11 Bad Writing Habits Preventing You from Publishing Your Work

Why publishing frequently and not overthinking the process are key to being a writer

Over the last few years, I’ve collected a folder of emails from readers looking for writing advice or to ask questions about blogging.

If your goal is to be a writer or to publish posts on social media, there are some bad habits that are easy to fall into. Each of these habits has plagued my own writing career at least once. You could even say these bad habits are my arch-nemeses.

Here are the 11 universal writing habits holding you back, followed by the solutions.

Bad Habit #1: Sending Your Work Out for Approval

You don’t need to send out your work for approval every time you write a blog post. People will find faults in your work that don’t exist. They’ll add their experience and perspective to your writing, which may completely distract what you’ve written and turn it into their work, not yours.

I endlessly get emails asking if I’ll read a person’s work to tell them if it’s good. The truth is, I’m no amazing writer and don’t have the right to critique your work or tell you if it’s good or not.

Quality is subjective when it comes to writing.

The Solution

If you find yourself wanting approval for everything you write, give it up. Edit your work as best as you can and then hit publish. As you develop your style and get better, then later on, you can perhaps have certain pieces edited by a professional. But even then, there’s a fine line.

Writing on the internet is supposed to be a little rough, and that’s what is imperfect and feels real to the reader. Don’t lose that magic through your need to have your work edited/validated.

Bad Habit #2: Being Scared to Publish

It’s scary to hit publish on your work. There’s a chance it will be judged. You may be swamped by trolls or someone could turn your writing into a humorous tweet or even a meme. The risk is always there.

Sharing your thoughts and having people comment on them comes with a few pitfalls. It’s good to be scared before you publish. It means you’ve been yourself and said something edgy or different or thought-provoking.

The Solution

We’re all scared to hit publish. The only difference is those who do and those who don’t. Be scared and do it anyway.

A few months ago I published, in front of my entire network, how it felt to lose my job and feel an overwhelming sense of shame. My ego was on display and there was a lot at stake. The benefits outweighed the fear. People found the story useful and some were inspired to share their own.

A few immature folks didn’t get it or saw the story as me showing weakness. That’s OK. You’ve got to learn to live with your work and know you can’t always get it right. Near enough is good enough when you’re being helpful.

Bad Habit #3: Worrying About Followers

Thinking about followers is a strange art. Whether someone follows you or not is a weird action. Sometimes, you follow someone and then forget you even followed them. Other times, you hit the follow button and religiously follow that person’s every move.

Whether you have no followers or a million, worrying about it can cause you to lose sleep. Checking your follower count and treating it like a competition leads to all sorts of problems down the line. You can never have the largest number of followers. Someone is always upping the game and doing better than you.

The Solution

This one is easy: Forget about followers. The number you have doesn’t matter. Pretend that the number of followers/likes is invisible. Focus on being useful and sharing your thoughts, ideas, and learnings.

Be grateful when people show you appreciation, and talk to the audience in the comments section or in private, with respect.

Bad Habit #4: People Stealing Your Work

This one is all too common. People will copy your work word for word and post it as their own. They’ll also share your work in places you don’t want. They may also choose to take your idea and copy it with a few subtle edits.

You may release a book one day and people could share it on torrent sites, meaning you don’t earn as much money.

The Solution

There will always be people who steal your work. Those people were never going to pay you anyway, so see your work being stolen as free promotion to people who will buy your work.

The internet can be quite honest, and when your audience sees your work has been stolen, they’ll point it out. It’s a temporary problem and you should be flattered when someone finds your work good enough to steal.

“One can steal ideas but no one can steal execution or passion.” — Tim Ferriss

Bad Habit #5: Starting With a Book

Writing a book is a huge project. You may dedicate a year or two to it and put your heart and soul into it only to find it sells less than a hundred copies. Even with a major publisher behind you, the chance of nobody reading it is high.

Starting out as a writer by publishing books is a tedious process that may make you give up.

The Solution

Start with a blog post and hone your craft. Race your way to 100 blog posts and build the habit.

Take on small projects in the form of blog posts and see what the reaction is. What ideas resonate? What audience is attracted to your work? Do you enjoy long-form or short-form writing? What subjects do you find easy to write about? There are so many lessons to learn from blog posts that will accelerate the ability to write a high-quality book down the line.

Starting out by writing a book is the old-school approach that will hold you back as a writer.

Bad Habit #6: Focusing Too Hard on the Platform

This one used to hurt my brain in the beginning. I was always jumping from one platform to the next looking for hacks and shortcuts that didn’t exist. I believed the lie that you have to be early to a platform to do well as a writer.

It was Facebook, then Twitter, then LinkedIn, then Instagram, then Quora, and then back to LinkedIn. The platform kept changing yet my results didn’t.

The Solution

I watched Sean Kernan recently change platforms and quickly accelerate his audience growth by writing consistently every week and avoiding shortcuts.

His writing speaks loudly and that doesn’t require any tips and tricks to help people read his work. The platform doesn’t matter; what matters is whether you’re consistent and publish at least one thing per week. The platforms will come and go but your skills as a writer is a differentiator, and that comes with simple practice and execution.

Bad Habit #7: Overthinking the Process

Everyone, including me, has a different approach to writing. Some people are very structured and others just write when they feel like it.

No amount of research on flow states or writing habits is going to make your writing better. The temptation to constantly play with how you write and feel that your results are determined by the process is one I know well.

I’ve tried different chairs, writing software, times of the day, food, exercise, music, keyboards, coffee brands — oh, how I’ve played around like a Muppet.

All the process adjusting didn’t really make the writing better. It became a distraction, and frankly, an excuse for not writing at all. It was easier to tweak the process or blame the process than it was to sit down, shut up, and bang the keyboard loudly to write words people could read.

The Solution

Focus on the writing as your primary goal and don’t overthink the process. Test as you go and don’t worry about trying to have the perfect process on day one. The writing process that’s right for you will evolve over time.

How you write as a single student living by yourself, fresh out of university, will differ from how you write when you have your first child and they’re screaming in the background begging for some milk.

Test as you go and be open-minded, curious, and adaptable to change.

Bad Habit #8: Being Seen by People You Know

You can easily be drawn to thinking about what your boss at work, colleagues, family, partner, and friends might say about your writing. They might Google your work or they might not.

You might try to leave out facts or hide elements of the story when you focus on those close to you reading it. Thinking about them can make you put on a mask and hold back on being authentic with your writing and letting your voice shine.

The Solution

Pretend nobody is reading.

I still use this strategy to date. I assume nobody is reading and don’t think about those close to me when writing.

If I did, I’d still be writing press releases about entrepreneurs whose startups have now gone bankrupt and pretending that how much a company is valued at actually matters, like it’s a trophy or status symbol.

Be empathetic and yourself, and then those close to you will respect your writing.

Bad Habit #9: Being Too Reliant on Publications

Many writers will tell you that publications are the Holy Grail. Here is the downside:

• Publications can edit your work if they wish and change the headline, photo, subtitle, formatting, etc.
• Publications can force you to conform to their standards.
• Publications can make you sound like everybody else in the publication.
• Publications can create a lot of back and forth.
• Publications can make you wait ages to be published.

Relying solely on publications is never a good idea.

The Solution

Share a story with a publication from time to time, and if it’s good they will pick it up. If not, publish it yourself and move on.

The best writing is writing that doesn’t follow any rules.

Bad Habit #10: Wanting to Be Paid

I didn’t earn a dollar for most of my writing career and that was intentional. As soon as you focus on money and expect to be paid, you start trying to find ways to make money instead of finding ways to write better — or simply just publishing frequently (the greatest hack known to humanity).

The Solution

You’ll get paid for your writing when you’ve helped enough people. Not a minute before.

Writing is one of the worst-paid jobs in the world so if that’s your focus, the chance of disappointment is high. If you focus on the writing itself, you’ll build a small audience of people. This audience will become a group of people you can offer online courses, event tickets, coaching, affiliate links, and eBooks to when the time is right.

When is the time right to make money from your writing? When you have spent a few years doing it and developed a skill that has value people are willing to pay for.

If you write for long enough like I have, you’ll never have to worry about making money from writing. It just involves getting your head around the fact that it may not be your writing that makes money, but what you do around your writing that helps you earn an income.

Bad Habit #11: Assessing Too Early

My blog is just in its humble beginnings, what am I doing wrong?

This was a question I got recently. It involved wanting to know what the future would look like after one blog post.

The Solution

If you’re just getting started, well, you’re not doing anything wrong. There’s no point in assessing your results after one blog post.

The results at the start will be small, so forget about assessing how it’s going and looking for huge wins when you’re still learning.

Stat-hacking is a common fault of writers in the early stages. It involves looking at the number of readers/comments/likes and trying to figure out what’s going on. No one can tell you that — not even Seth Godin.

The solution to wanting to assess your results is to change tact and build the habit of writing instead. Show up for one year straight and write every week.

Final Thought

There are many bad habits you can adopt as a writer. If you can avoid these habits and focus on the habit of writing as being your number one priority, you’ll produce extraordinary results after a few years.

It has taken me six years to get this far as a writer and I’m just getting started. Use your time to write and be useful, and then you’ll have more readers and side incomes than you could ever imagine if you stick with it.

There’s no replacement for hard work and showing up every day. Now go out there and hit that publish button like it’s going to prevent a nuclear war by doing so, thanks to the words you write. You’re good enough to be a writer.