Becoming a Writer: You Will Not End Up Where You Started

Being an influential writer is a never-ending process.

I will guarantee you one thing. No matter where you are as a writer, one year from now, your writing will not be the same as it is today. Like every other skill, the longer you do it, the better you become. But even when you’re “the best”, there’s room for improvement.

“You don’t start out writing good stuff. You start out writing crap and thinking it’s good stuff, and then gradually you get better at it. That’s why I say one of the most valuable traits is persistence.” — Octavia E. Butler

I was looking at some of my stories from 3 years ago. Everything about them was bad. The titles were awkward and boring. The first paragraphs were bad. In the body of the stories, I wandered like the flight of a bumblebee. There were spelling errors. There were grammar issues.

I didn’t like what I was reading. I remember writing every story. I struggled to get any ideas. I wanted to write something spectacular and life-changing. I worked on my stories for hours. I didn’t know about Medium back then, but I had a couple of blogs and published to them.

Even though my writing was crap, people read it and responded. The visits to my blogs grew from a few readers a month to hundreds a day. I don’t know if people kept reading because they felt sorry for me or because they found value in what I wrote. But I appreciate and still appreciate every reader who takes the time to read what I’ve written.

I’m a better writer than I was a few years ago. And a few years from now, I’ll be even better. That’s how this thing we call writing, works.

One lesson I’ve learned is writing for money makes the process harder. When I was writing for my blogs, there wasn’t an incentive to make money. I wrote because I had something to say. Now I’ve discovered Medium. I’ve learned I can make money writing on the platform, and it makes me feel stilted when I try writing for money. I second-guess what I write. I try to mold my writing to keep readers reading. It isn’t because I have something more to say. It’s because I can make more money the longer people read.

The solution was to stop thinking about money and go back to the purpose I started writing. In the beginning, I did my best to share with my readers what I’ve learned. I wanted to help them or entertain them. My hope was my readers would take something of value from me.

Another lesson I’ve learned is my writing will always improve if I keep working at it. Today, there are tools to check spelling and grammar. But they can’t help me write my thoughts in words that come from my mind and heart. So when I say my writing will improve, I’m not talking about the mechanics of writing. I’m talking about being able to dig a little deeper into myself so that I can better share a part of myself with my readers.

I hope that my writing is a little less crappy than it was a few years ago. But even if I never become one of “the best”, I hope my readers will know that I’ve done my best with what I have to work with.

If you are struggling with your writing, don’t sweat it. How you write, the words you put down, how you say things, is actually the small stuff. It’s what I consider the mechanics of writing. With time and regular writing, you’ll get better at that stuff. The big stuff is learning to write from your heart. Learning to always tell the truth to your readers.

And when you feel you’re writing is crap, remind yourself that you will be a better writer a year from now, than you are today.

One of my favorite quotes is from Hemingway who said, “Writing is something that you can never do as well as it can be done.”

If you’ve been writing for at least a year, how has your writing improved?