Write better together
How community notes can make you a better writer
Forget the idea that great writers don’t need help. Learn how to listen to your readers and make changes before your text is too cooked to reshape.
Take a gander at this mark-up of Raymond Carver’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.
Does the influence of Gordon Lish (Carver’s editor and friend) make Carver a lesser writer? No. Nope. Not at all. Sure, their story is complicated, but Carver is far better, not worse, for getting help.
The lesser writer refuses help.
Something marvelous happens when you ask for notes—you get to meet the people on the other end of your text while you still have a chance to make it better.
Ask early, while your post is still a draft, rather than hoping the notes will somehow start flowing after you publish. Bring your reader along as a co-conspirator and a companion, not as a consumer of your ideas, but as the only chance those ideas have to live on in the minds of others.
Remember the final pages of Franny and Zooey? About caring for the audience? It is quite something when the audience cares back and you discover that through their intellectual (and emotional) comity your text has a shot at an extended life. Without a reader, there is no writer.
Step-by-step guide
- Write with taut gusto (alone, like normal authors might).
- Rewrite four times (again, nothing new here).
- Pick a new lede (learn how here).
- Tweet your draft to friends and strangers and ask for help.
- Search for suggestions for specific readers who might have good ideas for your text.
- Email, DM, @mention all possible leads who might help improve your work. Entice with earnest enthusiasm and humility. Break the ice with a specific question.
- Review every note.
- Follow any suggestion that reveals a lack of clarity.
- Mostly ignore suggestions of style/taste except to double-check your own stylistic tics.
- Clean your text of all errors revealed by the notes and then have the courage to do three bold moves. For me, this is usually cut a whole paragraph or section, reorder a later paragraph to the top, and re-title.
- Post and then personally thank everyone who helped.
