Trash Your Writing
I’ve been working on a post for this blog; it had a certain direction, but I’ve recently done some reading at other blogs that made me change the end scope of today’s post or ties into the end scope of this post.
Michael at DailyWritingTips.com did a post, Ruining Your Writing by Cheap Blogging. It had some very good points in it and I’d light to highlight them before I get to my post for today.
Michael states:
What ruined my writing ability was placing money and productivity higher than integrity and honor. I told myself, “This assignment pays half of what I need to earn per hour; therefore, I will only spend half an hour on it.” In retrospect, I realized that I was gaining income, but losing self-respect. I was quickly lowering my standards to meet my financial goals, but found that I couldn’t raise them back again so easily. In essence, I was training myself to write sloppily.
Michael goes on to say:
Professional blogging, for low pay and not for love, hadn’t taught me to explain things clearly. We expect bloggers to entertain us more than to inform us. When we expect them to inform us, we don’t expect complete information. There’s nothing wrong with that. I’ve found, however, that you advance by exceeding peoples’ expectations, not simply meeting them. And you won’t advance as a writer when you don’t meet your own expectations, especially when you tell yourself that you don’t need to.
One of the commenters, Rudy, replied with:
Isn’t part of the problem is the reading level in countries like America, has dropped to 5th grade level? I wouldn’t necessarily call it “dumbing down” the writing. Rather, make it easier to scan and easily understood for regular readers.
I’m also afraid this problem will only get worse. Blogging has now turned to micro-blogging (140 characters or less), and reduced even further to mere pictures (and photos) instead of words. More bite size. Requires less reading. The ultimate lazy blogging.
This brought me to the reason I took a long hiatus from writing and why my partner in crime, I mean writing, is on extended hiatus at this time. We fell into that trap of crappy SEO writing for $5 a pop. A few good paying gigs came along, but the low paying gigs way out numbered the good ones. I got burned out and turned it all over to her. She kept up with it for well over a year before she got burned out as well.
When we realized how much we missed writing, we decided we would focus on trying our level best to fix the problem where we could and inform others of the problem, and try to get other writers to hold themselves to a higher standard too.
The post and comment I’ve quoted above reminded me of my About page for this site; the vision and mission that Angela and I had long ago.
So, now onto the post about trashing your writing:
I was recently skimming over some old writing tips I ran across awhile back. The writer stated that she once thought to write well she needed to write less and truly focus on the material at hand, almost trying to get it perfect by writing less. She discovered that to become a better writer you must write. This means you must write more.
One of my favorite quotes is from what some consider to be the grand master in writing.
“I write one page of masterpiece to ninety one pages of shit,” Hemingway confided to F. Scott Fitzgerald in 1934. “I try to put the shit in the wastebasket.”
What can we learn from the wisdom of one of the masters in the literary world? Throw the junk out. Hemingway obviously threw a lot of material away. He wasn’t concerned with keeping every little bit of material he wrote, he was concerned with writing well. Hemingway knew the main rule of writing well was to write as much as possible and throw out the garbage.
Writing for the web has kind of hindered our mentality on writing well. We all seem to be on a deadline and don’t have the time to write the amount of material we should be writing to become better writers. Many writers are happy to just get something written and thrown up on the webpage. We see this “mentality” all over the net. How often do you search for information and find a piece that was just thrown together? The facts are scattered, the grammar is poor, punctuation is almost non-existent.
We think to ourselves that we’ll never write that bad and put it on public display, but get us in a time crunch and what happens? Exactly. We throw up material that is sub-par. We’ve all been guilty of it.
What’s the solution? You need to write more and throw out more. Writing is like any other talent or sport you want to hone, it takes practice. Pro football players practice for hours a day. Just because they were good enough to make the pros does not mean they don’t need practice. Musicians are the same way. In order to get really good at their instrument of choice, they’ve spent hours a day playing. Often playing until their fingers bleed. It’s the same with writers. To improve your skills you must write. The more you write the better you become.
Challenge yourself each day to write more material. Don’t worry about facts, figures or being perfect, just write everything that comes to mind about the topic. When you go back to the revision process you should throw at least half of it in the trash. The hardest part of the challenge is throwing out the garbage. In the beginning you’ll wonder how you can throw your hard work away, you need that filler material to make your word count. Right? Wrong. You need to throw out the garbage and stop worrying so much about a word count. Just keep the facts and the important stuff. Your readers will be glad you did.
Learn from Michael’s mistake, from my mistake and from Angela’s mistake. Every word you write does not need to be productive or for money. Stop churning out $5 garbage and start writing good material. Above all else, write from your heart, write because you love to write, write because you’d write even if no money were involved.
Schedule free writing sessions with yourself each day. Treat these sessions just as you would a client. This ensures that you will set time aside each day to hone your skills. Pick a topic, a news story, an opinion piece; but pick something to work on that will help you practice your skills.
Get your butt to writing and then trash it!
Write on!
Patti Stafford
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