Transcription
If you want to master writing so fast it feels illegal, you need to learn the hidden techniques that separate amateur writing from professional work. I've learned that the writers who become rich and famous don't need inspiration or talent. They use specific repeatable practices that force a breakthrough. So these are the seven principles you need to write better than most people ever will.
First, let's talk about why most people never improve at writing, even though we all write every single day. Here's what it is. It's putting what's in your head into someone else's head. That's it. Writing and persuasion are the same thing. Effective transfer of thought. For copywriting, you are translating the right message into customer-facing messaging using voice of customer data. But across all writing, and I mean novels, emails, I mean even business reports, the job is the same. Most writers fail because they think their job is to make things sound good, but that's replaceable by AI. What isn't replaceable is understanding that every word should support getting agreement, getting someone to say yes.
If you never externalize your thoughts, you never evaluate them. You just operate on autopilot, assuming you're right. Writing forces you to confront gaps in your knowledge and blind spots you didn't even know you had. So when you understand that writing is persuasion, the effective transfer of thought, you can approach every piece of writing with that clarity. These principles will help you do exactly that.
Principle number one, be ready to massacre your work. Perman Melville rewrote Moby Dick, a very long novel, three times. Still, so many people hold on tightly to their writing as if good is only going to come that one time, and that's completely not true. Rewriting can feel like a waste, but it's not because it advances you, gets you closer to the writing, the better version of the writing that becomes the standard. So, writing is constant experimentation. You have little experiments running all the time. You're always experimenting with ways to phrase something. Then there are larger experiments like, does this chapter work? Then the largest, does the whole thing work? Now, this means you need to separate writing from editing. Put content on the page, keep putting more on the page, and only return later to tighten and refine. The more you do this, the closer you'll be to writing something actually great. So give yourself permission to write badly first. Draft it, then come back and massacre what doesn't work. Don't edit as you go. That kills momentum. Write first, edit later. Be ruthless.
Principle number two changed everything for me. Call yourself a writer right now. I was working as a hostess at a restaurant during undergrad, and a guy sitting in the front area just asked what I was studying, and I said, "I'm an English major." And he was like, "Oh, so you're a writer." And I was like, "Maybe one day." He said, "Call yourself a writer. Just do it." Now, you see, when you call yourself a thing, you're more likely to act that way and become that thing. This is James Clear's atomic habits principle. A dancer dances. A writer writes. If you identify as a writer, you ask, "What would a writer do?" Then you do that. This doesn't come naturally, but with time, I was able to start doing it. Identity shifting is more powerful than goal setting. Instead of, "I'll write my first novel in 12 months," you ask, "What would a writer do right now?" A writer would carve out time right now. A writer would produce three pages, then three more. Besides, when you identify as a writer, you give yourself permission to dare to embarrass yourself. The only embarrassment to avoid is, you know, basically putting out junk. That's a big ball of clichés. But start by calling yourself a writer today. Then act in keeping with that identity. Carve out time to write daily, even if it's just, you know, improving that work email. When you shift your identity, your actions follow.
Principle number three is skip what the reader skips. Have you ever watched a movie that starts in the middle of the action and then it cuts back to 24 hours before? This is in media res, which is starting right in the middle of things. And it's one of the most powerful ways to keep people reading or watching. It's useful in all types of writing. In an email, if you want someone to click, you don't finish the story. You stop midway at the most dramatic part. If you're writing a page-turner, you finish the chapter midway into the scene at peak drama. All we ever really want to do is make sure we're not boring anybody. The best practice is to cut warm-ups, cut conclusions, cut everything the reader wishes just wasn't there. Ask yourself before you share something, "Does this belong on the page?" If it doesn't help the argument or help get people nodding along with you, it doesn't belong. Go back to something you wrote recently and just cut the first paragraph. Then cut the last paragraph. Nine times out of 10, it's stronger because you've eliminated the warm-up and the unnecessary conclusion.
Next up is principle number four. Destroy your clichés. I bet that you are overusing these as a writer. At the end of the day, trust the process, or even emotional roller coaster. We've all been there. But you need to be conscious about it and start cutting these phrases if you want your writing to be unique. These types of things, these conventions are common in any artistic field, which is why musician and producer Brian Eno created a list called Oblique Strategies that was then turned into a deck of cards. In this deck, there's a strategy called "Every line has two sides," and that can fix this problem. So, for example, if you're stuck on the phrase "emotional roller coaster," okay, visualize its inverse. Replace it with something like, "helplessly bobbing unhappiness." Same concept, but said differently with specificity. You also need to discover and abandon your recipes. I rely on the rule of three, like three parallel sentences in a row. If you see yourself using a formula, don't let yourself use it for three weeks. Stop using the rule of three, just like that, and then you'll learn a new recipe. An easier way to fix these might be using AI. You can get Claude to review your work and highlight clichés. But the twist is, you need to rewrite them. The AI does not rewrite them. That's where your brain gets engaged. Here's another practice. Ask why. Why did David Ogilvy write that old headline that way? Why did Jane Austen open her novel that way? Then do the research to get a real answer. You might never know why, but you'll get better at thinking about the why. So, take a piece of your writing and just like hunt for clichés and repeated formulas. Delete every cliché. Then, rewrite those sections just using specific, fresh language that generates an image in the reader's mind.
Principle number five is the fastest shortcut to write better, and it is this: Surround yourself with writers. But Tolkien and C.S. Lewis were in a writing group together. Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein were also in a writing group together. It's critical that you surround yourself with people who write well and care about this stuff. You have to surround yourself with people who write well. Take that job as a junior copywriter at an agency. Work around people who produce writing. When you work in those environments, you learn the craft. Doing it around people who do it well makes you learn better and better and better. You also have to keep studying. I have been writing professionally for 20 years with two published novels, but I still take all the classes I can. The best thing you can do is be in a student role as much as possible. Assume you're not good at this. That's a far better place than assuming you're good or you're super good. And assume you need help. You can always, always, always learn from others. Writing is so isolating. It's just, you know, you versus the page. So when you sit next to other writers and talk about what you're working on, you get to connect with people who are also doing this very isolating thing. If you take away one new thing from each experience and apply it, you will become a better writer. So find a writing group, take a class, or join a community where writers gather. Show up as a student, absorb everything, and practice what you learn immediately.
Principle number six, use AI to challenge you, not replace you. There's this idea that AI is just going to replace all writers. And in fact, it's already replaced some, but the ones it replaced didn't understand that AI should do about 75% of the job. I mean, the boring, the painful work. That leaves you, as the writer, to do the remaining 25% twice as well, 10 times as well. The strategy, the creative thinking, the big ideas, even interviewing customers, all of the things that matter. I use AI. I use Claude as a devil's advocate. I upload my brief, my solution design, my copy, survey responses, everything. Then I ask Claude to challenge my copy line by line to give me the objections that my persona would have. But to do the last 25% twice as well, you need to keep training your brain. The easiest way to do this is to read everything. Cereal boxes, shampoo bottles, poetry, essays. Read one really difficult book every year. Something like, you know, Gravity's Rainbow or Finnegan's Wake to push yourself. Start using Claude as a thinking partner, not a replacement. Upload your work and ask it to challenge you to find holes in your logic. Tell it to interview you one question at a time, and then take that feedback and rewrite everything yourself.
And the last principle, don't compare yourself. When I read Carol Shields' The Stone Diaries, I did not write anything for like a year. I was like, "No, that's outstanding. I can't even enter this field." But that's not fair because you do have something to say. Everybody I know who's written a book wishes it were different. They go back in their minds and they rewrite it. Even the masters feel inadequate about their work. You just have to keep writing every day and improving bit by bit. Now, daily writing doesn't mean, you know, pulling out a separate laptop or creating something perfect. It means when you're writing, I don't know, that work email or a Slack message, you try a little bit harder. You get a little more ambitious. You maybe even dare to overwrite it and possibly embarrass yourself. That's fine. That's cool. The writers who win are the ones who keep writing despite feeling inadequate. They don't wait until they're good enough. They sure don't wait until they're perfect. They write badly, then they write better. Then they write well, and along the way, they never stop writing. So stop comparing yourself, please, to the writers you admire. Instead, write daily, even if it's imperfect. Lower the bar. Make your work emails more ambitious. Try harder in Slack messages. Dare to embarrass yourself.
And here is a writing exercise to try right now. Okay, so this is from a book called Steering the Craft by Ursula K. Le Guin, which I'm probably saying wrong. The writing exercise is called "Being Gorgeous." So your job here is to write a sentence that's meant to be read aloud in which the words you choose, the punctuation, and the structure of the sentence sound like the thing you are describing. So, if you're describing building a wall out of bricks, how would you write the sentence? So, the sentence itself sounds when read aloud like the slow, staggered, labored, patterned process of building a wall with bricks. This is the example that Le Guin gives in her book: "She slipped swift as silvery fish through the slapping gurgle of sea waves." It sounds like the image it's meant to bring to mind. That's what you want to do. That's your writing exercise.
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