The Secret Behind Prolific Writing

There’s no secret — at least not for me.

Disappointed?

Looking for “actionable tips” that will help you improve the coherence, originality, or plain quality of your writing and ideas?

I don’t follow any of that.

Why bother thinking about actionable tips when you can be acting?

It’s not like you’re going to get faster, better, or more insightful in your writing because you’ve chanced upon some tips that resonate with you or that you agree with.

I just open the page, and start hammering away.

If you want to get better at writing you should learn to enjoy the flow and transition of ideas, thoughts, and feelings seamlessly onto a physical or electronic medium.

There should be a sort of musicality to writing where the words that you want to come forth usher themselves into the correct positions of your sentences.

The feeling of your fingers striking the keyboard should feel as if your mind and your consciousness is directly extending from the innards of your brain to the glowing screen in front of you in the form of these letters, words, sentences, and paragraphs.

Writing should be, in part, a reflective process in the sense that the words you put together mirror the interior of your mind and your psychology. Becoming prolific in writing begins at a point where the interface and the separation between yourself and your language fades away.

Writer’s block disappears if you just forge on ahead by choosing impactful, precise, perhaps poignant wording that makes it seem as if you are melding and painstakingly transplanting the skill of writing and incorporating it as a part of your very being.

At any rate, a lot of my pieces have been focused on more academic and less relatable subjects, so I’ve decided to try my hand at just rolling out some opinion.

I figure I might start with some habits unique to my writing process, aside from the ones I’ve already mentioned.

For instance, that picture in the beginning is incredibly ironic because it has nothing to do with my writing process or even the image of myself as a writer.

Here’s a better breakdown.

• The stereotypical coffee mug doesn’t apply to me — I don’t drink coffee. Instead, I’ve gotten in the habit of swallowing caffeine pills to boost my alertness. After all, the bottom line matters the most to me.
• Pen and paper? Maybe for drawing and chemistry, but I never brainstorm before I write. The words just come out and if they don’t come out correctly, I delete them and start over.
• My laptop’s never off and I don’t have my writing set-up on the floorboards.

I throw brainstorming out the window at times like these and I just follow the logical structure of ideas that pours forth from my head.

Usually, it works out in the end too if you just keep on saying things that make sense and connect with each other. If the organization or structure of the piece doesn’t work out, it’s not even an issue anymore. You can bend, break, reword, and alter it until it does make sense.

I love words because you can make black into white and white into black just based on how you frame and present things. It sounds rather childish, but it’s a magical experience and feature personal to me.

Moving on, as part of my recently developing routine on Medium, I alternate between commenting on or responding to articles I find interesting (or downright absurd) and writing a bunch of articles.

I think it’s a reasonable and rational to assume that this what most people do on here as some part of their daily routine.

But when I do take a break from conjuring words on my the nice, sleek interface of Medium’s aesthetic word-processing design, I step back and browse through the list of things on the top bar: home, technology, self, and so on. I look for trends, I try to see what people are talking about.

I keep track of what’s hot by continuously browsing through the featured and popular articles.

I’ve consumed a voluminous amount of information and all I really see is people pontificating about their lives and ideologies — not that you’d expect anything different, right?

At the end of the day, that’s basically the premise of how this site operates right? To keep you reading like you are now.

A bunch of people put out information and then hope that a large group of other people resonate and support that information in entire cycles at a time. How about that?