The Secret to Creating a Deliberate Writing Practice
You hit publish and excitement surges through your body. It was worth 30 hours of your life because this is your best article yet.
Until a few days later.
Why didn’t my article get more engagement? Why didn’t more people read and love it?
It’s a crushing feeling, I know. I wrote a blog that didn’t get any readers for almost a year. And now I’m starting a new blog and Medium account, each with no audience.
We all want our articles to get attention and praise. That’s the point, isn’t it?
We want to grow our following, increase our influence, and change people’s minds. We want to challenge ideas, sell more products, or explain our service offering.
But what happens when your articles don’t do well? What are you supposed to do, if, after years of writing, you’re still not gaining any traction?
Why No One Reads Your Shit
There are two reasons why someone won’t read your article.
Distribution
If your article is published in a local Boston magazine, Texans won’t ever see it. If you’re published on a website someone never visits, they probably won’t see it.
This has been the case for all of history, but it’s starting to change. For instance, a new author can get great distribution on Medium if they write an article people enjoy. Their following doesn’t matter because Medium will curate the piece and let readers determine whether they like it, which then affects the article’s distribution.
Marketing and networking still have their place. But, because of these changes, it’s even more important for writers to focus on the second part of the equation.
Quality
People don’t want more noise. Our lives are busy. Many businesses are seeking our attention. We have jobs, families, goals, hobbies, and enough entertainment to last a thousand lifetimes.
To find a place in someone’s precious attention span, you have to convince them that what you have to say is valuable and entertaining. To create repeat readers, you have to deliver on that promise.
If you want your writing to be read, loved, and shared, you only need to focus on one goal:
Consistently publish quality content.
That’s it. That’s all you need to do. But it’s not that easy.
Focus and consistency are two of my favorite tenets. If you put all your working energy into one goal and attack it every day, you’ll likely succeed at some point.
But even this doesn’t work every time. Sometimes we work out for weeks without seeing progress. We diet for months without losing any weight. And we write for years without gaining traction. It even took the prosperous author Steven Pressfield 27 years of writing to publish his first successful book.
No one can guarantee your success. But there is one strategy that can turn five years of work into six months. You’ll improve your writing, or any other skill, at ten times the speed.
It’s called deliberate practice.
How to Force Multiply Your Practice
I created robriker.com to improve my life by changing my habits. And the best way to accomplish my goals will be to improve my writing. To do this, I plan on creating a deliberate writing practice.
Practice is the act of doing something repeatedly. If you write every day, you’re practicing your writing. If you ride a skateboard every day, you’re practicing your skating.
Deliberate practice requires constraints and specific goals. Trying to write better is not a specific goal. Improving your 700-word “how-to” posts that follow a specific structure is. Becoming a better skater is not specific. Learning how to kickflip is.
It requires focus and a willingness to leave your comfort zone. You can’t improve if you don’t do things differently than you do now. But a successful deliberate practice requires two essential steps: improving high-impact areas and getting feedback.
Improve High-Impact Areas
You’ve probably heard of the 80/20 Rule, also known as the Pareto Principle, popularized by Tim Ferriss and a plethora of self-help gurus. It states that 20% of your efforts produce 80% of your results. Put another way, certain actions outperform others drastically.
If you want to improve quickly, you need to find these leverage points. It could be learning a specific skill, seeing things from a new perspective, or using a different tool. It depends on what you’re trying to achieve.
For example, in fourth grade, I spent nine months trying to land a kickflip on my skateboard. Then, on Christmas Day, I got a new skateboard and landed my first kickflip ever. Switching from a chipped, water-logged board with heavy wheels to a new, light, grippy board with great “pop” provided high-impact for little effort. My ability improved dramatically with one small change.
This doesn’t negate the importance of practice-it’s just one example of a force multiplier. Other high-impact skateboarding skills may have been learning how to do tricks at high speeds, improving balance, or learning to ollie higher.
It’s not always easy to determine where your force multipliers are. That’s why it’s important to study, watch the greats, and learn whenever possible, which requires listening to feedback.
Get and Listen to Feedback
In his book Peak, Anders Ericsson emphasizes the importance of feedback. Deliberate practice requires it.
Every time you take action, you get some sort of feedback. Published articles receive attention or they don’t. Drafts get your point across or they don’t, even if you can’t tell. This is why you want to study your craft-so you can find these high-impact improvements.
Coaching is the best way to get good feedback quickly-if you find the right coach. And if you ever get the chance, take it. If not, no worries. It’s not easy to find a good writing coach or justify the cost, especially when you’re starting out. But that doesn’t mean you don’t need feedback.
Instead, you need to learn how to critique your own work. Fortunately, you get to edit your writing. Once it’s on the screen, you get to go through it with a fine-tooth comb. If you focus on mastering specific writing skills during the editing process, you can quickly improve.
The 3 Stages of a Deliberate Writing Practice
To create my own deliberate writing practice, I studied great writers and articles and took Niklas Göke’s Write Like a Pro course. From that, I boiled my findings down to three phases.
Before Writing
Before I sit down to write, there are certain mindsets I need to carry with me. These help me improve my writing, even when I’m not writing or editing.
Keep Your Writer’s Mind On 24/7. To write well, you need to relate to your audience. You need to tell personal stories and show them why you understand them. When you’re living your daily life, remember the different parts of your day. Find ways to use these as stories or lessons in your writing.
Constantly Learn and Take Notes. First, you should always be learning new things. Books, courses, YouTube videos, articles, podcasts, whatever. Keep expanding your mind and running new thoughts through your head. Second, take notes so you can revisit these ideas at any time.
Try New Things. In addition to learning, you want to experience new things. Talk to strangers and encounter unique situations more frequently. You write better stories when you live an interesting life.
Quantity > Quality. Your writing improves as you publish more, especially when practicing deliberately. Don’t worry about writing perfect articles, particularly early on. It’s better to write more than to try writing perfectly.
Preparing to Write
Once I start planning an article, I have another list of high-impact concepts to keep in mind. I infuse these into my writing by reviewing this list before I brainstorm and outline my work.
Context > Content. In addition to writing high-quality content, you must also write for the platform you use. A scholarly journal will not perform well on Medium. A popular Medium post won’t do well on Quora. People consume content differently on each platform and you must keep this in mind.
Elicit Feelings with Empathy. Decision-making and love are controlled by our limbic brain, which lacks the capacity for language and reason. That’s why good articles make people feel emotions. Readers feel bad for the main character. They become motivated to change their life. It doesn’t just make them think, it makes them feel. This is best achieved with empathy. When people relate to your stories, they empathize and feel the emotions themselves.
Is this Important Enough? Niklas Göke has a concept called the Circle of Questions-questions he asks himself to make sure an article is worth writing. Questions like:
- Do I care enough about this topic?
- Is it real, or is it something I wish I could write about?
- Has this been said before, especially recently?
- Is it useful?
- Is it entertaining?
- Is it inspiring?
If you answer “no” to any of these questions, you should reconsider whether you want to write it.
Use Proven Concepts. I also learned from Niklas that people enjoy reading certain concepts over others. Concepts like X is Wrong, Y is Right. Or taking a popular belief and saying the opposite, like “Self-improvement Has Made Me Worse.” You should analyze successful articles to find concepts that work for you. By using proven concepts, you improve your chances of writing articles that people like.
Use Successful Structures. Similarly, you want to use proven structures. Everything from the article length to the way you format your paragraphs matters. Again, study successful articles and see what kind of headlines they write, how often they use headings and subheadings, where they use block-quotes and the lengths of their paragraphs. People often skim articles before they read them. If your structure isn’t appealing, they won’t even give it a chance.
During Writing and Editing
Once you start writing and editing your work, you want to keep an eye out for issues that will make your writing worse. Here are the main issues that, if avoided, will enhance your writing significantly.
Be You. You may like certain writers and aspire to write like them. It’s good to learn from them, but in the end, you need to be you. Write as authentically as possible.
Remove Clutter. Remove unnecessary prepositions. Delete redundancies. Use the fewest words possible. It doesn’t mean you can’t write long articles. Just stop beating around the bush and say what needs to be said.
Vary your Vocabulary. You want your writing to be clear and concise, but you don’t want it to be boring. Use less common words to stand out, especially if the esoteric word is a better fit. An online thesaurus can help you find replacement words.
Use Grammarly. Grammatical errors are unnecessary. They annoy readers and ruin articles. Tools like Grammarly are easy to install, cost nothing, and improve your writing effortlessly.
Managing Overwhelm
While taking notes and brainstorming this article, I kept wondering how I would manage this knowledge. It’s impossible to keep all 13 strategies top-of-mind, especially when you’re thinking about and writing your article.
But after breaking it into three sections I realized it’s not that bad. If I review the “Before Writing” section every couple of weeks, it keeps my mindset right. Each time I’m ready to brainstorm and outline an article, I’ll go through the “Before Reading” section. Then, before I write, and again before I edit, I’ll read through both the “During Writing and Editing” section.
It’s a simple system that helps me improve high-impact writing techniques-like using proven concepts and structures-while giving myself good feedback during the editing phase.
Over time, I’d probably get better at writing by simply writing a lot. But who knows how much better and how long it would take.
By creating a process for deliberately practicing my writing, I have a chance to excel fast. And if you want to become a professional writer, or take any skill to a high level, don’t sleep on deliberate practice.
Originally published at https://robriker.com on June 26, 2020.
