If you want to become a better writer, you’ve probably heard this advice a hundred times: just write more.
So, I followed that advice.
I wrote and wrote, draft after draft, year after year. And that improvement? It wasn’t really happening.
There’s a difference between becoming a better writer and just stacking up the pages. So let me explain what it actually takes to become a better writer, so you aren’t spinning your wheels for years like I did.
To Become a Better Writer, Writing More Isn’t Enough
Here’s what I was doing.
I’d sit down day after day and write. And I was really proud of the discipline I developed.
If you’re doing this right now, you should be proud of that, too. Showing up regularly is good practice on its own. It’s going to serve you in the future. It establishes writing as part of your life, which is one of the best things you can do if you want to go on and be a successful writer.
But somewhere in there, I was assuming that just showing up was the whole thing.
I thought if I kept putting words down, the skill would somehow magically build itself inside of me.
Here’s what I learned a lot later: that’s not really how this works.
There’s a difference between practicing and repeating. They can feel almost the same, which is exactly why this is so easy to miss.
To Become a Better Writer, You Have to Know What You’re Practicing
Picture someone who shoots 500 free throws a day, but they have a flaw in their form.
They think they’re practicing. They’re out there. They’ve got the discipline. They’re shooting 500 shots a day, no matter how they feel.
But because this person has a flaw in their form that they don’t know about, they just keep shooting the same way. As a result, they don’t get any better.
In fact, they might get really, really good at missing the basket in the same way every time.
The reps are piling up, but unfortunately, the bad habit is solidifying itself under each one.
Or think about this: Maybe someone is learning to play the guitar, and they play every day for years, but they only ever play the same three chords for a handful of songs they already know. Ten years go by, and they’re really no better than they were a few months after they started.
If that person just wants to enjoy playing the guitar, more power to them. That’s not a problem at all.
But if that person wanted to get better at playing the guitar, then there is a problem there because they’re not getting better. And they can start to worry that maybe they’re not cut out for playing the guitar, which would be a mistake.
This is the trap.
Playing the same thing can feel like practice, but it’s just repetition.
To Become a Better Writer, You Need Deliberate Practice
So what makes the difference?
There actually is a name for it. It’s called deliberate practice. That basically means your skills improve when your practice is targeted, a little uncomfortable, and supported by feedback that tells you what’s working and what isn’t.
Volume of repetition alone isn’t enough. Volume without direction cements whatever you were already doing, the good and the bad.
I see this all the time in the writers I work with. They can have a certain way of writing that they’ve done for a long time, and it can be very difficult for them to understand that what they’re doing isn’t working if they want the story to become publishable.
If they want a story readers can’t put down, there is craft involved.
Writing has craft just like music has craft.
You wouldn’t go out and try to learn piano without a mentor. The same should be true with writing.
To Become a Better Writer, Treat Writing Like a Craft
I’ve been a musician longer than I’ve been a writer. I started playing piano when I was about five years old, and I got lessons. From the very beginning, as a budding musician, I understood that I needed mentorship and instruction.
I went to lessons every week for years, through my whole schooling career and into college.
So I got that.
Then I turned to writing.
Why I didn’t understand the parallels there is beyond me, but I didn’t. I spent years spinning my wheels, doing it by myself and just trying to learn.
I figured I’d read a lot of books, so I should be able to write a story. That’s kind of like saying, “Well, I’ve listened to a lot of piano pieces, so I should be able to play Beethoven.”
It doesn’t work that way.
But for some reason, a lot of us, including me, think that if we do it enough, we’re going to get it down.
Writers often think, “If I’m talented enough, I should be able to just write.” Maybe one percent of the population can do that. The rest of us have to learn the craft of writing.
I didn’t break through and get my first publishing contract, my second publishing contract, and my third, until I got a mentor—until I started learning from experienced writers what I was missing in my story.
After that, nobody could stop me.
But I’ve Read a Lot of Stories!
But it’s so strange because I spent so many years floundering, thinking I was practicing and doing it right. I thought I could just write a story because I had read so many stories.
In a way, that kind of makes sense because we humans are wired for story. We’ve been telling each other stories around the fire for a very long time. Somewhere along the way, our brains came to expect a certain shape in a story.
We anticipate cause and effect, wait for a setup to pay off, feel tension build, and then long for it to release.
And we don’t do this consciously. A reader doesn’t sit there thinking about plot points or pacing, but they can feel it when something is missing.
Unfortunately, a new writer often can’t tell what’s wrong.
I couldn’t.
To Become a Better Writer, Look Underneath the Words
We may rewrite the words and polish the sentences, but the words are rarely the real problem.
I’ve found in my years of coaching other writers, and in my own experience, that the architecture underneath the story is often the problem.
There’s a name for that architecture. Most of us have heard it tossed around and figured we basically understood it. That name is story structure.
When I was starting out, I thought structure meant the obvious stuff: beginning, middle, and end. Everybody knows that, right?
But it goes a lot deeper than that. It’s more specific than I ever realized.
What I didn’t understand is that structure isn’t a formula that makes every book sound the same. It’s closer to a promise between you and your reader.
You’re saying to your reader, “Stick with me because this is going to add up to something.”
When you, as the writer, understand the shape readers are unconsciously expecting from you, then you get to decide when to give it to them and when to bend it on purpose.
But you can’t work with it that way when you’ve never learned it in the first place.
To Become a Better Writer, You Need Feedback
Here’s the second thing I got wrong, and I held on to this for the longest time.
For years, I wrote completely alone. I didn’t show my work to anyone.
Why? Because I was scared.
I was scared that if I showed my work to somebody, it would confirm the thing I was most afraid of: that my work wasn’t any good and I was never going to be able to become a good writer.
You may worry about that, too. I think a lot of us writers do.
So I just kept revising on my own. Draft after draft, just me and the manuscript. I bought writing books. I tried to get some help from them.
And here’s the problem I didn’t see at the time: You can’t see your own work clearly.
It’s impossible.
I’ve written and published 10 books now, most of them award-winning books, and I can tell you this: it is impossible to see your own work clearly.
Our brains fill in all the empty spaces. We know what we intend to have happen. Whether that’s actually on the page is something we can’t see clearly.
You know what you mean to say, so your brain fills it in every time you read over your work. You see the story in your head, not the one your reader is going to see.
Even to this day, whenever I write a book, I’m so grateful for my beta readers and editors. I know I’ll have “aha moments” when they come back with, “This was a little confusing,” or “I thought this was going to go here, and then it went there instead.”
Even at this point in my writing career, when I’ve done this a lot, that feedback is still gold to me.
To Become a Better Writer, Let Feedback Clear the Fog
When I finally did let someone read my work—really read it and tell me the truth—it was every bit as uncomfortable as I was afraid it would be.
But here’s what turned the tide for me: That first time I got help taught me more in about a week than years of trying to revise on my own.
Suddenly I could see things clearly. It was like the fog cleared, and I could see my story. I could see what was missing. I walked away relieved because at that point, I knew what to fix. I wasn’t just circling around, hoping changing a few words would magically make everything better.
So here’s what I’m hoping you can hear if you’re at the stage I was in then: The feedback you’re avoiding isn’t going to break you. It’s scary, I know. But it may be the thing that finally lets you move forward.
When that happened for me, I was more motivated than I had been before. I was back to writing, back to editing, and back to fixing the things I now knew needed to be fixed.
And I got really excited about the story.
Because when we are writers, we do have instincts about storytelling. I knew something wasn’t quite right. Hearing what it was and knowing how to fix it felt like opening a locked door.
If you’re sitting where I was, afraid to share your work, but you know something is up with it and it needs some help, you can work with me on a Story Structure Diagnostic. Or you can choose an editor or beta reader. Be careful who you choose. It matters.
But don’t shy away from this step because it can propel you forward in your writing career.
To Become a Better Writer, Use Feedback to Practice on Purpose
Remember when I talked about deliberate practice earlier?
This is the missing piece of it.
When you get feedback from the right kind of person, then you can go back and write with a different kind of focus.
You can ask:
- What am I trying to improve here?
- What strength am I focused on?
- How am I improving my weaknesses?
That brings you into a different mindset. Now you’re deliberately practicing what you need to practice.
That’s how you become a better writer.
And trust me, it’s uncomfortable.
If you’re just writing, writing, writing, la la la, and you don’t know if you’re improving, that may be fun, but it’s probably not making you better.
Trying to get better as a writer is usually a little bit uncomfortable.
So if your writing is never a little uncomfortable, then you’re probably not deliberately practicing. If you really want to get better, deliberate practice is the key.
To Become a Better Writer, Make Improvement Feel Possible
Here’s one more benefit of getting real, experienced feedback on your work: When I did that, when I took that step, another change happened in my mindset.
I could finally see that getting better as a writer was within my realm of possibility.
It wasn’t just a dream anymore. It became more real because now I could see the gap between where I was and where I wanted to be. I could see that it wasn’t some mystery of talent or endless repetition.
It was practicing skills I hadn’t gained yet.
That changed how I treated my writing because once I understood I could actually improve, and once I knew where I needed to improve, I started giving my work a lot more time.
How do we do that?
By sacrificing other things.
That’s the other part of this puzzle.
Once we know what we need to deliberately practice, and once it becomes real to us that we can actually improve because we know what needs to be fixed, then the thing standing in our way is time and focus.
When I got that feedback, that became real to me.
I thought, “Okay, now I just need the time to really focus on this because now I know what I need to do to improve, but I’ve got to find the time to do it.”
To Become a Better Writer, Give Writing Real Time
There’s a lot of talk about increasing productivity and finding time in your schedule.
But the one thing that worked for me, and worked really well, was sacrificing something else I was doing.
All of us are busy. We all have full days. Getting serious about writing means we can’t continue to drop in once a week for 10 minutes and expect major growth. We have to make writing a priority.
So I stepped out of some of the other things I was involved in at that time in my life. They were things I cared about, but I wanted to improve as a writer.
The truth is that nobody is going to come along and grant you the extra time you need. And nobody is going to take your writing seriously until you do.
I waited for a long time for some signal that was going to say, “Okay, now you can really go for this.” That feedback I got from that editor was the closest thing I got to that.
It felt like, “Yes, you can improve if you do this, but you have to put the real time in.”
Giving your writing real time and real investment is not the reward you get after you get good enough.
It’s what helps you get good enough.
That’s backwards from how most people think about it.
We think we can’t really give ourselves permission to focus a lot of time and energy on our writing until it starts paying off.
But the investment of our time and focus is what gets us to that place.
It helps us earn that place.
To Become a Better Writer, Stop Waiting for Permission
If some part of you has been waiting for a calm season, a clear schedule, or proof that you’re worth betting on, I’d like to tell you that the waiting is holding you back.
The way forward, the one I learned through the mistakes I made, is getting feedback on your work and then deciding to make writing a priority in your life.
Invest the time you need to improve. Do that, and there’s no way you won’t get better.
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If you know you’ve been waiting for some permission slip that isn’t coming, I’ll just say this: You don’t have to do this alone.
That’s why I built the Writer’s Brain Studio community. It’s a place for writers who are done waiting and ready to get the feedback and direction their stories need.
Image by cookie_studio on Magnific.