Photo by Fikret tozak on Unsplash

Your Writing Career Won’t Always Seem This Hard to Pull Off (I Promise)

How to Not Suck at Writing: Episode #13

I get it…

If you’re just starting out in your writing career, or you’ve been writing for a while and still haven’t gotten traction, your dreams of building a full-time career seem distant.

The numbers you see other writers putting up — views, subscribers, and revenue — probably feel out of reach, don’t they?

I remember that feeling, thinking to myself “How the hell am I going to pull this off?”

Yet, here I am.

I’m now at a level that most writers dream of reaching:

• Millions of yearly readers
• 35,000 email subscribers
• And let’s just say I’m doing ok financially

​As hard as it is to believe and embrace, I was once you.

I started at zero. All writers do.

Let’s talk about what you need to do to make it to the next level.

Escaping the newbie abyss

When you’re new to writing or haven’t gotten a ton of traction, everything seems hard.

It doesn’t seem fair either.

You post a thoughtful tweet and it gets two likes. A big Twitter account will post something like “Drink water, get 8 hours of sleep, exercise” and get 10,000 likes.

You write a Medium post and it gets 10 views. If I were to just take your content and put my name on it and publish it to my account, the same exact content would get way more views.

You feel like you’re shouting into the void.

So what do you do?

First, you need to understand the power of compounding.

Your writing career is a lot like starting an investing account. When you first put your money into an investment account, your balance doesn’t grow fast. Give it a few years, though, and it grows faster. Not just a little bit faster, but a lot faster.

If you don’t quit, you’ll see an exponential jump in your views and income, guaranteed.

Second, you need to be extra scrappy when it comes to networking and engagement. You need to up the amount of engagement you do by 10X. You’re just expecting the platforms to shower you with views and that “build it & they will come mentality will surely fail.”

A couple of quick tips:

• Reply to every single comment or reply you get on your posts
• Have dedicated time every day to engage with other writers
• Go the extra mile and send people personal messages via email and DM

You also need to go above and beyond the typical effort level, most new writers give.

​Don’t just say “great post!” Leave a comment or reply that adds to the conversation, point out how the insights in the post have helped you, or ask a smart and thoughtful question.

You can pick up views and followers with comments. You should look at the comments everyone else leaves and leave the best comment on the post, period.

When you DM people, first just reach out and share some sincere appreciation for their work. Point out something specific. Do not have an agenda. People can smell when you’re needy and looking to take from them.

With all of these tips, you have to be relentless with them.

I know plenty of big-name writers who don’t need to engage and network but still do.

In your case, it’s a necessity. You need to get ‘escape velocity’ and have enough momentum going to break out of the inertia that comes with being new.

Engagement helps you escape as long as it’s coupled with the most important action you need to take.

How to Properly Play the Long Game

I know it sounds trite to say you “just have to do the work!”

But, in reality, you just have to do the work.

You can solve most of your problems through effort. When it comes to writing, you just need to practice your writing consistently as well as figure out a way to know whether or not you’re getting better.

When it comes to consistency, you need to work in a distraction-free environment and get comfortable with the tension that comes from trying to stay in the present moment.

If you haven’t already, you should read The Power of Now as well as Deep Work. Both books talk about the power of being present.

You struggle to sit down and write often enough because you struggle with being present. You can only practice presence by being present even though you don’t want to be.

You have no excuse not to have a minimum of 30 minutes of non-negotiable writing time per day. Set a timer. Sit there and either write or stare at the wall. Put it on your calendar and build a consecutive streak of days where you’re doing the work.

What about the mechanics of it all, though?

How do you know if you’re getting any better?

For one, you should be trying to incorporate new writing techniques into your work consciously.

For example, if you learn a writing tip like using contractions in your blog posts, you should hammer in that technique until it works — checking for every instance where you forgot to do it.

Second, you need to learn how to model other people’s work. If what you put out into the world doesn’t resemble anything else you see online, the odds are you’ve missed the mark.

Here are some examples of modeling:

• Reading headlines of top articles and stealing the frame from them, e.g., taking “Don’t Just Set Goals, Build Systems Instead” and translating it to a different niche like “Don’t just Go to the Gym. Train Instead”
• Reading top blog posts and writing notes where you’re literally just guessing why the article did well and thinking of ways to incorporate it in your own work.
• Studying how writing is formatted. If you see that top posts have short paragraphs and you have long walls of text, you know what to fix.
• Looking at a tweet and finding the big idea behind it for you to remix on your own
• Noticing that other writers are using shocking opening lines and trying a few on your own
• Seeing what sub-topics are trending in your niche by reading a few top blog posts

I have a section in my Medium course where I tell students to take notes on 15 articles. I can always tell which ones do and which ones don’t. The ones who do will develop a deeper understanding of what works. Those that don’t will struggle to come up with good ideas.

A huge part of this process is just being conscious in the first place. A lot of writers practice blindly. They can’t see why their writing falls flat because they don’t want to see why.

They don’t want to see why because that means they would have to have an honest conversation with themselves where they’d have to look in the mirror and nowhere else.

You don’t have to write just like everyone else to succeed, but you do need to understand the themes and patterns. Learn the rules of the game first, then break them by adding your own twist on the traditional techniques.

If you study the game and give yourself time, good things will happen.

Take Peace in Knowing This

You need to give it your all and do a crazy amount of work to break out of the newbie abyss, but once you escape, succeeding as a writer isn’t hard.

You’ll understand that it’s a literal matter of time before you get the results you want so you settle in and do the work.

One day you’ll look up to see that you have years of experience under your belt and the time of audience and income that was hard to fathom not too long ago.

All the top writers you see just got a little bit better every single day and outlasted everyone else who quit because they were impatient and let their frustration get the best of them.

You will win if you’re willing to wait.

Join How to Not Suck at Writing Here