Best Advice to Build Better Writing

tyunglebower ♦ March 14, 2024 ♦ Leave a comment

Above all other advice I have about improving one’s writing, I embrace a triumvirate of tips far above all others. Two are talked about often in writing and editing circles.

The first being to read. Read especially within the genre you wish to write in, but any reading on a regular basis is helpful. You need not study per se to improve your writing tendencies and instincts as you read. The mere status of reading regularly will through a sort of literary osmosis improve the quality of your own work.

Which brings up the second obvious requirement; to improve as a writer, you just write.

Not as obvious as it sounds.

Though I used to have patience with people who said, “I wish I could write, I could never do what you are doing, I have no time/energy/intelligence for it,” I find myself bristling more at this notion.

You have to write in order to be a writer. There is no choice and there is no excuse. The direct literal act of writing on a regular basis, if only for one’s self will oil machinery within your imagination and your brain that is not only useful but absolutely vital to your success. (Having nothing to do with sales or marketing.) If you have even the slightest respect for the work and creativity of writing anything you will either cease this pointless lament, or redouble your efforts to write something on a regular basis so as to improve. Practice may not make perfect, but doing nothing will make working writers annoyed with you.

My third piece of highest tier advice as not unique to me. Nevertheless it often gets caught up and lost in the shuffle and noise of methods and how-tos, personalities and plans and so many other aspects of the popular (and for some profitable) world of writing about writing.

It is this: You must be willing to be better.

That’s a silly thing to advise. If I didn’t want to get better, I would not even be asking the question.

But consider the statement again. You must be willing to be better, not merely get better.

That is to say, in short, if you are not willing to admit to yourself and the world at large that you both want and need to evolve as a writer, no other advice will matter in the end. You can craft and methods yourself into oblivion trying to make better writing, to catch up to the expectation of “good,” but you will never chance your powers as a wordsmith unless you can openly say, every day, “I can always be better.”

Now there is a dark side to this all important truth that you must avoid. This cannot be a self-flagellation technique. The road from this important wisdom to, “nothing I ever write is any good,” It is a short and steep one. Do not fall down it.

For to accept there is always something more to learn after each project or attempt is not to dismiss your current or even your past work. How insufferable the artist that proclaims a distaste for their own work because it falls short of the angels or some other delusion of grandeur. Believe in your work, and believe in your right to produce it. Just always be willing to ask the question, “how can I make the next thing better still?”

Once again, it is such an obvious-sounding approach it’s easy to overlook how many people actually reject it. They want to improve their marketing, their sales, get better at copying the masters or raise an eyebrow at their local NPR station. All of that may be wonderful ego fodder, and not bad in its own right. But it is not striving to improve. It is striving to be seen.

Hell, I want my work to be seen more than it is. If you’re a writer you probably do as well. Recognition is a fair, understandable desire for a writer. But if you stop evolving before you can say, “I am better doing this now than I was a few years ago,” what is being recognized?

I continue not to know where my career and status as a writer is supposed to be going longterm. Yet I am willing to be better along the way. At least, that is what I am trying to do.