My boring list of 29 writing tips (and occasional life lessons) from Neil Strauss and Tim Ferriss

What I learned from two New York Times bestselling authors about the creative process of writing

I believe in a good storytelling, but today out of laziness and sense of adventure (read: utter respect for Buzzfeed) I’ll resort to the cheapest and the most unimaginative way to present information. I’ll just give you a concise list of lessons I learned from watching Neil Strauss and Tim Ferriss talk for an hour at one of the creativeLIVE seminars. Here it comes. In my own words:

1. The writing day plan for Tim Ferriss is to write two crappy pages (obviously, he’ll crank out more than two once he gets started). It’s similar to making the goal of flossing just one tooth to tap into the habit of flossing. Reducing your goals to the embarrassingly obtainable subgoals is the best way to kill procrastination, get started and build good habits.
2. How do you go about finding your passion? The first question to ask yourself: what did you do when you were 12? Second: what would you do if you weren’t paid?
3. How to decide what to write? Tim Ferriss, ‘I announce my books early. This way I can refine the material I choose to write about by listening to my readers’. It’s quite nuanced though. On the other hand, you shouldn’t listen to your readers on what your next book should be about. All your audience knows is what you did before, not what you do next.
4. What to write about? Write about something you truly care about. If you care and sincerely enthusiastic about your topic, you can make it interesting. Pulitzer-prize-winning author John McPhee wrote an entire book on oranges, and it’s remarkable.
5. If you start from the premise that no one knows you and no one cares about your writing, you’ll have the burning motivation to make your readers care from the first page.
6. Once you finish the book, find a patient friend and have him listen to you reading your book out loud. Mark the parts where you lost your audience as boring and requiring revision or, more often than not, a total elimination.
7. Pick someone who is either a better thinker or a better writer as your proof reader. Brutally honest law students tend to be great proof readers!
8. On apprenticeship. Be coachable, find an internship. In the beginning, do it for free. And don’t make a threat to the existing organization — at the start, your goal is to learn from the masters and not disrupt their usual way of doing things.
9. Advice from Neil Strauss. The best advice for writing is to have a looming deadline with the consequences in the physical world. When an aspiring author tells me about her plan of writing a book and asks for help, I make her announce the date by which she will finish the first draft. If it’s not done by that day, I’m not going to read it.
10. Choose the theme you’re enthusiastic about, this way even if your book doesn’t gain popularity (my book didn’t reach the NY Times bestselling list — what a disaster!), you haven’t wasted your time. You explored and learned a great deal!
11. For many of you not considering to become a writer, that’s fine. You don’t have to. But remember: writing is one of the best ways to improve your thinking.
12. Write the introduction and conclusion at the very end. This way you won’t constrain yourself by the themes you’ll explore in your book.
13. Benjamin Franklin, ‘Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing’. Do interesting things, live dangerously to create the context for your writing. Writer George Plimpton acted in a Western, sparred for three rounds with Sugar Ray Robinson to get his ass kicked, played in the New York Philharmonic Orchestra to then describe his experiences first hand in the books.
14. Be an aggressive note taker. Put a notebook next to your pillow to scribble things down when you think of something while in bed. ‘Oh, I’ll do that first thing in the morning’ never works, you’ll forget it.
15. Make the first draft for yourself. Just a giant stack of pages, everything you wanted to say, no editing — only a pure expression of consciousness. Make the second draft for your readers. That’s the time to kill your babies and take out everything inessential. Make the third draft for your haters. Hater-proof your book, go over every argument and answer potential critiques.
16. There will be many times when you just can’t seem to find the right word. Don’t interrupt your flow by looking into dictionaries. Just put ‘TK’ (which stands for ‘to come’) whenever you’re missing a word and fill in the blanks in the second round.
17. No email and social networking mornings. Tame your internet access using apps such as Freedom, RescueTime or Self-Control. This way you won’t get into the usual reactive mode of answering emails and messages. Remember: your inbox is the agenda for the day set for you by someone else. Start your day by writing (Neil Strauss).
18. Set one day as the nonsense, minutiae day to deal with all the clutter (it’s Monday for Tim Ferriss). Tuesday through Friday are for writing. Automate your lunches. To avoid decision fatigue, pick five of your favorite restaurants and order food from them in rotating order. Make a dinner one night the event when you meet all of your friends at once to reduce the number of commitments during the week (that’s Wednesday for Neil Strauss, and Friday happy hours — for Tim Ferriss). Another tip from Neil, ‘I generally don’t commit to meetings. Then if you don’t show up — your friends won’t be offended, but if you do — you’ll be a hero’.
19. Neil Strauss: ‘Here’s my plan. Write 10 pages a day. Proof read 20 pages a day with 10-page increment (which means you’ll proof-read 30 pages the next day and 40 pages the day after that)’. For a writer, writing is not the most time-intensive part of the process. You’ll have the wrinkled shirt of your first draft, and then days and days will be spent ironing this shirt to get to the production-ready version.
20. Tim Ferriss: ‘If at least one proof reader like some material in the book, I’ll keep it. To remove something from the book, I require a consensus — every single one of my proof readers should be for eliminating it’.
21. Tools from Tim Ferriss: ‘I do all my documenting and researching in Evernote. I use Scrivener for drafting, Dropbox — for sharing big files, and ScreenFlow — for sending the modifications to my team of illustrators and designers’.
22. If the book is not fun to research, it will be boring to read. Writing should be fun. You’ve got to enjoy writing your book. Why bother otherwise?
23. On being unavailable. Neil Strauss: ‘I use a tiered system. I have one personal email (which I check daily) only 20 people know and one phone number for my closest fiends. I check the other email (available to the public) every other day’.
24. Who do you think your reader is when you’re writing? Just think of one reader and write for him/her. That reader can be yourself. What can be more enjoyable than writing the book YOU want to read?
25. Read great writing to brainwash yourself, to get into the mode of awesome storytelling. How would Kurt Vonnegut write it? Write as if you were him if you’re stuck.
26. If the words are flowing, don’t call it a day early. Don’t stop and keep on writing until you exhaust your source of inspiration.
27. It used to be the case that publishers took care of all the marketing. But today to get published, you’ll have to prove your publisher that you can sell at least 10,000 copies. How? By showing the number of your followers on Twitter, the number of readers of your blog, etc.
28. What is better: book-to-blog or blog-to-book? It depends as both approaches work. Do blog-to-book to test waters if you’re not sure. If you can’t sum up the courage to even write a single blog post, how the hell are you going to write a book which is a totally different beast? The Smitten Kitchen cookbook is a great example of this approach. Book-to-blog worked in many cases when the writer had such a conviction in her book, she truly believed that the world needs it.
29. For all the non-fiction addicts out there. Fiction books teach you through metaphors and stories, not boring ‘how to’s. That’s way more powerful!

For those who survived — it’s time for a fun experiment. Without looking back at the list, in the comments write exactly one lesson which you took away. Write the first one if there are several lessons which come to mind.