This is the Best Tool for Becoming a Better Writer

The most powerful tool for becoming a better, more clear thinker, and becoming more clear and articulate person, I believe, is the act of writing. Writing, as I’ve talked about so many times on this podcast, it is the act of making our ephemeral thoughts physical. And there is something magical about trying to force the words out through the. The filter of our fingers, whether that’s through pen or into the keyboard word, that helps codify and solidify this chaotic jumble of thoughts that’s typically flying through our head at any given moment. But the question is, how do we develop as a writer? How do we become a better writer? And this is a question that I got asked very recently, and it’s interesting because I believe that the only way to really get good at writing is to write a lot. But we know that one of the three things that we need, if we want to learn is we need to have a feedback loop, right? So, I think the learning loop looks something like, you do the thing, you get feedback on the thing, you reflect on the thing, and then you iterate on the thing, and you keep going through that loop of feedback, reflection, iteration, over and over and over. But a lot of times when we’re writing, say, if we’re journaling to ourselves or just writing on our computer but not sharing it with the world, there’s no feedback loop. And if we’re writing a book or if you’re writing something big and heavy, it could be a really long time until you get that feedback loop.

And so it slows your rate of progress and improvement. So somebody, when they asked me the other day, well, what are the resources, the tools that you recommend for becoming a better writer? They were specifically looking for, what were the books that I read and all that stuff? And I’ll share a couple of the books that I think are actually helpful. But the problem with books is that it’s one thing to read about how to write better. That’s one thing, and there’s a little bit of benefit to that. And there’s great books out there on this. But really, the way to become a better writer is to read great writing and then reflect on what makes it great to really reflect. Why is this so good? Why is this hitting me emotionally? Why am I drawn to this? What’s pulling me through this? By breaking it down, sentence by sentence, word by word, and really thinking hard. What makes this so good? That’s when you really start learning.
And a really common practice that copywriters will use to improve at this is something called copy work. Where you literally take a piece of copy and advertising a piece of writing from somebody great that you really admire, you think that’s a great piece of writing, and then you literally write it out, handwritten, word for word, and you format it exactly the way they formatted. And by doing this, you start to put yourself into the mind of the writer, and you start to realize, oh, they have these different techniques that they’re using. They seem to end their sentences here or a thought here, or they use this word choice here, and they use their white space in this way. Like, if you were to do this with my writing, you would notice a very distinctive style. Very, very quickly, you compare it to somebody else, maybe like a saw hillbloom. He has a very distinctive style, too, completely different than my own. And it’s very beneficial, I think, to see great writers and emulate what they’re doing through this practice of going through line by line.
In the beginning, I do recommend actually writing it out until you’ve gained that proficiency, that you can just look at a good piece of writing and identify why it makes it good. Right. So first we need to develop our taste, so to speak. But after that, I believe the single best thing that you can do to become a better writer is to write on Twitter, or x, or whatever you want to call it. I think the feedback loop that you get on a platform like Twitter is incredibly powerful one, because there is a character limit. These days, the character limit is kind of, like, not as relevant, but there is still a little bit of a limit there that forces you to be a little bit more concise in your know, I think Mark Twain said, I apologize for writing you such a long letter. I didn’t have time to make it shorter. So writing short is actually quite difficult.
When we leave ourselves lots of space, unlimited space to work with, we tend to fill it with nonsense, a lot of filler. But the constraint of saying you only get this much space to work with is actually incredibly useful for creating impactful writing. Because impactful writing, I think, at its core, is saying the exact minimum of what needs to be said to communicate the idea, no more, no more, no more. So you need to figure out what is the minimal amount of words that I need to communicate this idea in the most impactful way. And Twitter is a very great way of doing that. But the other thing about it that I like is that there’s a feedback loop. And again, with our writing, I talked about the fact that because we don’t have a feedback loop often, it makes it very hard to improve. Twitter is a great place because you’re getting the immediate feedback of, is this something that people are responding to? If it’s not, then you go, okay, maybe that’s not good.
Maybe I can make it better. And over time, you start to see what resonates and what hits better than what doesn’t. And that’s how you start to iterate and improve. So take that. Run with it. Now, in terms of reading books, two books is on writing by Stephen King. Great book. Another one is called on writing well by William Zisner.

Those are two great books. But generally, I recommend reading great fiction because great fiction writers are beautiful at crafting ideas and distilling them and communicating them in emotionally evocative ways. So nonfiction is fine, but I prefer reading fiction and really learning from those people what makes for great writing. And if you do that, then you will have a much more beautiful, eloquent form of writing as well. And I think that is something that’s rare these days, especially, I’d say, in the non fiction world. A lot of people are very dry, very formulaic, very lecture ish. And so start with fiction writing and go read some good fiction. Brandon Sanderson, I think, is a great example.

Patrick Rothfuss, if you want to go into the fantasy worlds, but those are my tips for you guys. So take these and run with them and work on your writing because it is a skill that is going to serve you regardless of what you’re doing in life. If you’re a business owner, you cannot afford to be a bad communicator, whether to your team, to your customers, to the world at large, you need to be able to communicate your ideas, and that comes through the act of writing. So what are you waiting for? Go write something awesome and I’ll see you in the next episode, guys.