This Underrated Exercise Will Spark Your Love for Writing and Secure Your Long-term Success

Do you know how to draw your writer’s curve?

Many questions abound about the need to love your work. And the answers? They couldn’t be more contradictory. But what’s certain is you don’t want to hate the work you do.

If you hate what you write, you won’t do it for long. Or even if you do it for long, you wouldn’t quite enjoy your time at it. It will not come from the heart, and readers will smell the lack of passion.

Conversely, write what you love for long enough, and you’re likely to create a semi-loyal readership attracted to your authenticity. And that’s a stronger foundation on which you can build long-term writing success.

Broadly, you can walk to the land of successful writers on two main legs: having something to say (the story) and knowing how to tell the story right (the technical side of writing).

There’s no shortage of information on how to do the latter. But this article will touch on the former. It’s a simple exercise I’ll call drawing your writer’s curve.

Find your love for what you write

Like most things out there, you’d likely do it best when it’s something you love. With that, the motivation to do it comes from within. That’s what researchers call intrinsic motivation.

Yes, external sources of motivation like fame and fine financial fortunes could also help get you writing, but what happens when those dry up? Time to look within, I suppose.

That’s why you need to pay just as much attention to that one topic about which people can smell some passion when you write.

A simple way to help you find it is by plotting your various interests on a graph, drawing a curve to connect those interests, and finding the highest point on that curve. Here’s how to do that in a more mathematical approach.

Find your Cartesian plane

Draw two lines — one vertical, one horizontal — to form a right angle. (The two lines should meet at the bottom left corner.)

List your topics of interest on the x-axis (horizontal plane) and ratings — from 0% to 100% on the y-axis (vertical plane). With the most objective point system you can muster, rate your topics by how much you love them.

Or whatever element of intrinsic motivation gets you to write on that topic: passion, expertise, etc.

When you finish, connect the dots with a line. That’s what I call a writer’s curve. One topic will jut tallest among the lot. And that topic should give you an idea of what to write more often.

If you get two topics to rank joint top, nothing prevents you from going hard on them. Remember, be as objective as possible, paying no attention to trends, rewards, or projections.

The one advantage you stand to enjoy

You’ll have a clearer picture of what interests you most, where to hit the hardest. And research shows losing yourself in something you love is the key to a good life.

You don’t want to make writing feel like another boring chore you dread.

I’ve heard writers complain they sometimes have to write about topics they don’t enjoy — needs must and all that. Others also say they research the trending topics on social media to ride the crest of those waves.

But you can’t keep going with every flow. You must find that one topic, maybe two at a stretch, for which you can thump your chest to show your love.

You must have at least one niche that gets you immersed in the art of writing. It may be unpopular among many readers, it may earn next to nothing, and it may involve the most amount of research. It may even feel like time wasted.

However, you’ve got to find that one niche that you’re willing to embrace regardless of results. You don’t have to do it every day. But once in a while, write a piece on that topic.

You can repeat a similar process for views/earnings/tone, etc

Some topics poke more eyeballs than others. And the more eyeballs you can poke and keep, the more money you could potentially earn (all things being equal, of course).

So if you’ve been writing for a while now, you can graph your earnings by topic/style and maybe focus a little more of your effort on exploiting topics similar to your best-performing articles.

You can also play the same game for your tone to find which ones resonate the loudest with your readers. As dated as the 80/20 principle may be, it’s left us with some insightful relics.

It doesn’t mean killing all other niches when you find that one.

Writing online is every bit as logical as it is unpredictable. That’s why it’s a massive risk to settle on only one niche/style, etc.

It’d be great if you could do that, but we all know it’s nigh on impossible. So yeah, focus more of your attention on your highest-rated topic. It only shows where you should pump more brainpower.

Talk of another way of finding a writing niche, but one in which you employ some objectivity to measure your level of interest. Yes, we all succumb to the occasional temptation of smashing word counts to build our writing muscles.

But another way to build muscle is getting lost writing about a topic you love. And because love is blind, you’ll also pretend you’re blind to the results of this love project.

That’s when you’ll learn that sometimes, it’s not all about the numbers; it’s also about doing it from the heart.

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