5 Worst Mistakes I Made As A Writer

Are you still making any of these?

I started blogging in 2009 when I was only 12. I kept multiple blogs and wrote about topics I was passionate about as a teen.

It’s been 15 years of writing and making tons of mistakes along the way. Most of them were lethal for my writing career and I’d have a flourishing writing career by now if I hadn’t made these mistakes over the years.

I don’t have regrets, but I am grateful to have learned them before it was too late. This is the article I wish someone had written for me when I started out as a writer. If you’re planning to make a living by writing, keep these points in mind.

1. Not Having a Writing Schedule

All the great writers and artists from history have kept a writing schedule.

Hemingway in one of his early interviews mentioned that he writes every morning with the first light of the sun and goes on until the creative juices keep flowing.

Haruki Murakami wakes up at 4 am when he’s working on a novel and writes for 5 to 6 hours which is then followed by a ten kilometers run or swim for fifteen hundred meters. He keeps the same routine as he believes that the repetition itself becomes the important thing.

Stephen King believes that your ideas start to fade if you don’t pour them out on a piece of paper daily. He sits at his desk which is placed at one corner away from all the distractions and writes one word at a time.

“A writer who waits for ideal conditions under which to work will die without putting a word on paper.”

— E.B. White

Not having a writing schedule says that you write when you feel like.

I had no writing schedule until recently. I’d write on a whim. It was unprofessional and meant that I didn’t take my craft seriously.

Feelings are fleeting, they make you weak in the knees. They control you rather than you controlling them. These renowned writers have a writing schedule so they don’t have to spend time thinking about when to write unlike a person with no such schedule.

As a writer, your priority is to keep a big chunk of your day exclusively for writing and stick to it.

2. You Don’t Enjoy the Process

Accept it or not, when you’re working on a new Medium story, you’re more concerned about whether you’ll make it to your favorite publication than writing the story. If you’re daydreaming about the aftermath of your writing and not enjoying the process, you’re in big trouble.

Writing should be the reward of writing.

A lot of writers fall prey to the results. That bestselling book you want to author, the book tour you’ve been dreaming about, or that $1000 Medium article.

We’ve all been there.

How do you intend to enjoy the process if your attention is fixed on the reward?

You will fail to give your 100% to your writing if your mind is romancing with the ideas of what will you get out of it. You need to fall in love with the process of writing to make it an effortless experience.

Fame and money is the by-product.

“When you stop you are as empty, and at the same time never empty, but filling, as when you have made love to someone you love. Nothing can hurt you, nothing can happen, nothing means anything until the next day when you do it again. It is the wait until the next day that is hard to get through.”

-Ernest Hemingway

3. Don’t Edit as You Write

I haven’t seen a lot of people talking about this, but this is one of the common mistakes newbie writers make. Guilty as charged.

When I started writing, I’d edit after every paragraph or often after every sentence I wrote. The critic in me couldn’t bear to see the unpolished sentence on the screen. It was difficult to bring out everything I had in mind on the screen and letting it sit as it is.

I had to make peace with the inner critic to avoid editing as I poured my heart on the paper or screen. It also made me a slow writer and sabotaged my flow.

I had an epiphany when I read The Pulitzer Prize nominee, Barbara Kingsolver’s interview where she talked about her writing process and how important is to pour everything out of the system and then refining and carving it into a beautiful piece of words. In her own words

“I write a lot of material that I know I’ll throw away. It’s just part of the process. I have to write hundreds of pages before I get to page one.”

We often don’t realize that writing and editing are two different tasks and they shouldn’t be done simultaneously. If you’re working on a blog makes sure you puke out everything you know about the topic and after a halt, edit it as you please.

4. Choosing the Wrong Platform

Now this one is more important than you think.

The first switch I made from my blogger account was to move to WordPress. It looked professional and was easier to use compared to blogger. However, I was not getting any traffic.

A friend mentioned Quora one day and I started using it. After a few weeks of being a mute reader, I started writing on Quora and totally ignored my blog.

I wrote relentlessly for 5 years and garnered the title of Quora Top Writer in 2018 and managed to gain 5.6 million views. But it didn’t help me become a better writer or neither did I make any money.

The problem with Quora is it’s not meant to support writers.

It’s for people looking for answers to a certain question. You can still manage to build an audience for yourself as many people have done, but it’s not going to help you as a writer because you’re not being appreciated for good writing.

It’s not just Quora, it’s any other platform that’s not specifically meant for writers like LinkedIn, Instagram where we as writers get lost in tropical trends and change our writing to accommodate in that platform.

Real writers write what they believe in. There are no prejudices and no rules for you to follow when you’re writing on your own blog. You can experiment and not care about getting your profile banned or disabled.

In a recent interview, travel vlogger, Nomadic Matt, talks about why everyone needs to have their own blog to avoid the fleeting social media fame and to have a home for all your content. Medium can be that blog for you, but I can’t say the same for Quora or even Instagram.

5. Not Writing Anything Substantial

This one is paradoxical, but there are a lot of people who call themselves a writer, but they can’t recall the last time they wrote something.

How do I know? Well, I used to be one of them.

Writing an email is not writing, writing an Instagram caption is not writing. It’s a disgrace to call yourself a writer if you can’t put yourself to a state where you’re gushing out hundreds and thousands of words every day.

Being a writer is a badge of honor, and a choice you make.

I remember when I published my first book in 2017, I’d call myself an author and felt proud of being associated with that word until recently…

When the notion of being a writer occurred to me — I realized that I was more proud and happy to be known for something I did in the past, and not something that I do in the present.

Being a writer is what you're doing at this moment. Being an author is your past. It could be an achievement, but being a writer is who you are.

Writing every day should be a part of your schedule if you’re a writer. It could be a blog post, a few more pages of your new novel, or anything that materializes your creativity!

“I have met so many people who say they’ve got a book in them, but they’ve never written a word. To be a writer — this may seem trite, I realize — you have to actually write. You have to write every day, and you have to write whether you feel like it or not. Perhaps most importantly, write for an audience of one — yourself. Write the story you need to tell and want to read. It’s impossible to know what others want so don’t waste time trying to guess. Just write about the things that get under your skin and keep you up at night.”

— Khaled Hosseini

Being a writer is an identity, and if you do justice with that title, you can really change your readers' life and yours.

Just write.