Lots of blog posts are littered with false promises. They offer tips to improve your life in five minutes. But like the residents of an old people’s home, none of them work.
Not this one! Whether you write for work or pleasure, here are my five (and-a-half) tried-and-tested tips to do it better.
1. Imagine you’re talking to a friend in the pub
A former editor told me the trick to writing well was simply to imagine you were telling your story - whatever it might be - to a good mate in the pub.
This simple trick helps you work out what’s most entertaining, newsworthy and emotionally engaging about your message.
Even if you work in a non-sexy industry and have something technical to communicate, this little nugget helps you distill your message down. You’ll uncover the angle with the most human interest and have a couple of punchy, engaging sentences to build your piece from.
Top tip: you need to imagine the conversation sober.
I recently wrote a piece about new pipework being laid in a tunnel under the River Humber? Boring, you say. I think you mean Boring. Engineers are digging huge shafts at each end of the estuary, dropping in a 100m long tunneling machine, drilling for a year and then feeding 5km of pipe through the hole… *takes sip of pint and eats a pork scratching*
2. First drafts are always dodgy
Ever stared at a blank screen with your brain feeling like a tiny, lost astronaut in an infinite universe of blackness? Or the last cornflake in an otherwise empty cereal box?
That’s where you’re going wrong.
Never wait for inspiration to arrive. It’s not like a bus, where if you wait long enough, two great ideas come at once. If your mind is blank, you need to fire it up. And the best way to do this is to start writing anyway. The very act of writing makes inspiration more likely.
Every writer knows that the first draft of anything is a messy shambles of half-baked ideas, double-baked typos and bad grammar. But it brings you much closer to your objective than sitting in the dark in front of a blank screen telling yourself you’re worthless.
Your second draft will see you shifting paragraphs and polishing your prose with confidence. By the end of your brilliant third draft, you have permission to feel smug.
3. Work hard on your headline and story intro - and then work some more
The secret of good writing is to work harder at it than everyone else. I know that’s not the best news to receive. Wouldn’t it be brilliant if there was a lazy fix, where you became brilliant with no effort? But sadly not.
I was chief sports sub on a newspaper for several years and the only secret behind my relative success was that I pushed that little bit harder to give every story an extra coat of gloss.
When you’re happy with a headline or intro, don’t stop there. Most people will. But you’re different. So go back and see if you can improve it further. Can you make it clearer? Can it work harder to tell the story?
Writing well is hard. Just accept that and keep trying to improve what’s in front of you.
4. Set yourself a ridiculous deadline
The ticking timebomb of doom - or deadlines as they’re also known - bring out the best in most writers. However long we have to do something, the biggest moments of inspiration - the ones that elevate your work from craprio to Di Caprio - often arrive in short, fast bursts.
In a newsroom, it’s not unusual to be thrown a dreadfully written double-page spread five minutes before deadline, with headlines and subheads to write, and copy to engineer. It’s an almost suffocating level of pressure. Your heat beats like a vibrating washing machine on spin. But you get results faster.
There’s no time to procrastinate, so you read more actively and just write something. Then you tart it up until your phone rings.
I’m a firm believer in setting artificial deadlines that recreate this pressure. If you ever find yourself faffing about and unable to focus again, set the clock for an hour and prove to yourself that you can get a first draft finished within the time.
5. E is for Empathy
Hugging strangers under strobes in the early 90s wasn’t for everyone. But that rave spirit - that empathy for others - should be part of any good writer.
Understand your audience. Work out what you want your readers or audience to know, feel and do. You won’t always get it right of course, but it helps you focus.
5 and a half. Lenny Henry
How can you have half a tip? What kind of annoying writer promises that? I’m like an anxious parent in an expensive restaurant who doesn’t know whether to leave a tip or not. Or Louis Walsh. Trying to give advice, but only getting halfway there. You remind me of a young Lenny Henry by the way.
For what it’s worth, my half a tip is that the more you research, the easier writing becomes. Why’s that half a tip? Well because the more you do it, the closer you'll get to feeling its full benefit.
Read your source material once and writing will be hard work. Read it twice - or more - and it will become at least twice as easy to write something great.
Read well - and you’ll write well.