How to Write
I’ve always loved writing. I do it frequently — books, columns, scripts, memos, speeches. Some of it has come out well. Some less so. But the act of writing itself makes me happy, so I keep doing it. Writing well is hard no matter who you are or how much you do it, but there are approaches that can help. Here are a few that have worked for me.
Write like you speak. When most people speak, their goal is to communicate whatever they have to say as clearly as possible. Writing should be the same. Your writing can’t have a true voice if it doesn’t sound like you (or your characters, if you’re writing fiction). Just say what you want to say as plainly, concisely and clearly as possible.
Do not try to sound smart. The worst writing is someone trying to impress you with how smart they are by using long, complex words and sentences simply because they’re long and complex. If the writer was truly smart, they wouldn’t need to do that. It’s the surest way to alienate your audience. My worst grade in law school was in legal writing. The instructor insisted there was one correct way to write and in my view, her way was simply bad writing, even if it was standard practice in the legal industry. I refused and my grade reflected it. So be it (when I published my first book, I made a cursory effort to find the instructor and send it to her but her name completely escaped me; I realized that for the sake of my writing in the years since her class, that was probably for the best).
Speak your mind/ don’t sound like a politician. If you’re too afraid to write how you actually feel, don’t waste the reader’s time. This is why politicians’ biographies are usually unreadable. By definition, politicians try to be politic. If your only goal is to never offend anyone or say anything disagreeable, that probably means you don’t have anything worth saying in the first place.
Use most of your time for editing. Blaise Pascal once famously concluded a letter apologizing for its length, saying something along the lines of “If I had more time, this letter would have been shorter.” I try to get whatever I can down on paper as quickly as possible and leave most of the time for editing. Having the time to rethink the piece, see what does and doesn’t work, what belongs where, what isn’t essential is what makes a piece worth reading. If someone asks you to read a draft of something, the best way to help them is rarely just by saying what you think of the substance itself. Focus instead on the writing, the flow, the voice, the structure, the feel. Opinions about ideas are easy. Anyone can do that. Feedback on the writing itself is more helpful.
Then put it to bed. While editing is the most important part, there also comes a point to stop. Yes, you can always keep editing and keep making it incrementally better. I can go back to everything I’ve ever written and find plenty of things I would now change. But at a certain point, the returns become very diminishing. Move on.
Keep your subconscious going. If I’m working on a column or chapter or script I’m excited about, my subconscious never stops thinking about it. I’ll often wake up in the middle of the night and realize where a sentence needs to go or why an argument doesn’t work or why the opening needs to be rewritten. Yes, every sleep expert would tell you to not then immediately dive into the document. They’re probably right. But how many of them can really write?
Have regular milestones. Like most things, deadlines and accountability helps. The reason I produce a weekly substack and a monthly column for the Daily News is because it keeps me writing. I’m accountable to a specific output and that forces me to continually think, write and edit.
Talk out your ideas. My substack comes out on Tuesdays. I record one of my podcasts on Monday mornings and the topic of the substack is almost always one of the topics of the podcast too. By talking through the piece in the studio, I realize what’s wrong with it and I go back and edit more before it’s published the next day. You may not have that specific setup, but just talking through your writing with others or even just reading out loud to yourself can really help.
If you’re writing fiction, have empathy for your characters. If it’s non-fiction, have empathy for yourself. There was a guy once who was angry at me and in an effort to hurt my feelings, he told me that my novel Obvious in Hindsight didn’t work because it was clear I hated all of the characters. He was right. I was so focused on emotional and intellectual honesty that I did it at the expense of making my characters sympathetic, relatable, human. Your characters don’t have to be perfect or even good. But they do have to be redeeming in some way.
Read a lot. I can’t imagine that many people write well in a vacuum. Being good at anything takes a lot of practice. But the act of writing alone is typically not enough. You need to read to learn from others. How do they express themselves? How do they tell a story? How do they write concisely? How do they structure their sentences, their paragraphs? For writing to be more than passable, reading is essential. With that said, as a reader, I am very protective of my time. If I don’t like something after 40 pages, I’m out. If I don’t like certain types of genres, I don’t read them. If everyone loves a book and I don’t, I put it down. Something like 150 million books have been written in human history. If you read 100 books a year, live to 100 and start reading the minute you come out of the womb, that’s .00006 percent of them. You can’t even make a dent in the total, so just read what you like.
Not everyone likes to write. And not everyone needs to. But if you do enjoy it — or if you have to write because of work or school — there’s no reason not to do it as well as you can. The tips above are certainly not the entirety of sound writing advice, but they have worked for me. I hope some of them work for you too!
I loved this post. I’m trying to pick up a writing cadence. Thanks for sharing.