The writing tip that matters? Accept that it’s hard
Tweets about writing are popular. They are usually by people who are good writers themselves, and they essentially say, ‘If you follow these simple tips, you can be a good writer too.’
I like these lists. I’ve learnt from them, I’ve shared them with students and I’ve written them myself. There really are some useful, basic rules (One point per paragraph! Omit needless words!) that will improve the way you write. But advice about the mechanics of writing somewhat misses the point. There is a bigger, more important piece of advice you need: accept that writing is hard.
I know this because I’ve spent a lot of time doing it. I’ve written academic papers, published a non-fiction book, and worked as an editor for a popular magazine, helping academics write about their work for a lay audience. I love writing and people say I’m good at it. But I also find it really difficult.
My writing process involves sitting at my computer and typing something bad. (Sometimes really bad: I read an early draft recently in which I called adolescence ‘a complex soup’.) Then I rewrite it. I rewrite it again and again and again, alternating between working on screen and by hand, until finally, eventually, something good starts to emerge.
For me, it’s not just the first draft that can be poor; it’s the second, the fifth, sometimes the tenth. I am relentless about rewriting because I know that, for me at least, this is the only way the magic happens; the only way to get to the good writing is to hack my way through a forest of the bad. Believe me: people who are kind enough to say my writing is beautiful and clear have just never seen the versions when it was ugly and opaque.
My advice — to accept that writing is hard — is essential because many people give up too soon. They stop at draft three (or, God forbid, draft one) and submit that, wrenching the thing out at the roots before it’s had a chance to grow. A great deal of writing could be improved if people simply edited their work a few more times.
Does this mean that all good writing is just a case of persistence? Well, no, and that’s where things get interesting. My theory, after musing over this for many years, is that excellent writers have two key skills. If you’re inherently good at these things, you’ll be a better writer: you will get to the good stuff faster, and the end result will be more impressive. But whatever your baseline abilities, if you accept that writing is hard and put in the necessary time for rewriting, you give yourself a fighting chance to use and develop the skills you do have.
The first is clear thinking. I’m not just talking about intelligence, because there are plenty of clever people who cannot write well. For exceptionally good writing, a more specific type of thinking is required: a kind of narrative, conceptual thinking that allows you to structure your thoughts in a logical, coherent way.
This is hard. (‘You can teach a lot of things in psychology,’ a mentor once said to me, ‘But you can’t teach someone how to think.’) It’s also why writing ability is not especially correlated with seniority — some undergraduates are excellent writers, and it’s because they are exceptionally clear thinkers. But by going over and over your draft, you at least give yourself some space to figure out what you’re trying to say, by playing around with your thinking on the page.
Clear thinking will only get you so far without skill number two: thinking about your reader. To write well, you need to constantly hold your reader in mind. With every paragraph, sentence and word, you need to be aware of what the reader knows so far, what they don’t know, and what they need to know next. If I was going to be a psychologist about this, I’d say good writers have good mentalising skills (AKA theory of mind). This was my key observation after a year helping academics write for a lay audience: many academics really struggle to differentiate between what they themselves know as the expert, and what their reader needs to know at any given time. When the goal is clear writing, it’s a fatal mistake to confuse the two.
But good writers also care about their reader. You need to consider not only what your reader needs to know but what they might like to know. Make life easy for them. This matters less in academic writing — where your key task is to be clear — but becomes acutely important in writing for lay audiences, where your task is to be clear and engaging. With popular writing, you are literally competing with the rest of the internet for your reader’s attention, and that means being considerate enough to give them a good time. To come back to psychology: good writers don’t just need good theory of mind, they need a decent level of empathy and compassion for their readers too.
This is why writing — good writing — is so damn hard. You need to be an excellent conceptual thinker, and you need to present those thoughts in a way that a reader, often a novice, will understand and find interesting.
And this is why those punchy tweets about writing tips are not enough on their own. They create the illusion that writing is easy, that the holy grail of good writing lies at the end of a simple checklist of hot tips. Yes, everyone should read this guidance, and we don’t teach it enough. But you could drench someone with a bucketload of these tips every day for the rest of their life and they would still find writing hard. Because it is hard! The only way through it is persistence: to work on your draft, over and over again, until your thinking finally, slowly takes shape. So if you’re sat in front of the page thinking writing is difficult, don’t worry. You’re not the only one. Just sit with it a little longer, and the magic might start to happen.
