Tips From Great Medium Authors on How to Improve Your Writing Skills
From how often to write to the quality of the sentence to the secret sauce
I have this Word document on my desktop. It contains solid advice on how to improve writing skills given by really good authors here.
As I practice them, my posts are becoming better. They may help you as well. Take a look.
The Process of Writing
For new writers, the craft of writing seems hard and vague. The most frequent questions they ask are:
- Should I write every day?
- How do I find new topics to write about?
These are the answers to them:
Should I write every day?
Devon Price advises us to write regularly in The Science-Backed Way to Write a Lot. I’ll paraphrase it:
Treat writing as an everyday habit, just like brushing your teeth. Sometimes it will be good, sometimes bad, but that’s OK — that’s just how it goes.
Devon advises us to set the time of the day for writing. And to write regularly, so we can flex our creative muscles:
“Creativity comes when you consistently make time for it — and when you trust that your effort will pay off over time. It isn’t magic. It isn’t something outside of your control. It isn’t an act of martyrdom. It’s just a healthy habit you can develop, day by day.”
How do I find new topics to write about?
Drew Magary loves everything about writing:
“Writing is all I think about and all I wanna do.”
He explains jotting down as the first phase of writing in his essay How to Write 10,000 Words a Week. Drew has a little notebook he carries everywhere.
Sometimes great ideas come when you are in a shower or about to fall asleep. You capture them as they occur and get a lot of raw material to play with later. Over time you will connect these pieces of the puzzle together:
“Those wondrous moments when you have a clean and vivid idea and your first instinct is I GOTTA GET THIS DOWN, not because it’s ready to be read, but because getting it out is the only way to give it shape. Once you get something down, it’s now out of you. Even in rough form, you’ve given yourself clay to mold into something interesting and beautiful. That’s writing. Writing is how you complete your thoughts.”
When you have it all down, choose what goes and what stays in a piece.
How to Find the Right Angle and Not Stray Away From the Subject
Marion Roach Smith is a former New York Times staffer well known for the first article on Alzheimer’s in the popular press. In Your Storyline is Too Big, she talks about how to write a memoir (a memoir can also be an article, not just a book).
Ms. Roach Smith says: find the right angle. You don’t write every single detail of your family tree.
If you are, for example, writing about your dying pet, we don’t need to read what your parents did on Sundays when you were little.
Marion tells us to stick to the narrative carefully:
“These other stories of my family bulge out in ways that your stories bulge out when you try to tell one of them […] Instead, you have to tell these tales one at a time, pruning that octopus before it grabs you by the earrings and eats you alive. So how do you write about them? By sticking to the story at hand, clipping it down on the page as you go, selecting carefully as you type, every day reminding yourself of this one single question: What is this about?”
Once you have pruned the story, do a bit more of the cutting.
Edit Without Mercy
Sean Kernan doesn’t call it an octopus, he calls it “modeling a big block of clay.”
In Write More, Write Better — 5 Ways To Improve Your Output, Sean says if you are aiming at a 750–1000 word piece, write the first draft at 1250–1500 words long. And then have a break and cut everything which may seem extra:
Always edit with cold blood.
Great writing is deleting. Build something up, look at it with an artist’s eye, and begin tearing off the stuff that doesn’t work.
[…] When in doubt, leave it out.
[…] Remember: Writing doesn’t begin until you start rewriting. Rarely does a good piece come to life in a single sitting.”
So, feel free to kill all your darling sentences if there is a better way to say what you mean. When you have finished with the piece, think carefully about how to name it.
How to Write Great Titles
Focus on the reader’s benefit
Sometimes we spend more time on finding a good title than writing an article. No wonder — with so much content on the internet, you really have to stick out.
In How to Write Articles People Actually Want to Read, Nico Ryan gives a great tip:
“Whether implicitly or explicitly, the title of your article must always
a) arouse curiosity,
b) give rise to emotion, and/or
c) promise the delivery of some sort of knowledge.”
Titles that generally do well are how-tos, keywords and phrases people Google, as well as topics discussed on social networks.
But you have to get off the curiosity gap. Instead, as Medium’s editorial team suggests in How to Write a Headline, you have to be explicit:
“You want the headline itself to be so clear that the only thing they need to ask themselves is: Am I interested in this story? […]
It can be tempting to appeal to base instincts to get clicks. You may want to use exaggeration or mystery for a click. This is clickbait. […]
Exercise caution with particularly bold, hyperbolic, absolutist, or deliberately provocative claims in your headlines. If the headline exploits the readers’ emotions and insecurities, it is likely clickbait.”
The Medium team wants articles of higher quality, not “The secret…” and “You won’t believe this…”
Headline formulas that work
Sarah Cy suggests these four headline formulas in How to Write Irresistible Headlines That Entice, Intrigue, and Insist on Being Read:
- How to-s,
- Numbered lists,
- Negative words (awful /never / Avoid… / …doesn’t work / Here’s how to…),
- Power words that evoke negative and positive emotions — but remember what the Medium’s editorial team said about this one in the paragraph above.
Now let’s get more to the presentation.
How to Tell a Story
The power of storytelling
Ali Mese explains how he writes gripping stories in If You Learn to Write, You Can Change Your Life. Once he read Charles Bukowski’s sentence “the secret is in the line” and it changed his whole perspective on writing.
Mese advises while we write to always focus on one sentence at the time, starting from the first one:
“The key to getting someone to read is taking it one sentence at a time, ensuring your readers are so compelled by that sentence that they want to read the next.”
It isn’t possible to do this all the time; but by having Bukowski’s tip in mind, your writing will improve drastically.
How to keep readers hooked
In Keep Readers Hooked With This Copywriting Technique, Chris Meyer suggests we should use a cliffhanger when we make a transition from one idea to another. He gives an example of the famous John Caples’ title: “They Laughed When I Sat Down at the Piano. But When I Started to Play!”
With a piece of information missing in the end, readers just want to know more about what happened.
But how to put it within the story?
Chris says:
“[…] you need to keep the readers hooked at those critical moments when you’ve finished a thought. And an “Ummm” (*a filler in speech) isn’t going to do it.
You need an internal cliffhanger. And you need to place it right where a pause filler would otherwise go if you were speaking.”
Cliffhangers are widely used in literature. Elena Ferrante, one of the best contemporary writers of today, often puts cliffhangers in her work. This is why she is the queen of storytelling and why her Neapolitan novels gained worldwide popularity.
Let’s take a look at sentences now.
How to Improve the Quality of a Sentence
Eileen Pollack, former director of the University of Michigan MFA Program, has given us a load of advice on how to improve your writing in her article How to Write a Sentence.
I’ve picked out a few:
What books do I read?
You cannot be a good writer if you read mediocre content. Read great authors and you will soak up some of their quality, be it the form, sentence construction, theme, or character presentation:
“We pick up most of what we know about good writing by osmosis. But only if we read good writing. And only if we read a lot.”
Do I write generic or specific sentences?
Don’t write generalizations. Give details so your readers understand the characters better. They also explain why the character behaves a certain way.
Pollock tells us how she taught her student to transform a generic sentence: “My father is the most forgiving man in the world” into this:
“My father’s father beat him so badly he broke both his legs. But now my father works two jobs so he can pay for my grandfather to live in the best private nursing home in the county instead of the shitty public one.”
Details make us feel for the characters. They also make the read more compelling.
How much information makes a sentence?
Give one idea per sentence, and don’t stuff it with details:
“As an editor, I often see sentences into which the writer has tried to cram every detail he can think of to help us visualize a scene.”
Even though the sentence can be completely grammatically correct, our mind won’t be able to process this load of information. Generally, we find it hard to understand the description because there is too much going on.
Are there any words I should stay away from?
Yes. Avoid words such as something, situation, thing, that, and it. Make every word count, and delete all the extra. Be specific. Ms. Pollack suggests to put concrete words instead:
“I earn my living by asking writers to replace “it” and “thing” with concrete nouns, to avoid vague words such as “situation,” and to substitute active verbs for “was” and “is.” Usually, you will want a sentence to convey a concrete image, or action your readers can visualize, or something specific they can hear, see, taste, smell, or feel.”
So, instead of
“I could hear something upstairs. I was afraid to go and check it. Maybe it was a ghost. I was afraid the baby was going to wake up and I had to do something.”
Put concrete words:
“I could hear a clanking sound from the upstairs. I was worried the baby would wake up. Water was dripping from the ceiling. Afraid to go and check for a ghost, I took the baby to the garden and called my neighbor.”
Is there a secret sauce?
Amy Roost says yes. In her post What I Gave Up To Become a Successful writer, Amy reassures us things will get better if we stick to it:
“Remember, the universe rewards persistence […] My advice for anyone — age 17 to 97 — looking to succeed at writing, or in a new career or venture is this:
focus your energies,
practice your craft,
persist, and
find a person who believes in your potential and is kind enough to pave the way.”
Writing is a skill that takes years to learn.
I often go back to my Word document with these pieces of advice.
You can do the same. Save the article or copy-paste the advice onto your desktop. Go back to the list and stick to it until the rules become your routine. Writing becomes better as you write and read more.
Summary
- 2–3 hours of writing a day, every day would do just fine in the long run.
- Be thankful for those little flashes of insight. Write them down. Combine pieces of the puzzle later. They can make new articles over time.
- Ask yourself: “what is it about?” and support your writing only with details that answer this question. Cut the extra.
- Write the first draft. Then edit it by cutting a quarter or half of it.
- A good title contains curiosity, emotion, or promise of knowledge.
- For titles, use how-tos, numbered lists, negative words, and power words for emotions (positive and negative).
- Write a clear headline not appealing to readers’ basic instincts — avoid clickbait.
- Like Bukowski, write each sentence so that people want to read the next one.
- Like Elena Ferrante, use internal cliffhangers when making a transition between two ideas, and your readers will be interested to read more.
- Read high-quality writing.
- Don’t write generalizations. Give specific details.
- Don’t make your sentences too long and complicated. Give one detail per sentence.
- Use words sparingly. Don’t use it and that, but describe a scene, an action, or what you can feel with your senses.
- Stick to it.
Here’s more about high-quality writing, storytelling, and the Golden Circle (the “Why?”):