your story may seem like the right way to approach writing, it turns out that for full-time writers, the brain performs a bit differently. When Dr. Lotze watched writers from a competitive creative writing program perform the same tests, he found that experienced writers, while brainstorming, used parts of their brains associated with speech instead of vision.

Novice writers, Lotze suggests, are more likely to watch the story unfold like a movie inside their heads.

This goes beyond setting goals for individual projects and instead spans all parts of your writing life, from pitching to craft to the business side.

Brainstorm all the things you’d love to see yourself accomplishing as a writer. Once you’ve got your ideas down on paper, streamline those thoughts by writing in one sentence that encompasses your overall objective for writing.

Each big picture requires a different set of tasks. And each short-term goal will flow naturally from your big picture goal.

The author of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll (real name, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson), continued to work day jobs throughout his life.

Other authors who held down day jobs throughout their writing careers include Bram Stoker, Philip Larkin, T.S. Eliot, and Virginia Woolf, among many others.

she wrote the bestselling book Interview With The Vampire while working her day job as an insurance claims examiner.

How, then, do writing opportunities work? To be paid for writing, you need to look for a person with two characteristics: They’ve got money to spare. They’re looking for writers. This could be: A magazine editor who is looking for feature articles. An aristocrat or multi-billionaire who wants to support the career of an aspiring artist. A blogger who makes money from advertisements, or from selling information products, but is too busy to do all their blogging themselves. A book publisher who is looking for the next Da Vinci Code or Harry Potter. A business owner who needs help from a writer to promote their business. Do you see where this is going? There are writing opportunities out there, if you know where to look, and if you know the right people.

Spreading an idea means getting it from your brain into someone else’s. It means putting together the essential facts, the logical arguments and your insightful conclusions together in exactly the right way to recreate your brilliant idea in the mind of your reader.

Try to describe your audience with this simple formula: X who Y. For example: “Bloggers who want to get more traffic”.

If you can’t explain what your post is about in one simple, short sentence, it’s probably too complex or unfocused.

Physical ailments:

Mental and emotional stress and distractions

Lazy days

Are You Likely to be Interrupted?

What Can You Hear?

Are You Sitting Comfortably?

What exactly do freelance copywriters write? Everything! From ad copy to newsletters, from policies to blogs, from business proposals to brochures, and from catalog blurbs to t-shirt taglines, there's nothing off-limits. James told me she's worked on everything from tweets for non-profits to ghost writing a book for a motivational speaker to writing taglines for Nike. So, if you are after variety, it appears that the freelance thing delivers. Sure, some freelances have specialties, but generally speaking, they are just really skilled at writing and they help businesses who need someone with that skill to produce written content. Unlike traditional writers, these people don't get their names in the byline, but they do get paid hourly for their work. Did you catch that? HOUR-LY.

My mantra is to do it instead of thinking about doing it. If I catch myself doing the latter I just switch to doing instead of thinking. Easier said than done for me, but I’ve gotten better at that. But there aren’t enough hours in the day. Or not if you’re also going to stay healthy and be a part of your family and not get burnt out. So things fall off the table, even more so if you’re hell bent on creating really great work. Yet, I find that quality is what wins at the end of the day and that solves a lot of other problems.

And if they share it, you gain greater readership. So I encourage writers to think of the entire canvas when creating content. Think about the headers in your piece and about the images you’ll use to enrich the story.

Which leads me to my second point: Your story is about Gina, at forty, deciding whether or not to leave her boyfriend. Are you really going to spend half your story showing us Gina’s white-trash childhood in Elbridge, Michigan (a key bit of backstory)? Or are you just going to cut to the chase, provide a few key details, and move on?

But push this advice too far, and again, you’ll get stuck writing mediocre fiction. Because sometimes the things that don’t work are actually important. They don’t work not because they’re the wrong things, but because they’re the hard, ambitious, at-the-very-edge-of-what-you-even-know-how-to-say-things, and the only way to land them is to dig deeper, work harder, and sometimes even (god help you) add rather than cut.