Writing In A Vacuum?
6 Powerful Ways To Upgrade Your Writing And Inspire Your Audience
I thought my writing challenge was about consistency.
That was part of it. But it went far deeper than that. Truth is, I never fully believed in myself as a writer.
Writing online for 30 days changed this.
I signed up for the August Ship 30 challenge with one specific goal in mind. How to build a consistent writing habit. I learnt significantly more along the way.
1. How to become an idea machine
What to write about for 30 days? Here’s a quick tip. Write down everything you’ve learnt in the last two years. The thinking behind this is really clever.
What’s the best way to learn something new?
Find someone with a year or two years’ head-start on you. Not the expert. Instead, the person who’s faced down your current challenges and successfully navigated this phase.
I scribbled down various work topics, personal challenges, and ideas of interest. Within an hour, I had a decent list. I then needed to distill the topics into engaging and relevant content.
2. All about you, the reader
For many of you, this is really obvious-it was a game-changer for me.
(i) Get really specific on who you’re writing for.
e.g. An essay on building workplace networks is very different if the desired reader is a recent graduate or a mid-life career changer.
What value are you giving the reader in return for their time reading your work?
(ii) Your writing should endow the reader with specific benefits.
e.g. What will your reader know/understand/be able to do/want to learn more about?
i.e. What’s the story format-is it a how-to list, a useful framework, a personal lesson learnt, etc
3. Find your writing niche
As a corporate trainer and coach, my background is in learning, professional development, and executive coaching. Publishing daily (@isobeltynan) enabled me to understand, via Twitter data analytics, what resonated most with readers.
I doubled down on specific areas of interest.
I engaged with every reader's comment. I focused on topics the reader asked for. I wrote about these topics from different perspectives for different readers.
4. Practice in Public
It was daunting pressing publish on a story daily. Frequently, they felt incomplete, less polished than I’d have liked. The perfectionist in me struggled with this.
The benefits of publishing daily over 30 days were quickly apparent.
I became a faster and more focused writer. It was easier to hone in on the key reader takeaways. The more I wrote, the more ideas I had.
5. Real Feedback
I wrote alongside a cohort of kind, inclusive, and very engaged writers. We were all at different stages of our writing journey-many far more skilled than I. All of us were open to sharing feedback and commenting on others’ work.
Positive engagement with others was a massive motivator.
I thrived on external accountability. It gave my writing the impetus it needed. Combined with real-time Twitter data analytics and the increasing reach of my essays, it kept me pushing on.
6. Consistency
Progress made in meaningful work-even a small win-is a strong predictor of how creatively productive we will be in the long run. (Theresa Amabile)
I have stacks of notebooks and online folders with sparks of ideas, unfinished stories and half-written articles. My published writing was significantly slimmer.
The 30-day writing challenge tipped this balance
It made writing a consistent habit. It turbo-charged my confidence to complete work. I feel differently about writing-Excited, Energised.
It’s given me a content library to delve into. An online community to engage with. It’s moved me from writing as a hobby to identifying as an online writer.
