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What magic do good writers possess?

Do you ever wonder how the great ones do it? Even the not-so-great manage to get published. The magic is in the practices they implement. Successful writers have written about their habits, practices, and rituals that get them through the work of writing.

In my reading on the subject, these 4 practices come up again and again. From using them, I know that they work. And they’re transferable, so anyone can make use of them.

You don’t need to have had straight A’s in language, throughout your academic career. Neither is it necessary that you be a particularly gifted writer. It helps to know how to write, though. That’s important and interesting, too, because even gifted writers can fail when they don’t use these 4 practices.

These practices can put some relative ease into your work of writing, as well as help to improve the skills you have. And, isn’t that always  a bonus.

How can I improve my writing skills?

1. You need to write daily. Don’t make excuses; just do it. Write daily, all the way through your first drafts. Remember, too, no editing in drafts. Just get it written.

Daily writing is on-the-job training that can make or break your rhythm. Many successful writers who write about their process share this interesting experience: Characters, plots and settings, in fact, all aspects of your work can and often do change as you write. If you don’t write daily, the idea can leave altogether.

So, not only will your skills lag, but not writing daily can cost you the flow of your piece. And sometimes that flow cannot be recovered as it was originally conceived. You need to find some hours (or at least 30 minutes) when you can sit in your space and record your daily thoughts.

2. You need to know where and when you’re going to work. A big part of being able to write daily is having a place to write. Your writing place is where you work daily without being uprooted once you start. After a while, getting to this place will eventually signal an automatic brain switch to writing mode.

3. You need to read widely. What do you get from reading everything—aside from possible eye strain? Reading various materials helps to inform your intellect, perspective and knowledge base. Beyond that, you get exposed to different written voices.

Also, language is fluid, dynamic, evolving. Good writing is a matter of knowing what traditional and current trends audiences will bear. Read in your genre and all through it, writings from the past and current times. Read outside your genre: poetry to magazine ads, all are important.

• Read for pleasure
• Read with a discriminating eye

It’s important to know what writing works for you, and why it does.

4. You need to pay attention to others. Writing is a very insular activity to say that it’s so much informed by socialization. Conversations, arguments, and silent interactions, all matter. Consider these few conversation questions:

• What about strangers’ conversations initially draws you in? It may just be that you could hear them.
• What keeps you interested? What do you notice? Accents. Lisps. Names.
• In each participants rhetoric, do you notice that one drops many names?
• Does one dominate the conversation, with the other(s) interjecting only acknowledgment when they can?
• Does any one seem greatly disinterested in the conversation? How can you tell?
• When you read dialogue, do you balk or does it flow for you?
• Imagine you’re part of the conversation. What would you add that they didn’t say? What would you say differently or not at all?

Does it matter what you’re writing?

Even if you’re writing a science fiction novel with no humans involved, you need to develop the personalities of your characters. Even if there is no verbal conversation, there is some sort of exchange in a community even if only a community of one.

In Cast Away, the island scenes worked because the writer and director knew how to convey sentiments to which the audience could relate.

No matter the genre, your mission is to engage your audience. Your choice of words is what gets your audience invested in the outcome of your characters, as well as what happens along the way. How you say things will determine if your readers read all the way through your book or flip to the end.

And if you do it well, they may even come back for your next novel, article, essay, or commentary, to see what you have in store for them.

When do I start these practices?

Don’t wait until you have everything down to a science. Get going and don’t stop until you have your first draft, be it a novel, short story, essay, play, poem, post, biography, editorial, or historical record.

Plan your schedule. Follow it. If it doesn’t work out, you can make adjustments to time, location, whatever you find doesn’t work for you. But keep writing—just do it. Everything can fall off from time to time, the location, even the schedule, and your reading materials, but keep writing daily.

You may want to read:

at least take notes, by Shari Lynne Smothers
“So, you want to be a writer? Here’s How” by Allegra Goodman [http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2008/08/11/so_you_want_to_be_a_writer_heres_how/]
Deb Ng, by Allena Tapia
Nike’s “Just Do It” Advertising Campaign, from Center for Applied Research
Freelance Writing Jobs, Deb Ng’s blog
3 Sure-Fire Steps for Beating the Boring Content Bules, by Sonia Simone at Copyblogger.com
The Effects of Writing Practice, by Judy Reeves