The Secret to Becoming a Good Writer is to Become a Prolific One
When I tell people I write 1000 words a day, they almost always respond by asking “what do you write about?” If you read through my Moleskine notebooks and journaling software , what you’d find are hundreds of half-baked thoughts, false starts, and incoherent psychobabble. What makes it into my books and articles here on Medium is the 10% I think is worth sharing. Because the cumulative output is more important than any individual piece of work, only a small percent needs to be good.
To make it even more concrete, let’s look at the math. 1000 words a day over the course of a year is more than 300,000 words. That’s 30,000 words. Add another 15 days on and you’ve basically written a book even though 90% of what you wrote was terrible.
In other words, only 10% of what you write over the course of the year needs to be good.
The Myth of Linearity
So how do you go from incoherent psychobabble and false starts to usable ideas? Just the act of sitting down and writing moves you from a place of confusion to one of clarity, fluency and flow. After years of writing 5 paragraph essays, we’re conditioned to think that our process has to be linear. Our structure of the final product has to be linear, but the process doesn’t. In a typical writing session I might write a paragraph for a talk I plan to give, a headline for an article I plan to write or even a sentence for an idea that isn’t fully formed yet. You’re effectively creating the pieces of a puzzle that you will assemble later.
The Myth of Length
Another myth I think traps people is they feel like they have to use a lot of words. If you look at Steven Pressfield’s book The War of Art, some of the chapters are really short. But he manages to say so much with so few words. The same applies to many of the 6000+ blog posts Seth Godin has written on his blog. Don’t underestimate the value of an idea that only needs one sentence to be expressed.
Finding a Takeoff Point
In surfing, there’s a section of the wave known as the take off point. If a surfer stays in the water long enough, eventually he’ll find the takeoff point. If a writer keeps writing long enough eventually he’ll find the takeoff point. Find your take off point and keep writing. Sometimes that will happen after 100 words. Sometimes after 800. But I know if I commit to getting words down on the page eventually I’ll arrive at a place where my voice is lucid and my ideas are coherent.
The simple secret to being a good writer is to be a prolific one. You simply write shitty first sentences, shitty first drafts, and at some point, some of what you write will be good.
I’m the host and founder of The Unmistakable Creative Podcast. Every Sunday we share the most unmistakable parts of the internet that we have discovered in The Sunday Quiver. Receive our next issue by signing up here
