I’ve Been Writing For 215 Days. Every Single One Was Hell

What I would tell to a beginner self | My lessons

It’s been 7 months since I started doing this whole writing thing. But I didn’t become a full-time writer and I didn’t achieve any significant milestones. Why would people do it for so long?

Money? No.

Fame? Definitely not.

Maybe it’s easy? Hell no.

I don’t know. What I do know is if I do it for long enough I will be able to reach some kind of success. And I genuinely love some aspects of writing. I still can’t call myself a writer without experiencing the impostor syndrome. But I can give advice to writers who had less experience in this field. Here I will list the tips I would tell myself when I was only starting out.

Unleash Your Inner Warrior

The hardest part of writing for me is starting. That’s when you need to activate your willpower to just sit and start writing. After several minutes, you enter the state of flow that will help you stay productive for a long period of time. Getting to a task or learning something new requires the same brain area that is responsible for pain. Why would you hurt yourself? That’s why you procrastinate. The easiest way is to start doing no matter what. Unleash your inner warrior and stop procrastinating before writing anything. Writing about something you are passionate about will also give that productivity boost.

Pump Iron

When I just started, I noticed that it’s really hard to find topics to write about. Every day I had to come up with something new. What if I ran out of ideas?- I was asking myself. What if my life is not interesting enough? For the first time, I had to brainstorm every day to find something new.

Well, after so much time writing I can assure you that it’s impossible to run out of article ideas. After my 6th month of writing, I noticed something unusual. I was coming up with story titles on autopilot. I never could come up with so many ideas. This is what I call a creativity muscle. Believe me, if you spend enough time training your brain to find story ideas, it will eventually notice the patterns and kindly supply you with them. That’s what you need to do, pump iron to develop your creative muscles.

Crave to Write More Than You Can

Write a lot. An interesting thing I noticed after writing for half a year is that my articles were mostly long-reads and they had pretty good quality (in my opinion). When you are just starting, write as much as you can. You can’t focus on quality because you just don’t know what quality looks like and how to achieve it. The only thing you can do is to write a lot of crap until you get to the point where you naturally begin paying attention to small details. Crave to write more. This will help you with your productivity because you will always have to write that thing and jump to a new story. This will develop your skills enormously.

Don’t Ever Finish Your Work

Don’t finish writing that paragraph. Intentionally stop doing your work even though you know what to write next. This will help you get into the state of flow faster on the next day. You already know what you are going to write about, so it’s not that difficult to start. It’s hard to sit and think about something new, that’s why it’s easier to start with something you already know.

Write NonSense, No-one Will Notice

It’s very important to have a terrible first draft. Sit and write everything you have on your mind about whatever topic you chose. Don’t judge your writing or grammatical mistakes. This draft is just a flow of your thoughts. Then you can come back to that draft, cut everything useless out, rearrange sentences, and fix grammatical mistakes. Remember to get rid of words that don’t add any value, make your story as easy to read as possible. Here is a scientific reason why terrible drafts work. I use this all the time and it helps me to remember everything I’ve got to say. Editing is as important as writing. No-one will read your first draft anyway, so write nonsense.

Copy From Others

Copy ideas, phrases, structures, tips. Steal everything to come up with something unique. Creativity is all about copying, transforming, and combining other people’s ideas. There is nothing original. Our thoughts are also heavily influenced by everything around us. Don’t be afraid to steal ideas from other people. Just remember to add your personal touch. Otherwise, it’s called plagiarism. Here is the best article to understand the nature of creativity:

Make People Beg For Explanation

Your headline should be something that provokes a question, makes people feel good, or is just controversial. Try to make your headlines catchy. YouTubers spend hours making the perfect thumbnail for their videos. If they don’t, hours of their work are wasted. No one clicks on the video with a bad thumbnail. So put more thought into your headlines. The same goes with the story subheadings. They should not be labels. They should spark a question and make readers want to keep reading.

Be Grateful For Every Step

One of the pleasures in our lives is seeing progress. When you look back and see how far you’ve come, you feel pure joy because you see the improvement. Be grateful for that, every story you put out made you stronger. Let this be the motivation to keep you going. Furthermore, think of your every milestone as a way you get rid of the competition. Every obstacle you face made X% of writers give up, but this didn't stop you so now you have less competition. Every obstacle makes your writing better. Every step removes more and more rivals.

Write Whatever The Hell You Want

Seriously, write whatever you want. Don’t write something just because you think that it will get more clicks. You are living one life, so why would you spend your time writing something that you don’t enjoy. Moreover, if you will put out content that isn’t from your heart, people will notice that and won’t read you. Writing about something that doesn’t excite you will only make your inner warrior sad and he will have to work 10 times harder. Pick a niche and write whatever you want.

Don’t Measure How Bad You Are

The thing that a lot of writers struggle with is seeing the stats for their work. You have to understand that numbers do not define your work’s quality. This is just a result that you don’t have any control over. Care only about what you can control- writing the best piece possible. Focus on the process, not the product. Focus on writing every day, not getting 100 views on your article.

My recent story took me 10 days to make. I edited every sentence so it could be engaging. I wanted to have as high view\read ratio as possible. You know what? This article ended up having one of the worst ratios among all of my stories. You never know what to expect. It’s not under my control. Even though I wrote more than 50 articles, most of them still get less than 50 reads.

Remember that tip about getting rid of competition? Well, I bet most writers quit just because their stories receive less attention than they expected them to. So if you keep your expectations low and don’t worry about your stats, you already got over the hardest obstacle. Don’t focus on money either. If you are giving value to people, the money will come naturally.

You Are Different From Others

You are entirely different from other people who are in the same boat. Some of them are geniuses, some are born writers, and some are great marketers. Don’t compare your path to others. It’s completely different. They might be doing it longer than you, or maybe they just had better luck. One of the great ways to stop feeling envy is to ask yourself: Are you willing to swap your entire life with this person just for that thing?

You Know Nothing

People have been writing for thousands of years, it’s one of the oldest skills in the world. Constantly educate yourself on writing and storytelling because there is always something new to uncover.

Final Words

Writing is all about doing it consistently. Every time you sit and write your thoughts down, you are improving your skill.

• Use willpower to start.
• Develop your creativity.
• Write more, quality will come itself.
• Don’t finish your stories to quickly get into flow next time.
• Start with a terrible draft.
• Steal ideas from others.
• Write unusual headlines.
• Enjoy your progress.
• Write about topics you love.
• Don’t look at the numbers.
• Don’t compare yourself to others.
• Learn.

I hope these tips helped you. Good luck with your writing!

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