6 Mistakes Professional Writers Don’t Make
Anything worth doing is worth doing right
I once knew a woman who wrote herself out of business. It was painful, watching her spiral the drain. A shame, too. She was a great writer.
She’d write deeply emotional posts about how hard it is to be self employed and the incessant content churn to get views with little result.
Writing, writing and there’s never enough traffic or views. There’s got to be a better way, she’d lament. How hard it is to find inspiration to write when she’s depressed and broke and sick of it all.
One day, she wrote about having to sell her car to pay the rent. She wrote about watching someone drive away in her car, the pain was palpable.
It’s okay, she said. It’s okay. She’ll figure it out. In hindsight, that post was probably the final sucking sound of her dreams going down the drain.
Her business was creating content for businesses. Was. Literally. Past tense.
All she wanted to do was write, and she wrote herself out of business. Pretty hard to convince people to pay for content creation while wailing that content creation doesn’t get enough traffic and doesn’t pay the bills.
Her final post was telling her readers that she has to get a job, but she’ll be back. One day, her site disappeared.
There’s no real statistics on broken dreams, but I’d wager a lot fail. Dreams die hard, usually not because of lack of opportunity, but lack of strategy. Effort without strategy is impotent.
Do you dream of stringing words together for a living?
Writer isn’t a singular career, like podiatrist or accountant. There’s a lot of people who write for a living. Copywriters, content creators, bloggers, screen writers, and marketers, to name a few.
There’s ample opportunity to earn an income stringing words together but there’s some common mistakes you need to watch for. It’s always the mistakes we don’t see that hurt most. Blind spots, and we all have some of those.
6 mistakes professional writers don’t make…
Not everyone who writes wants to be a writer. Some people dabble in writing for fun, or for the friends, or whatever. And that’s fine.
Some people write for money because it’s an opportunity in front of them, but if it goes away, they’ll be fine with that. We all have our own motivations.
But if you’re not a tourist in the land of words, and if you long to write for a living, there’s a few mistakes you want to avoid.
1. Professional writers don’t think short term.
Once upon a time, there was a site called Open Salon. It worked much like Medium before the paywall. Writers could set up a profile and write their hearts out, free. The carrot on the stick was that if your writing got the attention of Salon editors, it could be featured on Salon, the parent site.
As you might imagine, some writers figured out that meta posts got a lot of views. Many started writing about how to get featured, how to get more views, the best time to publish, the best day to publish, etc.
It got them a lot of reads and followers. Which didn’t matter much in the long run as far as a writing career goes because Open Salon is gone now. Defunct. Dead. No one cares how to get to the top of a site that’s long gone.
Some of the writers who caught Salon’s eye and got featured on the parent site got a little leg up in their writing career. The meta posters? Not so much. Not long term, anyway.
The point isn’t to criticize meta posts or say they’re useless or pointless. It’s to recognize they’re a short term strategy.
But do you have a long term strategy? Do you know what you want your writing career to look like in the long term? Because if you’re only writing for short term — well that’s just another ant and the grasshopper story, if you know what I mean.
Professional writers know where they want to be in a year or 3 years or 10 years. They have both short term goals and long term goals. The short term goal might be to get 10,000 readers and the long term might be to get an agent or publisher based on the strength of their audience.
Your short and long term goals will vary, but when you have a long term goal, it colors your choices in a way that short term goals alone never can.
If your long term goal is to build a business writing content for companies, maybe it’s a bad idea to write about how ineffective content marketing is.
“If you don’t know where you’re going, any road’ll take you there.” — Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland
2. Professional writers know their strength…
Julia Cameron is known for her book The Artist’s Way, but she has another called The Vein of Gold that talks about finding the underlying strength that powers your best work.
All actors have a certain territory, a certain range, they were born to play. I call that range their “vein of gold.” If you cast an actor within that vein, he will always give you a brilliant performance. Of course, you can cast an actor outside his vein of gold. If you do, the actor can use craft and technique to give a very fine, a creditable performance, but never a performance as brilliant as when he is working in his vein of gold.
Robert DeNiro, male bonding and betrayal. Meryl Streep’s blue-bloods. Kevin Cline shines more in comedy than drama, and those are but a few examples.
The same applies to writing.
If you’ve been here a while, you know what Jessica Valenti is about. You know Umair Haque, Caitlin Johnston and a number of others.
You might be quick to say Valenti writes about feminism, because she does, sometimes, and that’s what her profile says. But look at her posts. She writes about education, parenting and she’s a top writer in Politics.
It is not the topic that she focuses on. It’s the underlying thread, the vein of gold that weaves itself through her writing no matter what she writes about.
Whether she’s writing about parenting or politics, her pieces are all written from the viewpoint as seen through feminist eyes. That’s her strength. Her vein of gold. It’s not all feminist posts. It’s feminist perspective on many topics. Make sense?
And Umair? His vein of gold is willful blindness. Doesn’t matter if he’s writing about politics, finance or climate change, that’s the common factor. He’ll ask repeatedly… can you see, can you see?
Advice-givers often tell writers to pick a “topic” to focus on. It’s not topic you need to be clear on. It’s the underlying viewpoint. Your vein of gold. Once you know what your strength is, you can write about anything.
That’s what Pulitzer winner Andrew Greer meant when he said writers need to pitch from their strength.
“Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom.” ―Aristotle
3. They don’t confuse writing with publishing…
Every once in a while, someone posts something so controversial that it creeps into the collective and you’ll see a chain of people responding.
Such was the case when someone posted that he wished writers on the internet would stop writing daily because they’re churning out crap.
Take your time, he said. Quality, not quantity. More people agreed than disagreed.
Sorry, That’s a fundamental misunderstanding of the writing process.
First of all, quantity and quality are not joined at the hip. There are plenty of people who write daily and write well. Journalists come to mind. Problem is, that’s not most of us. People who can churn out great reading daily are the minority, and they’re trained.
But also?
Just because you write something today doesn’t mean you need to publish it today. Some of the best writers sit on their work for days, or even weeks. They’ll throw a draft together and walk away from it until they can look at it with fresh eyes. Again and again. They don’t just edit once.
One of the popular writers on Medium says his posts have usually been in the works for weeks. Three edits is his minimum.
Your mileage will vary. Sometimes a piece flows out of your fingers and you know it’s good the minute it’s done. That’s not the norm. Don’t confuse writing and publishing.
You never know who will read your writing. It might be someone who could make all the difference in the world. That agent or ideal client you’ve been hoping for. If your writing isn’t what you’d want them to read, don’t publish just to make a daily or weekly quota.
“Anything worth doing, is worth doing right.” ― Hunter S Thompson
4. They don’t let criticism change their writing…
If you write anything at all, it’s inevitable that trolls and critics will show up at some point. Some people have weird hobbies.
Many people say writers should listen to all feedback, good and bad, because it can be helpful. I’m not sure I agree. Unless it’s from your editor — then please listen. Random strangers on the internet, not so much.
If they’d tell you where something felt disjointed and let you figure out what, that would be one thing. But they don’t.
Mostly they tell you what they see as “wrong” and what you should have done instead. As Neil Gaiman points out, they’re mostly wrong.
“When people tell you something’s wrong or doesn’t work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.” Neil Gaiman
The real problem is that, too often, when writers take criticism or trolls to heart, they start to water down their opinions to avoid criticism. In the process, their watered down words don’t connect as well with the people who would have resonated with what they wanted to say but didn’t.
Women do this most, Natalie Goldberg says in Writing Down the Bones, prefacing their words and opinions with ambiguous qualifiers like I think, I feel, sort of, kind of, a little. Watering down their words in hopes of not offending the critics.
Here’s the thing. Anyone that cares about your writing dreams will offer feedback kindly. Privately, even. People who criticize are not trying to help you. Sometimes it’s bad manners, but mostly it’s an ego game. No shortage of people who make themselves feel bigger by making you feel smaller.
Want to know something funny? My top paying posts are the ones that are most criticized. They make people who disagree the angriest and most vocal. But they also resonate most with the people I wrote them for.
You can’t water down who you are and resonate with your people at the same time. There’s no shortage of critics, but there’s only one you. Don’t let them change who you are. If you have critics, you’re doing something right.
“There is only one way to avoid criticism. Do nothing, say nothing and be nothing.” — Aristotle
5. They don’t take rejection personally
Chicken Soup for the Soul was rejected 144 times. “If we had given up after 100 publishers, I likely would not be where I am now,” Canfield said.
The Lost Get-Back Boogie was rejected 111 times over 9 years and when it was finally published, in 1986, it was nominated for a Pulitzer. Think about that. A Pulitzer nominee was one of the most rejected books of all time.
Rejections are more about taste and suitability than anything. Doesn’t matter if you’re submitting a book to an agent, an article to a magazine, or trying to get into some elusive publication.
Rejections would be more helpful if they told you why. If they said your writing skills need work, or the pace is too slow, or the subject matter isn’t a good match, that would be helpful.
And while some do give feedback, most don’t. They just say no thanks.
But also?
Sometimes they do give an opinion and they’re dead wrong.
When Paul Harding won the Pulitzer, The New York Times called him Mr. Cinderella. It was his first book, and he’d been rejected so many times he stopped counting.
He didn’t wonder why he was getting rejected. They gave him a reason. They said his book was boring.
“No one wants to read a contemplative book,” one publisher told him. A Pulitzer win and millions of sales later, seems the publisher who said no one wants to read a contemplative book was wrong.
Not for them, though.
Had they signed him, I’m not sure he’d have won the Pulitzer. Not with a publisher that didn’t believe in the book.
It’s just fit. You know?
Submitting your writing, regardless where, is like sitting on the floor with a lock and a giant pile of keys. It’s not personal. You just need to find the one that fits. Doesn’t matter how big the pile of keys is. You just need to find the one that fits.
A rejection just means that key will not open the door for you. Don’t take that personally.
“Rejection isn’t failure. Failure is giving up. Everybody gets rejected. It’s how you handle it that determines where you’ll end up.” — Richard Castle
6. Professional writers never stop learning…
There’s a reader on Medium that hate-reads my posts about writing. lol. I removed that reader from my newsletter too when the vitriol got old.
Omg, who cares! the reader would say. People should just write how they talk. Stop writing about writing. Etc.
Here’s the rub.
The untrained eye and the trained eye do not see the same.
Your readers might love your writing. That doesn’t mean a publisher will. If it’s riddles with technical errors, and editor might prefer to pass. Too much work to edit that mess into something publishable.
I wrote about a book called The First Five Pages, by a New York literary agent who says he rejects books based on the first 5 pages.
It’s easy, he says. Amateur mistakes show up instantly. A weak opening, too many adjectives or adverbs, rambling and slow pace — those are amateur writing mistakes he doesn’t need more than 5 pages to see.
It’s not just editors and publishers, of course. Because you never know who’s reading.
I mean, imagine this: your big dream is to write for Forbes or Writers Mag or some other big publication in your field of desire.
While you’re poking around to find a contact that can help you get a foot in the door, the very editor you want to impress is reading your post on Quora or Medium or LinkedIn. And it’s a hard no because your writing skips from first person to third person repeatedly. Dang!
There are no rules for good writing, because good writing is subjective, but there’s plenty of rules to help you avoid writing badly. It’s not just technical skills. It’s finesse and flair, inspiration and encouragement.
A good writer never stops working on their skills. Learning to craft words. In all things worth doing, when you stop learning, you start stagnating.
“The capacity to learn is a gift; the ability to learn is a skill; the willingness to learn is a choice.” — Brian Herbert
Before You Go…
If you’re interested in writing or marketing, you’ll probably enjoy my Friday emails. Read the back issues at https://lindac.substack.com/