- Joined
- Feb 15, 2014
- Messages
- 181
How did Chase and the others learn to write so well? What can I do to improve my writing?
Charm,
What I did to improve my writing was to write regularly. I keep a private journal on my tablet. You can download a journal app and type out how your day went. Try to make it sound interesting and fun. And it can be on anything that happened. Also I sometimes write short stories at school and that builds communication skills that enables me to tell more interesting stories in field reports and in person.. I'm not finished but in the meantime you can start with those.
Troy
What I did to improve my writing was to write regularly. I keep a private journal on my tablet. You can download a journal app and type out how your day went. Try to make it sound interesting and fun. And it can be on anything that happened. Also I sometimes write short stories at school and that builds communication skills that enables me to tell more interesting stories in field reports and in person.. I'm not finished but in the meantime you can start with those.
Troy
- Joined
- Oct 23, 2013
- Messages
- 473
Number of things that come to my mind,
Writing regularly and/or journaling (making it a habit) – exactly what troy suggests and a great idea, you do it more and get better and better at it (it becomes quicker and easier to write more thought words ideas concepts come to you natural and it is all much more fluid and effortless with enough time spent on it)
Reading a lot – writing and reading go hand in hand; I like to think of it as output input all you read is input all you produce and let out is output. Read a lot and you gain access to higher thoughts ideas concepts and words. You can look up words you don’t know and look up concepts and ideas that connect to others and find more articles posts research and books and stuff to read. Reading more and more good writing gets in your head more what good writing should sound like.
Finding writers who you can identify with and read them a lot – for me that was chase and a few other people; if you can identify with their work and their writing style and stuff and it appeals to you, you can go on and try to write in a similar voice style, the more you read and the more you write you may come to find the influence of reading their writing for many months and years in your own writing and that’s a neat thing to find.
Post field reports on the boards – can work at getting better at your writing and post reports on the boards (getting better with girls at the same time). Any of the guys posting really long reports are pretty good at writing and it can take a while to write something long like that. Practice writing a lot of time/content like that and you can gradually get more efficient and rapid at it
Good luck man, practice makes perfect (or makes you improve at least).
Writing regularly and/or journaling (making it a habit) – exactly what troy suggests and a great idea, you do it more and get better and better at it (it becomes quicker and easier to write more thought words ideas concepts come to you natural and it is all much more fluid and effortless with enough time spent on it)
Reading a lot – writing and reading go hand in hand; I like to think of it as output input all you read is input all you produce and let out is output. Read a lot and you gain access to higher thoughts ideas concepts and words. You can look up words you don’t know and look up concepts and ideas that connect to others and find more articles posts research and books and stuff to read. Reading more and more good writing gets in your head more what good writing should sound like.
Finding writers who you can identify with and read them a lot – for me that was chase and a few other people; if you can identify with their work and their writing style and stuff and it appeals to you, you can go on and try to write in a similar voice style, the more you read and the more you write you may come to find the influence of reading their writing for many months and years in your own writing and that’s a neat thing to find.
Post field reports on the boards – can work at getting better at your writing and post reports on the boards (getting better with girls at the same time). Any of the guys posting really long reports are pretty good at writing and it can take a while to write something long like that. Practice writing a lot of time/content like that and you can gradually get more efficient and rapid at it
Good luck man, practice makes perfect (or makes you improve at least).
- Joined
- Oct 9, 2012
- Messages
- 6,245
Charm-
Can't speak for others, but I'll say that at least for me, a diversity of writing experiences + a variety of influences was key.
e.g., I wrote short stories occasionally as a child, but they were always pretty bad. Put my first novella together in 4th grade about an expedition to Mars in which everyone gets slaughtered and dies gruesome deaths after reading Jurassic Park, then hardly did any more writing (outside of school) for the next 8 years. I read tons of Crichton, King, and Lovecraft in the meantime, though. Almost everything King and Lovecraft had published at that time, in fact, and maybe half of what Crichton did.
After high school I decided I wanted to be a famous author, so I started writing one Lovecraftian-styled short story every night (or revising one I'd previously written), for about 3 or 4 months before I found myself working 50-60 hours a week at the tire shop and too burned out from work at night to write much anymore.
In college the next year (I was 19... almost 20 when I entered university) I started working on my first novel, and took a creative writing class where I discovered my writing had dramatically improved, because my teacher constantly gushed over my writing and insisted I present it before the class. I'd been a little above average in high school, which had always bugged me since I'd wanted to be a good writer, and that was the first time my writing was being praised profusely.
I also took up songwriting that semester (Hip-Hop / rap), which, along with beat-making, I did for the next four years. I spent a lot of time studying how the top Hip-Hop artists constructed their songs and sought to emulate these as much as possible. I stopped writing fiction but spent a great deal of time writing rhymes, and really being a perfectionist about it - I only wanted crisp rhymes that weren't the same words everyone else was rhyming together, I wanted to tell stories with my songs, and cover the gamut from philosophical to club banger. Trying to convey a clear message and not go off topic in a short, metered piece like a song or a poem and still retain a pleasurable auditory aesthetic (i.e., make it still sound nice) is a very different and often quite challenging hurdle from what standard writing presents... probably why many well-known writers have also been those who dabbled with poetry or music (Lovecraft wrote poetry; King plays in a band).
Toward the end of university I found pickup, and got involved in message boards there. I had close to 3,000 posts written across two different boards after four years or so of activity there, and the stylistic improvements from message #1 to message #3,000 or whatever the last one was were huge. Just pure practice, refinement, and trying to get better, clearer, more succinct, and more compelling.
I got away from writing on message boards so much and started writing articles for GC in 2010. The first half of How To Make Girls Chase I wrote over a month or two in early 2010; the second half I wrote in 2 weeks following a deal with a friend (he'd had a book he'd finished writing half a year earlier he just needed a few revisions on to publish, but he'd been procrastinating; I made the deal with him that if he could finish those revisions he'd been putting off in 2 weeks, I could finish the second half of my book, plus all the revising, in 2 weeks too). Because I'd been writing forum posts on all this stuff for years, the words just poured out.
Writing articles was another change in focus from writing on pickup boards, because now I had to write something that someone who had no knowledge whatsoever of pickup and who'd just stumbled in from Google or Reddit or wherever would be able to read and say, "Huh, that makes sense," instead of saying, "This guy's just another one of those pickup loonies!" like he would with most of that stuff, yet still offer value to the guy who'd been reading pickup for 3 or 4 years. I also had to learn how to break things up more with subheaders, bulleted lists, etc., so it was no longer a big wall of text like in forum posts (like this one!).
Much of the refinement in my writing style from 2010 to 2015 was just from tons of rote practice; I went through a few periods when I wasn't consciously improving and wasn't even proofreading or re-reading / revising / editing my articles before I published them because I was burnt out, and worried they were probably bad or in decline, but people told me my writing was improving - no reason for that but sheer volume + a focus while writing (if not revising) of "Try to be better / clearer / more compelling than the last article."
Though at other times I'd consciously work to include some new element or structure into my writing, or test something out I thought might work well. e.g., I realized the "open loops" tactic I saw Malcolm Gladwell using and made full use of this, though I also limited how much I used it because these pieces tend to be extremely emotionally absorbing, and not the kind of thing you want to read every day. Talked about a lot more of the technical side of things in this article: How to Tell a Story that Rivets and Captivates.
At the same time, I've also had to study copywriting, because if you can't write copy, you can't sell, and this business would be kaput. A lot of the tools from that - tease/foreshadow what you'll discuss later; outline the main bullets you'll cover before you start writing the message body; roll a little NLP into the copy with dream stories and nightmare stories - this is stuff I've been able to make use of in improving my writing in general also.
I still intermittently write fiction; I published a novella in 2012 that I wrote and revised in about 2 weeks, wrote the first draft of another I did not publish (wanted to revise it first), and did another draft from scratch that year on the first novel I cooked up back in 2002. Comparing the 2002 draft and the 2012 draft, it was easy to see how much my writing had improved; the characters were all a lot more distinct, believable, and subtle.
I wrote a few million words in each of 2013 and 2014. It might've been 3 million in 2013. The average non-fiction book is around 80,000 words, and the average novel about 120,000. So that's 38 non-fiction books, or 25 novels, in 2013 (although article-writing and comment / forum posting is not the same and does not require the same level of forethought and coordination as a proper book does).
One of the cool things about writing is that it brings things you weren't otherwise aware of into focus. There've been plenty of times I sat down to write an article, thought 'This is a cool topic, but I don't even understand it myself and wouldn't know how to explain it', but once I gave it thought and started writing on it, that got the analysis going in my head and it all clicked into conscious place (things you know unconsciously / intuitively, but weren't previously consciously aware of).
Also forces you to get comfortable with criticism; I've read so many praising and derogatory remarks about my writing over the years that I'm pretty thick-skinned at this point (although I still do occasionally have the article I publish that I think might be controversial / get people telling me I'm talking out of my ass, and that makes me grit my teeth a little and brace for impact - I think the one on game imbalance theory was the latest one like this). You also can't ever reach a point where everyone is impressed with your writing; all you can hope for is that you appeal enough to some segment of the population that they enjoy your stuff.
I appreciate all the people telling me my writing is good - it's how I know I'm not a complete waste of space as a writer.
But I have a special place in my heart for the English teacher who told me my writing was overly melodramatic in 2004, and the nameless Internet commenters who told me I couldn't rhyme on beat in 2003, and those who've pointed out logical fallacies in my articles and argumentation, and the friend who told me a few years back he couldn't read my articles because each one was like reading a "dry academic paper". These are the people who pop your 'specialness' bubble and show you exactly where you need to improve... so long as you can take the criticism without quitting.
If you want a clear-cut path to being a good writer, I'd say: find something that's going to get you writing that a.) you will enjoy doing so that you keep doing it daily or near-daily, and b.) is going to open your writing up to criticism so that you are forced to get better.
Also, change it up. Spend too long writing in one distinct style, and you'll run out of revolutionary gains to make and only be making evolutionary ones. If you can combine different 'realms' of writing - e.g., for me, it's fiction, rap, forum posting, article writing, and sales copy at this point - you have to repeatedly study different forms of writing, frequently realize that what's great in one is crap in another, start from scratch and utterly humble yourself in the new medium, and in the end you get takeaways that benefit all your other writing as well.
Chase
Can't speak for others, but I'll say that at least for me, a diversity of writing experiences + a variety of influences was key.
e.g., I wrote short stories occasionally as a child, but they were always pretty bad. Put my first novella together in 4th grade about an expedition to Mars in which everyone gets slaughtered and dies gruesome deaths after reading Jurassic Park, then hardly did any more writing (outside of school) for the next 8 years. I read tons of Crichton, King, and Lovecraft in the meantime, though. Almost everything King and Lovecraft had published at that time, in fact, and maybe half of what Crichton did.
After high school I decided I wanted to be a famous author, so I started writing one Lovecraftian-styled short story every night (or revising one I'd previously written), for about 3 or 4 months before I found myself working 50-60 hours a week at the tire shop and too burned out from work at night to write much anymore.
In college the next year (I was 19... almost 20 when I entered university) I started working on my first novel, and took a creative writing class where I discovered my writing had dramatically improved, because my teacher constantly gushed over my writing and insisted I present it before the class. I'd been a little above average in high school, which had always bugged me since I'd wanted to be a good writer, and that was the first time my writing was being praised profusely.
I also took up songwriting that semester (Hip-Hop / rap), which, along with beat-making, I did for the next four years. I spent a lot of time studying how the top Hip-Hop artists constructed their songs and sought to emulate these as much as possible. I stopped writing fiction but spent a great deal of time writing rhymes, and really being a perfectionist about it - I only wanted crisp rhymes that weren't the same words everyone else was rhyming together, I wanted to tell stories with my songs, and cover the gamut from philosophical to club banger. Trying to convey a clear message and not go off topic in a short, metered piece like a song or a poem and still retain a pleasurable auditory aesthetic (i.e., make it still sound nice) is a very different and often quite challenging hurdle from what standard writing presents... probably why many well-known writers have also been those who dabbled with poetry or music (Lovecraft wrote poetry; King plays in a band).
Toward the end of university I found pickup, and got involved in message boards there. I had close to 3,000 posts written across two different boards after four years or so of activity there, and the stylistic improvements from message #1 to message #3,000 or whatever the last one was were huge. Just pure practice, refinement, and trying to get better, clearer, more succinct, and more compelling.
I got away from writing on message boards so much and started writing articles for GC in 2010. The first half of How To Make Girls Chase I wrote over a month or two in early 2010; the second half I wrote in 2 weeks following a deal with a friend (he'd had a book he'd finished writing half a year earlier he just needed a few revisions on to publish, but he'd been procrastinating; I made the deal with him that if he could finish those revisions he'd been putting off in 2 weeks, I could finish the second half of my book, plus all the revising, in 2 weeks too). Because I'd been writing forum posts on all this stuff for years, the words just poured out.
Writing articles was another change in focus from writing on pickup boards, because now I had to write something that someone who had no knowledge whatsoever of pickup and who'd just stumbled in from Google or Reddit or wherever would be able to read and say, "Huh, that makes sense," instead of saying, "This guy's just another one of those pickup loonies!" like he would with most of that stuff, yet still offer value to the guy who'd been reading pickup for 3 or 4 years. I also had to learn how to break things up more with subheaders, bulleted lists, etc., so it was no longer a big wall of text like in forum posts (like this one!).
Much of the refinement in my writing style from 2010 to 2015 was just from tons of rote practice; I went through a few periods when I wasn't consciously improving and wasn't even proofreading or re-reading / revising / editing my articles before I published them because I was burnt out, and worried they were probably bad or in decline, but people told me my writing was improving - no reason for that but sheer volume + a focus while writing (if not revising) of "Try to be better / clearer / more compelling than the last article."
Though at other times I'd consciously work to include some new element or structure into my writing, or test something out I thought might work well. e.g., I realized the "open loops" tactic I saw Malcolm Gladwell using and made full use of this, though I also limited how much I used it because these pieces tend to be extremely emotionally absorbing, and not the kind of thing you want to read every day. Talked about a lot more of the technical side of things in this article: How to Tell a Story that Rivets and Captivates.
At the same time, I've also had to study copywriting, because if you can't write copy, you can't sell, and this business would be kaput. A lot of the tools from that - tease/foreshadow what you'll discuss later; outline the main bullets you'll cover before you start writing the message body; roll a little NLP into the copy with dream stories and nightmare stories - this is stuff I've been able to make use of in improving my writing in general also.
I still intermittently write fiction; I published a novella in 2012 that I wrote and revised in about 2 weeks, wrote the first draft of another I did not publish (wanted to revise it first), and did another draft from scratch that year on the first novel I cooked up back in 2002. Comparing the 2002 draft and the 2012 draft, it was easy to see how much my writing had improved; the characters were all a lot more distinct, believable, and subtle.
I wrote a few million words in each of 2013 and 2014. It might've been 3 million in 2013. The average non-fiction book is around 80,000 words, and the average novel about 120,000. So that's 38 non-fiction books, or 25 novels, in 2013 (although article-writing and comment / forum posting is not the same and does not require the same level of forethought and coordination as a proper book does).
One of the cool things about writing is that it brings things you weren't otherwise aware of into focus. There've been plenty of times I sat down to write an article, thought 'This is a cool topic, but I don't even understand it myself and wouldn't know how to explain it', but once I gave it thought and started writing on it, that got the analysis going in my head and it all clicked into conscious place (things you know unconsciously / intuitively, but weren't previously consciously aware of).
Also forces you to get comfortable with criticism; I've read so many praising and derogatory remarks about my writing over the years that I'm pretty thick-skinned at this point (although I still do occasionally have the article I publish that I think might be controversial / get people telling me I'm talking out of my ass, and that makes me grit my teeth a little and brace for impact - I think the one on game imbalance theory was the latest one like this). You also can't ever reach a point where everyone is impressed with your writing; all you can hope for is that you appeal enough to some segment of the population that they enjoy your stuff.
I appreciate all the people telling me my writing is good - it's how I know I'm not a complete waste of space as a writer.
But I have a special place in my heart for the English teacher who told me my writing was overly melodramatic in 2004, and the nameless Internet commenters who told me I couldn't rhyme on beat in 2003, and those who've pointed out logical fallacies in my articles and argumentation, and the friend who told me a few years back he couldn't read my articles because each one was like reading a "dry academic paper". These are the people who pop your 'specialness' bubble and show you exactly where you need to improve... so long as you can take the criticism without quitting.
If you want a clear-cut path to being a good writer, I'd say: find something that's going to get you writing that a.) you will enjoy doing so that you keep doing it daily or near-daily, and b.) is going to open your writing up to criticism so that you are forced to get better.
Also, change it up. Spend too long writing in one distinct style, and you'll run out of revolutionary gains to make and only be making evolutionary ones. If you can combine different 'realms' of writing - e.g., for me, it's fiction, rap, forum posting, article writing, and sales copy at this point - you have to repeatedly study different forms of writing, frequently realize that what's great in one is crap in another, start from scratch and utterly humble yourself in the new medium, and in the end you get takeaways that benefit all your other writing as well.
Chase
- Joined
- Jan 5, 2014
- Messages
- 172
OP, I had just recently gotten into writing for a investing website at seekingalpha.com. I contributed my first article after spending years just making forum posts and reading others.
My best advice and sounds cliche....but to get better at writing you gotta write. Go hands on. Like anything else in life. Want to bench press more? Bench more. Want to get better at guitar? Play the guitar more...
More tips:
- Also learn from editors! After I submitted my first article I took note of what the editors did to spice up my paper.
-Whatever topic you're writing on try to find authors to look up to. Notice how they write and try to emulate some of that
-Increase your knowledge and terminology of the subject you're writing about. It helps to get the lightbulbs clicking
Sorry I feel my advice isn't the greatest but I just recently gotten into writing as well. Hope it helps.
My best advice and sounds cliche....but to get better at writing you gotta write. Go hands on. Like anything else in life. Want to bench press more? Bench more. Want to get better at guitar? Play the guitar more...
More tips:
- Also learn from editors! After I submitted my first article I took note of what the editors did to spice up my paper.
-Whatever topic you're writing on try to find authors to look up to. Notice how they write and try to emulate some of that
-Increase your knowledge and terminology of the subject you're writing about. It helps to get the lightbulbs clicking
Sorry I feel my advice isn't the greatest but I just recently gotten into writing as well. Hope it helps.
- Joined
- Feb 17, 2015
- Messages
- 5
Im new into writting and it seems fun thus I can read my own mind on the paper. Im not writting in english so excuse me if I make mistakes and call myself a writer
