The best way to improve your writing

I’ve wanted to be a published author for a long time, so naturally whenever I got the chance to go see an author speak, I jumped at it. I always had one question for them: what can I do to be a better writer? And no matter how many books they had published, how old they were, or what type of books they wrote, they always had one answer: write.

For a long time, this answer kind of annoyed me. I would think, Of course I’m going to write, but how is that supposed to make me better? I was looking for some insightful nugget of advice that would magically transform my writing, or a step-by-step guide of how to become a bestselling author. It wasn’t until I started writing consistently that I realized their advice to simply keep writing was actually both of those things. Still not convinced? Here are three things I’ve noticed since I started getting serious about my writing.

You stop relying on “inspiration.”
Creativity is like a muscle—the more you use it, the stronger it gets. Elizabeth Gilbert, the author of Eat, Pray, Love, has a great TedTalk that expands on this idea more, but basically, we wouldn’t expect the muscles in our body to get stronger without working out regularly, so why do we think creativity, and therefore our writing skills, will get stronger by only writing once every few weeks or months? When you sit down and write regularly instead of waiting for inspiration to strike, you’ll discover your creativity can come when you want it to, instead of whenever it wants to. Yes, you’ll definitely still have days of feeling like you have nothing to write, but if you power through, you’ll be surprised at how much you can get done even when you’re feeling uninspired.

You change how your mind works.
You begin thinking like a writer, and not just when you’re writing. You’ll watch a movie or overhear a conversation at Starbucks or see some wild person at the grocery store and automatically begin crafting in your mind how you would write it—how you would describe the setting, convey the tension of the argument, or create that character. Suddenly, you’re always working on your writing, even if you’re not sitting down with a pen and paper or computer. And when you are sitting down to “officially write,” you have a wealth of knowledge and experience, just from going about your daily life, that you can draw on, either to put directly into your story or to incorporate a small detail or description that you wouldn’t have thought of otherwise.

You start to enjoy it more.
When I would just write every few weeks, I always felt like I was forcing myself to open up the document on my computer and start writing, even though after a few sentences I was back in the zone and loving my story. Still, that initial aversion to it often kept me from writing to begin with, which then made me want to do it less, and it became this perpetual cycle of not writing. When I started writing regularly, even just a few times a week, suddenly it became easier to start writing, and then it became something I looked forward to, and then it became something that I put off doing other things so I could work on my story. It was exciting to see the word count grow, and I knew my plot and characters would be more consistent within the story since I wasn’t taking long breaks in between writing, which had plagued me before.

I know it’s easy to ignore this seemingly simple advice since we hear it all the time. But write regularly truly is the best way to improve your writing. Not sure what to write? Check out some writing prompts here. You don’t have to restrict yourself to working on one project–as long as you’re writing consistently, it won’t be long before you start noticing changes.

How frequently do you write? Have you noticed a change since you started writing regularly? Let me know in the comments!

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