How to do Writing Goodly

Back to the basics.

Can I be honest?

I’m gonna be honest.

I’ve been feeling exceptionally stuck in my writing lately. It sucks. The spark is simply not in the air at the moment.

For the last 2 weeks, 14 days, 336 hours I’ve been struggling to put out awesome, engaging, thought provoking content, and have been feeling bad about it.

SO, I did the only other thing I’m halfway decent at. I had a (few) beer(s) with someone smarter than me, and spent time shooting the shit with them. I’ve come to a few conclusions that I’d like to share with you today.

1. Writing exists outside of time.

I put a ton of pressure on myself to perform, provide, and produce about 90% of the time. The other 10 I’m completely content doing a whole lotta nothing. It’s probably what holds me back from being a top performer, but in my humble opinion, one must do a little bit of nothing to stay sane.

Going 100% hard 100% of the time will create burnout consistently. The thing is, writing exists outside of time, separate from you and me. It doesn’t care about how hard you work, or how you feel. You “rent” the Muse, in the sense that it visits you when it’s ready, not when you call upon it. Once it’s set in paper/screen, it lives forever. Of course, actually putting pen to paper is a literal transfer of energy/vibes/thoughts from the mind, on to media. It’s an exceptionally special thing. We lose a lot of that when we switch from pen to keyboard. The upside, of course, is that it’s far easier to spread those thoughts and ideas across the world. The more people they touch, the more chance they have to impact someone, and then that person can use your ideas to create ideas of their own, and even invent something new.

2. Good writing isn’t always “Good”.

Audience capture is real, and affects all modern writers to some degree, no matter how diligent we are. Like a bonsai tree, you need to manage it every day very carefully. If it sits for a few days it’ll begin growing in a way that doesn’t fit your plan, and there’s no real way to correct life once it’s occurred.

Feedback affects us all, some more than others. When we receive praise for a thing, or validation, we tend to steer our actions towards doing more of that thing. When we receive criticism, or condemnation, we steer the ship away. The trick is to recognize it, awareness is everything.

Writing in public is wonderful, it allows you to get near immediate feedback on your ideas, for better or worse. It allows people to take your ideas, build off them, spread them, praise them, fight them, and creates a modern day Agora. The danger of writing in public, is that you can be pushed to feel the pressure to perform, and may even experience the desire to create a specific type of outrage, in order to experience the validation feeling. It’s natural, we just need to be aware of it.

Good writing doesn’t have to be world-breaking, epiphany creating, or massively inspiring. Good writing means opening yourself to The Muse, regardless of what the feedback is. It simply means sitting down for a long enough period of time, and creating an environment for the inspiration to flow through you. It may not be what you want, and it may not blow any minds, but it’s what you need.

3. Good reading makes for good writing.

You are what you eat. There’s simply no question about it, if you spend your time reading masterfully done classic pieces, your prose will improve. If you neglect to read, and spend your time consuming other, less nourishing forms of media (social, sitcoms, etc.), your writing will suffer.

The funny thing about language is that it gradually changes over time, and develops differently in different parts of the world. Even though 2 people from different parts of the US both speak English, there is likely to be some interesting nuance in how they communicate. Writing/reading works the same way. It can be quite difficult to fight through writing from before the 20th century, because the way we spoke was entirely different from today. A century from now, linguists and readers alike will puzzle over modern terms like “gucci”, and “no cap”. I hope Bryan Johnson succeeds in defeating death, because I’d sure love to see that!

It gets even more difficult when attempting to read Epic Poems. Ancient Greek doesn’t exactly translate to English well, on top of all the cultural nuance that has been simply lost to time over the centuries. Adding ANOTHER layer on to it all, most Epic Poems were designed to be recited, not read. The literacy rate in Ancient Greece was something like 10% by our best guess. People got their stories from bards and rhapsodes, who performed at public gatherings.

I’m not suggesting we write more Epic Poems, quite the contrary. We should write how we speak today, albeit maybe a little cleaner than how we communicate with our buddies. By absorbing different forms of writing, we start to form our own style. Bits and pieces of different forms, colored by personal experience, and flavored with the occasional opinion. Good writing is communicative, honest, enjoyable, and comes from the heart, even if it’s nonfiction, or historical.

4. Writing is it’s own muscle.

It isn’t really like a bicep, or a quad, but it behaves the same way. It isn’t exactly just your brain either, writing requires more than just the brain (you also need fingers, but that’s not my point).

Writing demands more of you than just effort, just inspiration, just intelligence, or just experience. Good writing requires all of that, and more. I don’t think we know exactly what it is, but if you don’t use the “muscle” that allows you to write, it will shrivel up and die. You have to show up, over and over. You put in the hours, work at it, and likely won’t even “see” the results, they happen that slowly. It takes years to formulate your own personal style, and even longer to learn how to apply it in a logical way that gets your point across.

We’re spoiled by our keyboards. If I screw something up, Mr. Backspace steps in to clean up my mess, every time. There is no consequence to sloppy or foolish prose these days. Just delete it and start over!

I think that mechanism has damaged our collective writing ability. Imagine with me, for a moment, writing in 1860, just before the invention of the typewriter… You spend hours and hours painstakingly carving out a literary masterpiece to be published in the local paper. You dip your quill pen in the ink for the final few words, commit to it, and accidentally knock over your inkwell, spilling blackness all over the paper. You swear profusely, and decide to go buy more expensive writing supplies at the general store tomorrow, knowing it will hurt your already meager savings…

I edit my Substack pieces heavily. I delete stuff, change up the wording, pause for research, spellcheck, and generally make use of all the tools available in our modern age. The folks who suffered through writing pre-computer, in all likelihood, were much better at thinking, contemplating, and making sure what they set out to write was worth writing at all. It’s hard to image writing with those sort of consequences.

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Writing is awesome. We are privileged to live in a time during which pretty much anyone and everyone can write whatever they want, about anything they want. Despite my complaints about modern day wokeness and censorship, you won’t spontaneously combust for writing something “forbidden”. You may be targeted, attacked, and possibly even assaulted by the evil forces of woke anti-truth, but you can still do it. For now.

I’d actually like to take it a step further. We have an obligation to write, to think, to form ideas, and to communicate with each other in “traditional” ways. We will only get better by exercising our writing muscles, and having the tough discussions that occur after clicking “publish”.

So, this is all to say, just write, and read! Enjoy the pleasures of the written word, start some good conversations with your friends, and even strangers! Don’t worry too much about how “good” your writing is. It’s a hard lesson to learn, and I’m still working on it.

Good writing isn’t judged by how many people read it, but instead by the quality of the thought, and the execution of the sentence.