How to Instantly Become a Better Writer
Writing is a skill that must be practiced and cultivated in order for you to get better at it.
I’ve always been kind of a storyteller. I used to love to make fanfiction, which was the earliest form of making stories, when I was three years old about Pokemon, Mario, and Franklin the Turtle. My sister and I were both big bookworms; every week our mother made sure to take us to the library and we each picked out a stack of books. Once, in the sixth grade, a boy was doing a statistics assignment on how many students read a certain number of books, and I was the outlier. I had read 220 books in the past year. He was absolutely shocked. I then went to a fancy public specialized arts high school where I majored in writing, where my class featured a National Student Poet, YoungArts winners, and Scholastic National Medalists.
It wasn’t in high school that I got good at writing. It was towards the end of my college career, even though I was graduating early, that I found my voice and rhythm. Surprisingly, I had been awarded a Brooklyn Poets Fellowship before I began to hit this stride, which validated me as a writer. I wasn’t studying writing at the time and was doing it as a hobby, so when I got that fellowship when I was only nineteen, it allowed me to focus a bit more on writing because I saw potential. Then the pandemic hit, and I ended up in a shitty relationship and so I stopped writing again because I became depressed.
Fast forward to now. It’s been a year and I’ve had the biggest creative output I’ve ever had. I’m currently freelancing and taking the year off before going to graduate school, so I’m building routines and learning writing as self-care and regimen. While I’m doing it professionally, I’m also learning how to write for myself more, not for an audience. I don’t really care for doing something that’s not for myself, so curating my life to certain publications and outlets has been absolutely therapeutic.
With that little self-introduction done, let’s dive into what makes you a better writer almost instantly.
Stop talking as much. Just observe. Take notes.
When I was a young child, I would sit and look out the window every single day on the bus. The elementary school kids who rode the bus with me knew me as the girl who didn’t talk. I sat and wrote in my journal every single day about how the landscape changed, how so-and-so’s garden shifted from growing roses to daffodils, or noting down who had moved or gotten a new car. That was the beginning in my practice as a writer of discipline.
Nowadays, I don’t forced myself to write from scratch, even when it comes to fiction. My process for writing both poetry and fiction are the same: it stems from a single sentence that I’ve become obsessed with recently. I carry my little dotted notebook around with me everywhere, along with my phone, to jot down whatever comes to my mind. As someone with a terrible memory, if I’m thinking of a brilliant image and I don’t write it down, it’s going to be lost to me forever. There’s no way I’m getting that thought back. Sometimes I even forget it within minutes, which is absolutely horrible.
And so I keep a collection of images in my notebook. This is how you can build entire stories and poems; by taking the images and turning them into something that’s a Frankenstein of sorts. This method is particularly useful if you’re unable to find a way to get yourself going when it comes to creating something new. But by also slowly down and not throwing yourself into the world, you become an observer.
By being an observer, you see how the world works. How people on the bus interact with each other, or how a kind pedestrian helps an elderly woman push her cart of groceries up the sidewalk’s hill. You catch snippets of conversation, ones in which you’ve found interesting. You jot it down, and one day that can become a story that will capture the world’s attention. It’s that simple.
2. Read for a literary magazine.
I’ve hashed this out in my post about how to submit to literary magazines, but it really is such a crucial tip to go out and get a position at a literary magazine. My first position was at Mud Season Review, which was actually one of the first venues I was published in. I was a poetry reader and a complete rookie at the time, but now I’ve moved all the way up the totem pole and have become the co-Editor-in-Chief of the publication at the time of when I’m writing this. It was at MSR I started building up the skills and seeing what worked and didn’t work when it came to someone’s writing, and it forced me to take a critical eye to everything I wrote. Because someone else’s poem lacked a certain energy, I began to spot that lack of energy in some of my poems as well.
This also puts you into an editing mindset, which I will touch upon in the next section.
3. Force yourself to write every single day.
People get really mad when they hear about Stephen King’s method of writing (the man sits and writes for hours a day, which is pretty interesting, but this is just one man). It’s unrealistic, they say, that you make yourself sit and write every single day. But I’m against those naysayers because if you are unable to force yourself to write, what will ever bring you back? You can say I’ll take a week break, but when you then lull yourself into a false sense of complacency, then you never come back to write that story idea you loved so much before. I know how I am, and if I didn’t make myself write, I would never get anything done. I literally schedule out writing time on my Google calendar to get myself going, and it works.
Even if I’m not feeling inspired or creative, just writing anything, even if it’s a journal entry about my day, allows me to sit and make sentences. This blog has become a daily writing practice, and, despite its random typos and spelling errors, I find myself becoming a better writer just by blogging because it forces me to write something different than poetry.
Remember the editing mindset I mentioned in the last section? This is where it comes in. When I first started writing seriously in high school, I always had to go back and force myself to edit my work. Hell, even now, I’m a kind of mediocre editor because when it comes to my own work, I do it half-heartedly. But as I sat down and made myself write every day, I was able to mark a noticeable shift in my habits: I was starting to edit as I wrote. I’d stop and be like, “No, that word doesn’t work. Neither does that image,” and by the time I had a completed first draft, I’d send it to a literary magazine and it’d get accepted. Here’s a little secret: the vast majority of poems I publish are first drafts. I’ve just whittled them down as I write, which is a learned skill I got from writing so much.
4. Don’t feel limited by genre.
Hybridity is in babe. When I first started writing, I felt like I had to strictly be a poet or fiction writer and that there couldn’t be any form of overlap in between the two. I was dead wrong. I am naturally a fiction writer, that’s where I started and I honestly only read fiction anyways, and I just happened to cross into poetry territory. I think all of these constraints of what a poem can and can’t be are so limiting and that’s not how the mind actually works. We think in images, fragmented language and thoughts, a mix of different kinds of memories. So why should we try to depict ourselves, as humans, as something different on the page?
Don’t force yourself into a box. Break all the expectations of what form and function should be. There are going to be people who will love you for what you’re doing, and if you do it, you’ll find an entirely new level of creativity coming out into the world.
5. Have fun. Self-care goes hand in hand with creativity.
None of these tips matter if you’re not having fun. When I was seeing a therapist and I brought up why I was unable to write for months, she told me a little secret. That when I, and many other people, get extremely anxious, it hinders our creativity to the point where it cuts it off. For so long I was unable to write, even as I tried to force myself to, because I was so anxious about what was going on with my life and the world. And this is why you need to be able to write for yourself—even as I looked as writing as my job and my income, I became so anxious and stressed that it was getting int he way of the fact that this was my income. You need to be able to balance fun with work, or you’re not going to be able to get anything done.
6. Create writing rituals.
I found out this one while reading articles about creativity and the human mind. Did you know that if you associate the act of writing and creativity with something, you can actually spark your creative juices a lot faster? We hear so much about writing routines and may scoff at the fact that someone may have a writing routine, especially as we live busy, flawed lives, but it’s so true when it comes to how effective these routines are. Some of us may not be routine-people, but if you can do one little habit that sparks your creativity, make it simple: maybe it’s a cup of Darjeeling tea or doing certain stretches.
My writing routine as of October 2021 is this: I write my creative work almost exclusively after 10 pm. I tend to block out of my daily schedule this time for reading and writing, as I find it’s the best time for my creativity. I write at my desk, where I have a wireless keyboard for my laptop, I light a couple of candles that were given to. me, I dim the lights, and then I start typing. I tend to write one poem every two days. I schedule my time for writing blog posts at noon on Fridays and Sundays, so I don’t find them a grueling chore that is something boring or mundane, and then I do my freelance work between 10 am and 2 pm from Monday to Thursday. All in all, I end up writing about 3,000 words a day. Oh, and you know what gets me really creative? A cup of raspberry tea. It’s the perfect remedy for my anti-creative moods.
