This One Tip Will Improve Your Writing No End
The best thing is you don’t even have to do anything
Only today, I checked back on an article I’d published the day before on Medium. I’d been quite proud of it, it seemed like a good idea and as far as I could tell, had all the ingredients of a decent article.
I read through the article, which was only a 3 minute read, that’s something I definitely need to work on, not that ‘more = better’ just that, I need to start writing more, full stop.
Anyway, I reread the article and I was deflated, disappointed. Had someone snuck in overnight and changed my glittering, informative and chatty article for something that was….well, a bit dull and frankly lackluster.
No of course not. It was the same article, but how did it come across so differently now?
I’d had the benefit of an overnight break from it, so I wasn’t caught up in the romance of thinking what a great piece of writing it was. I was coming at it with a completely new pair of eyes and what those eyes saw wasn’t great.
It will be very rare indeed that you, me or indeed anyone is going to bash out a piece of writing, music, art, anything and it’ll be bang on from the get-go. It needs time to marinade, time for the flavors to come together.
I’m pretty sure that when Michelangelo was paining the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel he didn’t rush to get it finished and dash off thinking;
‘That’s a cracking job I’ve done there. What’s next?’
How many edits did it take The Beatles to produce St Pepper, how many edits did J K Rowling take to get Harry Potter absolutely right?
There’s a reason when you read anything about writing, that it says
“Write your work and then put it down and walk away”.
Your mind can play tricks on you and con you into believing that your work is better than it is.
Write once, edit over and over again. Heck, even Stephen King, who writes practically non-stop, edits everything he writes time and time again. That’s why he’s so good.
So take your writing, put it to one side and don’t be in such a damn hurry to press that publish button. The platforms you want to write on will still be there tomorrow and the next day. You won’t suddenly run out of ideas, and if your work is good enough, then your audience will find you regardless of how long it takes to publish.
Good things always take time, unfortunately the world we live in is geared up to getting instant gratification and approval for everything. We put a post online and we immediately start to check to see if we’ve got likes to give our egos a stroke.
Maybe sometimes it would be worthwhile just sitting back and taking your time. Sometimes you may want to delay that gratification for a few days and reap the rewards later.
So the message from me and the tip I’d like to share with you, from one who has suffered at the hands of pressing the publish button too hastily is
Step back
Forget about your article
Watch tv
Do something else.
Go back in a day or two and reread it, make any corrections, additions and amendments then and only then.
I guarantee that you will be astonished at how different it seems and your writing will improve as a result.
