Born With It
Or Maybe It’s Years of Practice?
Today’s Shelf Life is on somethings you can do, consciously, in your day to day life to become a better writer. Or to better your writing, I should say. You’re already a great writer, you don’t need to be better. The writing, however, could always become better. This is because writing is a skill and skills can always be improved.
I don’t know if Maybelline (the cosmetic brand) still runs these ads—because I neither watch television, nor listen to radio, nor read glossy magazines, anymore—but their tagline used to be “Maybe she’s born with it, maybe it’s Maybelline” but that always rubbed me the wrong way because—well, first, because of the implication that makeup should be so subtly applied no one can tell you’re wearing any, which is a fine way of applying makeup but not the only or best way—but more to the point, because the kind of beauty the ads promise doesn’t really come from the features anyone is born with but neither does it come from a pile of cosmetics you bought at the drugstore. A person who has never applied makeup before could go buy out the entire Maybelline section at Target and not hope to look anything like the ad promised.
The magic is not in the bottle or tube but in the skill of applying it, which you acquire through long practice of doing that (applying it). Sometimes people ask me how I do a certain aspect of my makeup and can I teach them? And I can demonstrate the technique, sure, but if you want it to look like this you’re going to have to do it every day, or at least most days, for a long time. “But I don’t want to do it every day, just for special occasions.” Then you have to hire someone to do it for you on special occasions. Nobody is particularly good at skills they use once in a blue moon.
There is a bit difference between knowing how to do something and being skilled at something. To become skilled at something, you first have to know how to do the thing and then you have to study and practice it. Usually for a long time. You have to do it poorly first while you build the skill.
Most everyone knows how to write. That is, most everyone who knows how to read a language can also write in that language; and many or most people who can speak a language can also read and write that language. Most languages (not all!) have both a written and a spoken component. And so probably everyone reading this, and everybody on Twitter, for instance, knows how to write. We all know how to fix our thoughts in written form for the purpose of communicating with other people. We write emails and sometimes letters, tweets, Facebook posts, Instagram captions, stuff like that.
That does not mean everyone who knows how to write a skillful writer. Skillful writers are a subset of people who know how to write, a subset that could be any size at all. As far as I can tell the size of the subset is so large that skillful writers are plentiful enough to keep my to-read list populated and overflowing, but small enough that many people I encounter who want me to read that thing they wrote are not especially skilled at writing prose.
This is not aimed at anyone in particular, by the way, and is not meant to be insulting. When you’re an editor everyone wants you to read their thing so you read a lot of peoples’ things. Some of the people who ask you to read their things are pretty skilled at writing and some people are less so. Skill at anything can be rendered on a spectrum, right? Everyone falls somewhere on a spectrum and we’d all probably like to be falling higher than we are on any given skill spectrum—but that’s the idea. You start somewhere and then you keep practicing to improve your skill.
Like on the spectrum of “how good are you at composing music” on one end there’s, like, Mozart, and on the other end is me, who does not know what all the little squiggle lines mean on the sheet music even though I was flogged through years of despised music lessons. That’s actually a skill I have no interest in improving. I am at zero skill level and here I shall remain.
But anyway, all I mean is it’s not an insult to say someone is developing their skill as a writer and that they are not already maxed out on the skill. I don’t know if anybody is. If you ever max out on writing skill it’s probably at the end of a long life spent writing. You may point to an incredible writer who died young as a counterargument, like “Look how great this guy was—[let’s say Chekhov?]—and he was only 44 when he died!” but my counter-counterargument is, sure, but we can’t know how good he would have been at 88.
There are very few natural talents that people are inherently born with. Having a pleasant singing voice and a good sense of pitch, for instance, is one. It might predispose someone to be a better singer. But they still have to practice singing techniques to be an all-around good singer. Just having a pleasant voice is not enough.
Writing is not a natural talent at all. Nobody is born knowing how to write or even how to compose thoughts into words. That’s all learned. Which is good news, because anybody who wants to learn it—to hone and improve their writing skill—can do so. It’s not a thing you simply have or don’t have. It’s a skill you practice till you get good.
For today’s Shelf Life—which is now like halfway over so perhaps it’s disingenuous of me to phrase it like this—I’m going to share some tips that anyone can make use of in day-to-day life to give their writing a boost and help build that writing skill over time.
Make a Habit of Writing Down Details
Let me tell you a story, one that as far as I know is true: Once upon a time, Dolly Parton was meeting fans after a concert—a Dolly Parton concert, that is, and they were fans of her; it wasn’t like a Beatles concert or anything—and a little girl asked Dolly for her autograph. Dolly asked the girl her name to make the autograph out to, and the little girl’s name was Jolene. Dolly signed the autograph and then sprinted back to her dressing room to write down the name, repeating “Jolene, Jolene, Jolene, Jolene” in her head to make sure she didn’t forget it; because she had an idea the name would be good in a song. She was right, and “Jolene” went on to be one of our language’s greatest love songs, perhaps second only to “I Will Always Love You,” which was also written by Dolly Parton, in fact on the same day as she wrote “Jolene.”
So that’s a story about how important it is to write down cool details from life when you encounter them. Details from real life give stories depth and texture and make them feel real. Get in the habit of writing these things down when you notice them, things like—
Interesting names;
Unusual styles of dress of presentation;
Phrases or bits of dialogue you overhear or participate in;
The way you feel at a particular time or in a specific situation.
In other words, things you see, hear, or otherwise experience that make an impression on you.
If you don’t want to carry a notebook and pen with you everywhere you go, just start a file on your favorite notetaking application and use your phone to type or make a voice note on the fly so you don’t miss the opportunity. Start by trying to write down one thing you notice each day and before long you’ll have a pile of tidbits to drop in your stories or even use as writing prompts.
Don’t Wait Around for Opportunity’s Knock
That is, don’t wait to feel motivated or inspired to write. If you do, you will quickly find yourself at the mercy of demotivation and lack of inspiration and you’ll never write. Listen, if I only went to my job or tidied the house when I felt motivated or inspired then I would be unemployed and I would live in a hovel because I would simply never do those things. I can’t wait to feel inspired to go to work, I have to just go to work and work, because I need to get paid. Likewise, if you want to write something substantial you can’t just wait for inspiration to find you. You have to go on the offensive and find inspiration first.
If you set aside a specific time to do something (in this case, your writing) and then you make yourself do it faithfully at that time, you will build a habit around doing the thing at the specific time and it will get easier to do. I write Shelf Life on Monday and Wednesday evenings after seven and I’m really quick about it at this point. I might make notes about what I’m going to write or put a few lines in the document in advance, but I don’t actually sit down to do it till after seven. That is the habitual Shelf Life time. Now that I have the habit engrained, it’s really easy to do. The challenging part is engraining the habit.
Likewise, don’t wait for an amazing idea to come to you before you start. Amazing ideas come to those who come up with lots of ideas. Coming up with an idea to write about is a skill and you can train your brain to do it (I talk about it in Idea Machine and Getting the Right Idea About Ideas). If you learn how to generate ideas on demand you will never have to wait for one to float out of the ether and land in front of you like the down feather in Forrest Gump (1994). Further, you will become less dependent on your lackluster ideas if you have many ideas at your disposal. A person who has only one idea to write from will hang onto that idea for dear life even if it’s not a very good one, while a person with tons of ideas can select only the very best to work with. Not every idea has to be good, because not every ideas has to be written. Ideas have no value; throw them away if they don’t suit.
Practice Saying Things the Best Way You Can
Not everyone has the same kind of job as me, that is, a job that involves writing emails and speaking to others (in meetings) for a large part of every day. I am trying to be judicious and not say “everyone’s job gives this opportunity!” Also not everyone works. But let’s put it like this: Most people do some spoken and written communication in the course of whatever it is they do during their day. Maybe you write some emails, or send some texts, or write some letters or memos, or maybe you speak to colleagues or customers. When you communicate with other people is when you can put this tip into practice.
Choose the best words for the job and find the best possible way to say something, always. That’s it. Every time you write an email, write it the best way you can. For me, that means I try to include the most information with the fewest unnecessary words (informative and concise) while also trying to make the message just read nicely. I know it’s not a book or a manuscript of some kind that is going to live on forever. I know the recipient will read it and move on and probably won’t think twice about it but the effort is not to produce an end result for them, it’s for me to practice how I choose words and construct sentences and organize a message to flow nicely.
I do this with speaking as well, which is a bit tougher because I speak quickly and you can’t control-Z to undo something you’ve spoken (unfortunately). It’s a tall order but I try to speak more slowly than my natural speaking speed (it’s still a comfortable listening speed for people!), to pause and think about what I want to say and how best to express my thought before I start to speak, and to put less-common words into my speaking rotation so I get comfortable using them.
Also, when put on the spot, I’ve learned not to be afraid to say, “Hmm, let me think about that for a moment” and compose my thought before I start to speak. I mean don’t leave people hanging for multiple minutes, but if someone puts you on the spot it is fair to ask for a moment to think.
Like I said it sounds like a lot of work and it is, at first, but over time—like the other items above—it becomes habit and you do it without thinking. All I’m really suggesting is to practice writing every time you write and not just when you’re doing your writing-writing. That’s all. And also speaking. Okay it’s a lot.
I’m suggesting these three things because they specifically have helped me elevate my writing considerably and, once you get in the habit of doing them—or not doing them, in the case of waiting for inspiration to strike—they just become second nature and your writing will level up without you even having to think about it.
If you have questions that you'd like to see answered in Shelf Life, ideas for topics that you'd like to explore, or feedback on the newsletter, please feel free to contact me. I would love to hear from you.
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