A couple of days ago my EMBA classmates and I were hit with requirements for six papers at once. Four case study breakdowns and two final reports that are—because of the way the holidays are spread out over our class dates—due all at the same time. In total, it’s over 100 pages of writing for three weeks of class, and, of course, all the papers need article and journal citations and blah, blah, blah—you know, collegiate paper drill.
If you write for a living, this number might not scare you. If you don’t write for a living but work a full a time job and have to find time to do research while managing a family, it’s daunting. In fact, many of my classmates were horrified when the assignments just kept coming.
I’ll admit, knowing all the final projects were writing based thrilled me. Writing is not math (my arch nemesis), so plus one for that. But, more importantly, writing is something I love to do and I’m good at.
Because meetings about projects are all the rage in my EMBA, my classmates and I got together to discuss the writing. Picture me sitting at my desk, tickled and excited to get cranking on pages because I know that I can spit the projects out in a couple of days and have a lot of off time going into the holidays. My glee is palpable. Then, picture how annoyed my classmates are, because, for them, writing still sucks.
That’s when it dawns on me, I’d never been in school with real writing skills. Everything I learned about writing was self-taught after I left school. I wrote The Bullpen Gospels when I was in the minors, nearly 7 years after I was drafted from college. I didn’t have a degree yet, and the college credit I did have wasn’t focused around writing. Hell, I’d never written anything over an 18-page paper.
I got my start in writing with a blog, and a very poorly edited blog at that. Then I asked Baseball America if I could write for them. That’s right, I asked them if I could write for one of their online properties, for free. They didn’t expect much, and neither did I. I wasn’t good enough to have anyone approach me. I needed to shop around to get interest, just like any other writer ever, except I didn’t think of it that way. I just thought, hey, I write baseball stories, they tell baseball stories, therefore, I should write baseball stories for them to tell.
My first article on BA very nearly got me fired because it pissed off so many of my teammates. But it was highly read and made Baseball America ask for more. So, I kept doing it. I was told that I wasn’t a great writer, but a good storyteller, and if I worked at the writing skills I’d eventually be good enough to hold my own. That pumped me up, so I tried working on those aforementioned writer’s skills, and it was painful.
In my early years of writing, putting sentences together felt like blacksmithing. Literally, it was me pounding away at a keyboard, making words and sentences like I was shaping metal. I hit the backspace key just about as much, if not more than I hit keys with letters on them. And, even then, when I was done capturing an article, I would re-read it, hate it, toss it, and start again. It took me days to make an 800 word article that I didn’t want to throw in the trash or vomit all over.
How did I go from that to four books and getting paid to write? Honestly, I never really thought about it until people started asking my what I did for a living, and I’d say, “We’ll, I’m a writer I guess.”
I don’t feel like one. I mean, I only know I can write and that I like it, but I certainly don’t feel like a writer, not like I was told to think of them when I was in school, learning about what writers and journalists are. I just feel like a guy who tells stories with words and a keyboard and gets paid for it…which, I guess makes me a writer.
Seeing my joy at writing 100 pages in 3 weeks, my classmates asked me for some tips about how to write faster, how to take the pain out of it.
They’re not the only ones. Sometimes athletes write me and ask me for tips on how to write about their sport because they’ve seen how I’ve had success doing it and they want to know what they should do themselves. They want to know how to make it easier and more fun and have success.
So, I thought I’d sit down and talk about the art of writing, from what I know.
First, let’s do a gut check. If you want to write, don’t ask someone how to do it, just do it. I don’ t mean to sound like a condescending jerk here, but, writing is free, so stop asking about how to start and start. If you can read this website and comment on Twitter, you can read and write. It’s cool to be inspired by others and want to hear about how they make it happen, but at the end of the day, needing a task to be easy before you start it, and knowing how little effort you must put in to finish are good gauges of your commitment level. If you need to hear that it’s easy, you’ll quit the first time it gets hard.
Second, writing will be hard if you’ve not done it before. That’s why making it easy for you is such a waste of your time. If you are starting cold turkey, writing will be hard, so folks who sell you the “easy methods” are just teaching you how to easily write garbage. Put the work in, punch keys, and get to know your self in print. Writing is a craft, not a microwavable meal.
Third, there is only one simple formula for making large blocks of good content come into existence—write them. Sit down, and write them. Write the hell out of them. Write fast. Write sloppy. Write with bad Grammar. Write without reading what you’ve written in the paragraph before the one you’re writing now. Write slightly intoxicated. Write very intoxicated. Write with a caffeine buzz. Write angry. Write Happy. Write with a chip on your shoulder. Just fucking write.
And while you are writing, do not, above all else, adopt the mindset that you must write whatever it is that you are writing perfectly from the very start, as if you are cutting sentences like diamonds and each one must align seamlessly with the next else the entire project is crap. If you write like that, you’ll never write anything.
Fourth, don’t sweat grammar goofs. You can fix those later. You can hire someone to fix those. But, even then, there will still be goofs. It’s hard to catch everything. Don’t be a grammatical slob, but don’t beat yourself up if your grammar isn’t Oxford quality.
People give me grief about misspellings and grammar errors. They love to do it and I’m an easy mark since I’m a baseball player turned writer, not the other way around. But these are people who will never see the kind of success in writing I have, or the kind of money I’ve made telling stories. I’m not bragging, I’m just pointing out a fact—tell good stories, commit to finishing them, and don’t sweat errors. Content is king, so focus on making great content and the grammar stuff will get tightened up in time, or forgotten about by the people who love your tales. Writing is a creative thing and when you’re in the throws of creation, you will make mistakes. Do not let mistakes scare you, or criticism discourage you. It’s going to happen. That said, always try to get better with the grammar stuff when possible. It will make life easier for you.
Fifth, learn to walk away from your writing. Your brain gets stuffed with the material and loses its objectivity if you don’t. In fact, you’ll fill in words that aren’t there, miss huge mistakes and read meaning where there is none. You need to see the world in your head clearly translated in to text, so put it down for a while and come back later, when your writing palate is clean.
Walking away is really important, especially if you get good at writing fast. Often getting the first words of a story down is the hardest part. I focus on that because I know, once they are down, I can always go back to rearrange and reshape them. But, if I commit to getting the words out, I need to commit to coming back and cleaning them up, tightening them down, and making them impart the meaning I see in my head. In this sense, writing is like blacksmithing because you’re going to temper your words into something good with several passes to make it really strong and purposeful. Just know that you can’t do that on your first pass, and shouldn’t try. And, after you get it down, don’t rush it out to your blog or teacher or editor without letting it breath a little. You’ll be amazed by what you miss.
In longer form writing you’re going to make several passes, so set a reasonable expectation for each pass. I tend to write without a lot of visual impact my first time through, so, the next time through I think more visually about my meaning. Then I go through and cut chaff and tighten my narrative. Then I go back and make sure my adjectives aren’t getting over used. Then I recheck chaff. Then I polish, and polish, and polish.
The first few passes make the project bigger—great for meeting those EMBA page quotas— but at some point, it starts to get smaller, tighter, faster and ultimately better—great for writing you want to sell.
Sixth, don’t hold on to the project overly tightly. You can over engineer words until they lose their meaning. I have a friend that reads my stuff and frets about every possible interpretation of every word and its ability to offend. To some degree, that’s a good thing, as you don’t want to hurt anyone if that’s not your intent. But know that you have to be a bit fearless with your writing because no matter what you write, there is always the chance that someone is going to be mad it. Measure your appetite for that risk before you put down your words.
Seventh, write like you talk. I know you hear people say that you shouldn’t do that, but screw them, do it anyway.
People always talk about having voice in your writing. “What is your writerly voice? Who are you when you write?” Well, you should be, uh, you which means that you should write like you would present yourself, using your innate understanding of how words come out. When you tell a story, do you tell it like someone else, or yourself?
This is also a function of writing what you know. If you write what you don’t know, you’ll sound like you—mindblower here—don’t know it. You’ll use language and meaning that is not authentic, meaning the story won’t sound as natural. If you write what you know, you can write about it like you talk, and you will sound authoritative as a natural by-product. This is your voice, and once you know your voice, you can learn to imitate others.
If you don’t know who you are when you communicate, you will suck at writing. When people ask me about writing and whether it’s for them, this is the one big thing I come back to: Do you have anything to say? If yes, great. Now do you want to say it, or are you just writing what you’ve read and changing out the characters with your own?
If you don’t know who you are, your writing will always be derivative—and most likely so will a lot of your life. Write authentically or don’t write at all.
Finally, eighth, know that you’re not just having a conversation with someone through your words, you’re having a conversation with yourself. Writing is an extension of you, an examination of you. When you sit down to make words have meaning, learn something about yourself. Challenge yourself. Expand yourself. Some words have changed the world. Your words should always be able to change your world. When they no longer can, put the pen down because you’ve got nothing left to write about.
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