Category: Writing

The United States Navy SEALs go through some of the most intense and rigorous training you can think of. The dropout rate in basic training is pretty high. Over the years, the Navy found that those who succeed are not the ones who can focus on the big picture, but the ones who can micro-focus. 

While crawling through mud with barbed wire fences over you, and there’s a thunderstorm, and it’s raining like cats and dogs, recruits who have the ability to micro-focus, that moving one arm and then the other are the ones who survive the boot camp.

Micro-focusing can be applied to writing as well. If you are stuck in a murky middle of your book, focusing on writing one sentence at a time and then following it with another one can help you power through. 

So many things become really easy when explained with an analogy or some law or concept. This kind of analogy, or a model that can help change a mindset, is called a mental model. 

A mental model is just a concept that can be used to explain things. They can be a framework, or worldview that you can wear on your head like a hat that can help interpret the world and understand the relationship between things.

Mental Models Are The Tools of Thinkers and Successful People.

Mental models have been around for a long time. They are widely used in economics. Supply and demand is a mental model that helps understand how the economy works. Game theory describes how relationships and trust work. Entropy explains how disorder and decay work.

Some call them “apps for the mind.” We use many in day-to-day decision making, problem-solving, and truth-seeking. Here are some familiar ones:

Murphy’s Law — “Anything that can go wrong will go wrong.”

Pareto’s Principle — “For many outcomes roughly 80% of consequences come from 20% of the causes.” 

Fear of Missing Out (FOMO) — “A pervasive apprehension that others might be having rewarding experiences from which one is absent.”

Butterfly Effect — “The concept that small causes can have large effects.”

Parkinson’s Law — “Work expands to fill the time available for its completion.”

Murphy’s Law — “Anything that can go wrong, will.” 

Hofstadter’s Law, “It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law.”

Eisenhower’s decision matrix — “what is important is seldom urgent, and what is urgent is seldom important.”

Imposter Syndrome — “High-achieving individuals, marked by an inability to internalize their accomplishments and a persistent fear of being exposed as a ‘fraud.’”

Deliberate Practice — “How expert one becomes at a skill has more to do with how one practice than with merely performing a skill a large number of times.”

Mental models are thinking and decision-making tools. They cut through the fluff and help reach largely correct decisions (there are no absolutes, another mental model). 

Charlie Munger, Warren Buffet’s partner and vice chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, says, “80 or 90 important models will carry about 90% of the freight in making you a worldly‑wise person.”

“I think it is undeniably true that the human brain must work in models. The trick is to have your brain work better than the other person’s brain because it understands the most fundamental models: ones that will do most work per unit.” “If you get into the mental habit of relating what you’re reading to the basic structure of the underlying ideas being demonstrated, you gradually accumulate some wisdom.” 

— Charlie Munger

There are tens of thousands of mental models, and every discipline has its own set.

Here are my ten mental models for writing.

1. There Is Nothing New Under The Sun Model

When I was new to writing, I used to get very frustrated with my work. I wanted to be original. I wanted my stories to be new and fresh. I wanted my voice to be unique. I wanted my prose to sing. But then I learned aiming for originality was, in fact, inhibiting my creativity. 

Nothing is original. Every emotion has been explored before; every story has been written before. Even the Bible records that.

What has been will be again,
 what has been done will be done again;
there is nothing new under the sun.

— Ecclesiastes 1:9

The Sooner you free yourself from the pressure of creating something original, the sooner you will be able to create.

All ideas come from other ideas. Experienced writers get inspiration from other people’s writing, real-life events, or applying ideas from one field to another (from animals to humans, humans to aliens, science to psychology, and so on).

“Everything that needs to be said has already been said. but since no one was listening, everything must be said again.”— Anfre Gide

There is nothing new under the sun, is a great mental model for new writers. Stop trying to create something out of nothing. Take influences from anywhere you can — other writers, old works, nature, real life, science, animals, or other art forms. Your particular pick of influences will make your work unique.

2. A Beginner vs. Imposter Model

When I started writing articles on “writing,” I felt like an imposter. Who am I to advise on writing when I haven’t published any work? The same happened when I wrote self-help articles or wrote about psychology or human behavior or recent trends. I had no formal qualifications in any of the subjects. I felt like a fraud—a typical case of imposter syndrome.

But then I looked at the definition of an imposter. 

“A person who pretends to be someone else in order to deceive others, especially for fraudulent gain.”

My fears were unfounded. I was not pretending to be someone else for fraudulent gains. Neither was I pretending to be an expert. I was a beginner, writing from my own experiences. Explaining things when I was learning them. That doesn’t make me an imposter. 

An imposter is a conman; personal gain through deceit is his aim. A beginner is a learner; learning through teaching is her aim. 

Knowing the difference between the two freed me and made my writing bold and truthful.

Next time you feel like an imposter, think whether you are fraudulently trying to be someone you are not or a beginner trying to learn through teaching.

If later, write fearlessly.

3. Resistance Is A Writer’s Number One Enemy Model

The credit for this Mental Model goes to Steven Pressfield. He identified that resistance and not the lack-of-skills or self-doubt that stops writers in their tracks. He wrote about it at length in his book The War of Art.

Those of us who have a passion for writing know resistance very well. It stands between who we are and what we want to be and doesn’t let us cross the line. The more passionate we are for our vocation, the more forceful is the resistance to prevent us from pursuing it.

Writing is not hard; it is sitting down to write is hard. And what keeps us from sitting down is resistance. 

“Resistance will tell you anything to keep you from doing your work. It will perjure, fabricate, falsify, seduce, bully, cajole. Resistance is protean. It will assume any form if that’s what it takes to deceive you. It will reason with you like a lawyer or jam a nine-millimeter in your face like a stickup man. Resistance has no conscience. It will pledge anything to get a deal, then double-cross you as soon as your back is turned. If you take Resistance at its word, you deserve everything you get. Resistance is always lying and always full of shit.” — Steven Pressfield

Every new writer thinks they are the only ones feeling resistance. But resistance doesn’t discriminate. 

Hitler wanted to be an artist. At eighteen, he took his inheritance and moved to Vienna to paint. No one has ever seen his paintings. Resistance beat him. Someone said, “It was easier for Hitler to start World War II than it was for him to face a blank square of canvas.”

Knowing that resistance is the enemy waiting to defeat you is a good Mental model to have. Build up your strategy to defeat it. 

I have learned that if I persist for twenty minutes, resistance goes away. It doesn’t like to be ignored. 

4. Everything You Desire Is On The Other Side Of The Fear Model

The big thing with wiring is that it is all about mindset. The thing that screws your mind is fear. And if you can learn to get a handle on your fear, you can get a handle on your writing career.

“Everything you want is on the other side of fear. “ — Jack Canfield

If you can tame that critical voice, as Dean Wesley Smith likes to say, then you can pretty much control your own destiny, and you can become prolific. 

You can do just about anything you want to do if you can silence that voice in your head. Fears of self-doubt are the big one. 

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, ‘Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?’ Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”
 — Marianne Williamson (A Return to Love: Reflections on the Principles of “A Course in Miracles”)

I think of fear as a river of fire, and I need to cross it every day. Not like the Indian monk walking on hot coals but like the fireman walking through the inferno. Once I have that image in mind, it changes the mindset. It gives me a handle to my fear. You need a handle too, your fear because it doesn’t go away. You will have to fight it every single day.

“Fear doesn’t go away. The warrior and the artist live by the same code of necessity, which dictates that the battle must be fought anew every day.” — Steven Pressfield

5. Trickster vs Martyr Model

I am forever grateful to Elizabeth Gilbert for this Mental Model. In her book The Big Magic, Elizabeth Gilbert says that as creatives, we have a choice. 

We can be either a martyr and vow to be committed, dedicated, serious, grim, always-on-the-go, strive-for-excellence, and fit-more-in-a-day-to-achieve-more-type. Or we can be tricksters and play games and have fun with our work.

Martyr energy is dark, solemn, macho, hierarchical, fundamentalist, austere, unforgiving, and profoundly rigid.

Trickster energy is light, sly, transgender, transgressive, animist, seditious, primal, and endlessly shape-shifting.

I was approaching my writing with Martyr’s energy. I was going to become a writer even if it killed me. I was setting harder goals and then beating myself for not achieving them. Self-doubt was my chaperone. He protected me from other people’s ridicule but sneered at my efforts. The very activity which used to give me so much pleasure became an ordeal.

Martyr says: “I will sacrifice everything to fight this unwinnable war, even if it means being crushed to death under a wheel of torment.”

Trickster says: “Okay, you enjoy that! As for me, I’ll be over here in this corner, running a successful little black market operation on the side of your unwinnable war.”

Things started changing when I became joyful. I started forgiving myself for making mistakes and missing deadlines (my own). Rather than feelings small by other people’s work, I started complimenting them. I began experimenting (like the publishing of Medium) and see what happens.

Martyr says: “Life is pain.”

Trickster says: “Life is interesting.”

Martyr says: “The system is rigged against all that is good and sacred.”
Trickster says: “There is no system. Everything is good, and nothing is sacred.

Martyr says: “Nobody will ever understand me.”
Trickster says: “Pick a card, any card.”

Martyr says: “The world can never be solved.”
Trickster says: “Perhaps not…but it can be gamed.”

Martyr says: “Through my torment, the truth shall be revealed.”
Trickster says: “I didn’t come here to suffer, pal.”

Martyr says: “Death before dishonor!”
Trickster says: “Let’s make a deal.”

Martyr always ends up dead in a heap of broken glory, while Trickster trots off to enjoy another day.

Martyr = Sir Thomas More
Trickster = Bugs Bunny

When feeling under pressure, ask yourself which energy you are using – martyr or trickster? What can give you better results? Would you be rather Sir Thomas More and be hanged or Bugs Bunny and have fun?

6. Shitty First Draft Model

And once you have the trickster’s mindset you can understand what Anne Lamott tries to drill into new writers through her book Bird by Bird.

Shitty first drafts. All good writers write them. This is how they end up with good second drafts and terrific third drafts. People tend to look at successful writers, writers who are getting their books published and maybe even doing well financially, and think that they sit down at their desks every morning feeling like a million dollars, feeling great about who they are and how much talent they have and what a great story they have to tell; that they take in a few deep breaths, push back their sleeves, roll their necks a few time to get all the cricks out and dive in, typing fully formed passages as fast as a court reporter. This is just a fantasy of the uninitiated. — Anne Lamott

For years I hated all those whose prose comes out as natural and fluid, all those with English as their mother-tongue and those who write as if they are taking dictation directly from God. 

For me, writing is torture: broken sentences, unformed ideas, limited vocabulary, and terrible spellings. (One would think why I the hell I want to become a writer, but I do. I really, really do.) The only way I can write anything is by receiving whichever way it comes.

But when I learned this is why with Anne Lamott too and with scores of other writers too, I stopped complaining and got to work.

If you operate from that assumption, that all you are creating in the first instance is a shitty draft, it changes how you approach your writing. 

That is why I consider shitty first draft as a Mental Model. It changed my mindset forever.

7. A Day Is All You Have Got Model

“How we spend our days is how we spend our lives.” — Annie Dillard.

When I was young, I used to think I have all the time in the world. I can do it tomorrow, next week, next month, next year. As I get old, the days are shrinking; months are getting shorter; years pass much more quickly than before.

“You live as if you were destined to live forever, no thought of your frailty ever enters your head, of how much time has already gone by you take no heed. You squander time as if you drew from a full and abundant supply, though all the while that day which you bestow on some person or thing is perhaps your last.”

 — Seneca

 “Get hold of your days and you will have a hold of your lives,” commanded Seneca. 

When I started realizing that today is all I have got, whatever I can get done in a day is what I can hope for, my mindset changed. I made daily schedules and set myself routines that I could follow without thinking. I still have good days and bad days. Some days are a complete write-off, but that doesn’t matter. 

As Annie Dillard writes, “A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days.” I don’t have to figure out what to do; next, my routine tells me that. And I don’t miss deadlines because my schedule takes care of them.

When you apply the Mental Model of A Day Is All You Have Got, you begin to appreciate that every day counts. And even if you add a few drops each day, the bucket will get filled very soon. 

(I have a leaking tap in my laundry, it fills up a bucket every second day which I use to water the pot plants.)

“In guarding their fortune men are often closefisted, yet, when it comes to the matter of wasting time, in the case of the one thing in which it is right to be miserly, they show themselves most extravagant.” — Seneca

8. We Are All Amateurs.

“That’s all any of us are: amateurs. We don’t live long enough to be anything else.” — Charlie Chaplin

We all crave to be counted as professionals. We feel ashamed to be called amateurs. Yet an amateur is someone who pursues her work with the spirit of love. 

Austin Kleon points out in his book Show Your Work that Amateurs are not afraid to make mistakes or look ridiculous in public. They are in love, so they don’t hesitate to do work that others think of as silly or just plain stupid.

“On the spectrum of creative work, the difference between the mediocre and good is vast. Mediocrity is, however, still on the spectrum; you can move from mediocre to good in increments. The real gap is between doing nothing and doing something.” — Clay Shirky in Cognitive Surplus.

Amateurs know that contributing something is better than contributing nothing. Ameture might lack formal training, but they’re all lifelong learners, and they make a point of learning in the open so that others can learn from their failures and successes.

“In the beginner’s mind, there are many possibilities. In the expert’s mind, there are few.” — Zen monk Shunryu

Since I adopted, we are all amateurs model fear of failure lost its power. I am no longer turning red whenever I find mistakes in my work; neither I feel dishearted by its quality. I know I am moving from mediocrity to good.

9. Choose Creativity Over Competition.

All my life I was raised to compete. It is the survival of the fittest, our generation learned from Charles Darwin. 

The only way to lead a better life is to be the best student, get the best job, be the best employee, win promotions, marry an ambitious person, accumulate wealth, own the biggest house, drive an expensive car, and have holidays at exotic places. Nowhere there was room to slow down, to take it easy, to get in touch with the creative soul in yourself and you will have to compete for anything. 

Wallace D. Wattles imparted with the knowledge more than a hundred years ago:

“[A] man must pass from the competitive to the creative mindset to achieve whatever he wants to achieve; otherwise, he cannot be in harmony with the Formless Intelligence, which is always creative and never competitive.” 

I made a decision to lead a creative life. I quit my job and started nurturing my creative side. I started a blog and learned to draw. I determined the purpose of my life and wrote down my life philosophies. I wrote down the philosophy behind my creativity too.

Choosing creativity over competition helped me listen to the tiny voice inside me which wanted me to create. To make something that will make me happy. As it used to when I was a child. It didn’t care whether it was any good, sellable, or will make any difference in anyone’s life. It wants me to create something which will make a difference to me. Something that will make me happy. 

Listen to that voice because if you don’t, it will die. And with it, a big chunk of you will die too.

10. Never, Never, Never Give Up — stick around

Ah! the good old Mr. Chrurchill. He wrote the history so that “history is kind to him,” and he taught us how to be our best in our darkest hour. But the mental model he gave us will keep him alive in our minds forever. Because we are at times where “giving up” is too easy and “sticking to it” is rare.

When the going gets tough, we fight a battle with us every single day. And when I hear Mr. Churchill thundering voice saying, “Never, never, never give up.” I get filled with new enthusiasm to keep going.

Summary

To summarise here are my ten mental models for writing. 

1. There is nothing new under the sun.
2. Beginner vs. imposter.
3. Resistance is the writer’s number one enemy. 
4. Everything You Desire Is On The Other Side Of The Fear Model
5. Trickster vs Martyr Model
6. Shitty first draft model.
7. A day is all you have got.
8. We are all amateurs.
9. Choose creativity over the competition.
10. Never, never, never give up.

Next Step

You probably would have heard of more and perhaps have your own favorite ones. 

You can either become a collector of mental models or focus on acquiring a deep understanding of a few and use them to help change your mindset.

I would leave you with a little story.

Richard Feynman liked to tell this story about something his father taught him: “You can know the name of that bird in all the languages of the world, but when you’re finished, you’ll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird.” 

Photo by Robert Keane on Unsplash

When Microsoft released Windows 10, they did an experiment. Instead of a boring blue screen with the Microsoft logo at the start-up, they introduced a lock screen. The lock screen is a display setting that shows breathtaking high-resolution pictures of places or natural phenomenon and some words to entice the readers to click the link. It was one of Microsoft’s strategies to get more traffic on its search engine.

Their strategy worked. Millions of people kept lock screen as a default screen saver and started clicking the link to learn more about the beautiful places introduced through a humble screen saver. 

Microsoft had figured out what their readers wanted.

What do readers want?

Today’s readers are savvy. They read a lot. That means they know a lot. They get frustrated with the poor quality writing. 

They want to consume a lot. But they are time-poor. An article needs to be worthy of their time and written in a way so that they can consume quickly and still get impacted by it.

When they select an article to read they want the article to do three things simultaneously. To entertain them, to educate them, and to inspire them.

It is no easy feat but we writers need to rise to the challenge. 

When they start writing online, many writers (including me) have no idea what readers are looking for. 

When I started writing, I was primarily writing for myself. The writing was a way to clear my thoughts and to become better at expressing myself. Since no one was reading my work, I didn’t have to think about entertaining, educating, or inspiring with my words. But as I grew as a writer and wanted to share my writing, I just embarked on it without much consideration whether my writing is suitable for consumption. 

It took me a lot of observation and an article writing course to bring my article useful and entertaining for my readers.

How can you do that too?

Here are three ways:

1. Entertain them with stories
2. Educate them with information
3. Inspire them with examples.

1. Entertain Them with Stories

Stories are a great way to entertain the readers and get the point across in a light way. Stories give a break from heavy reading. Readers might forget the advice you might give them through your article, but they rarely forget the stories. Stories get itched on their psyche. It is not an accident that all religious teaching happens through stories.

Have a read of the following story that explains the difference between an imposter and a beginner so beautifully in an article written by Sean D’Souza.

My father ran a secretarial college. And one of his students was a conman.

Back in Mumbai, where I grew up, the majority of secretaries were women and Catholic. Steve, the conman, was from another religion. Like most conmen, he had different aliases, and when he joined my father’s college, he wasn’t Steve. Instead, he called himself Sadashiv.

As we learned later, this conman was very thorough. He would go through a complete transformation where he’d fall in love with a girl, then convert to her religion. And even change his name to a more suitable “Catholic name”. They’d then get married, start up a joint bank account and all would be well for about a year.

One day his new wife and her family would wake up to find “Steve” had disappeared.

During that first year of marriage, Steve would create an enormous level of trust, and then once he had his plan in order, he’d decamp with money, jewellery and all sorts of valuables. The only reason my father found out his modus operandi was because he called my father from jail, saying that he’d been framed.

When my father went to post bail, he was informed that Steve or Sadashiv had many aliases. He always used the letter S, when coming up with names. And he’d been in jail many times before. The story was always the same. He was an impostor and certainly no beginner.

2. Educate them with Information

There is a reason “How To” articles and books are doing so well for decades now. Readers need to learn to do things and articles are a great way to start. A time-poor reader will start with articles to get some basic understanding of a topic and then move on to books to build a deep understanding.

Educational articles are written in form of listicles just like this one. They could be long (I have seen listicles with thirty points or more) or short (like this article which has just three points).

I believe three to seven is a good number. 

My personal favorite is three points. Three points give you enough space to include substance and are not too long for the readers to consume in one read. Seven is my upper limit. I wrote an article Seven Tips To Write With Style which got curated. Anything above that and we start losing the readers.

When writing educational articles, write it as if you are explaining to a single reader. That will make your writing personal and understandable. If you write for masses, you don’t connect with anyone.

You don’t have to be an authority on the topic. You can provide beginner level information. But whatever you write you need to understand it well so that you come across as someone who knows her topic well. 

3. Inspire them with examples

Examples bring the point home. They also make it easy for the readers to understand what you are saying. 

In the article, The Expert Generalist: Why the Future Belongs to Polymaths Zat Rana gives the examples of Aristotle, Galileo, and Da Vinci to make a case for gaining breath of knowledge as compared to the depth of knowledge.

Learning itself is a skill, and when you exercise that skill across domains, you get specialized as a learner in a way that someone who goes deep doesn’t. You learn how to learn by continuously challenging yourself to grasp concepts of a broad variety. This ironically then allows you to specialize in something else faster if you so choose. This is an incredibly valuable advantage.

…

Aristotle practically invented half a dozen fields of study across philosophy. Galileo was as much a physicist as he was an engineer when he helped kick-start the scientific revolution. Da Vinci might have been even more famous as an inventor than an artist if his notebooks were ever published.

Ryan Holiday quotes examples from both ancient and contemporary text in his article Why Everyone Should Watch Less News.

Two thousand years ago, Marcus Aurelius wrote in his Meditations, “Are you distracted by breaking news? Then take some leisure time to learn something good, and stop bouncing around.”

…

A reader of Bryan Burrough’s Days of Rage would find that between 1971 and 1972, there were some 2500 politically motivated bombings in the United States. 

In the pages of Thucydides’ The History of the Peloponnesian War, they’d find an eerily modern jockeying between an ascendant power and a dominant power and the mistakes made by both. 

Reading Robert Kennedy’s Thirteen Days, his first-hand account of the Cuban Missile Crisis, would reveal the life and death calculations of nuclear powers, each looking to save face and neither looking to actually blow up the world. 

In Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer, a reader might relate to the rather ageless angst of the next generation trying to find its meaning and purpose in the world.

In Anne Frank’s diary we hear of the timeless plight of the refugee, we are reminded of the humanity of every individual (and how societies lose sight of this) and we are inspired — even shamed — to see the cheerful perseverance of a child amidst far worse circumstances than ours.

In Stefan Zweig’s biography of Montaigne we get the unique perspective of a man turning away from the chaos of the world to examine the life of a man who turned inward, away from the chaos of the world some 400 years earlier.

Although it is not easy to come up with these examples, as a writer, it is our job to research before sitting down and writing the article. Many writers have swipe files where they collect information that interest them. This way, they have already done their research before they sit down to write.

There you go, you now have three basic ingredients the readers want in an article. 

Combine all three and you will have a winning recipe.

Writing is like cooking. We have a lot of ingredients to work with. But with time we learn that each recipe has basic ingredients (without which the recipe can’t work) and the secondary ingredients (nice for variation, to change the flavor, taste, texture, etc.). Just like a cake recipe can’t work without eggs, butter, and self-rising flour, an article doesn’t work without stories, information, and examples.

It might sound hard initially but with practice, it becomes second nature just like baking a cake.

Remember when you first time baked a cake, how long it took you and how much mess you made. And it still fell flat in the middle. But with the time you got better. 

Dabble. Play around with the ingredients. Repeat the process.

Every writer on the planet has learned it this way. J K Rowling, Stephen King, Elizabeth Gilbert, or any good writer were not born with writing genes. They learned with constant practice.

Keep in mind, talent is nothing more than reducing the errors and eventually eliminating them. 

Many writers are already doing it. Read the work of your favorite writers and learn from them.

Kurt Vonnegut was a great American storyteller and teacher. Known for his satirical style of writing, he was one of the most famous writers of the 1960s.

His career spanned over 50 years, in which he published fourteen novels, three short story collections, five plays, and five works of nonfiction, with further collections being published after his death. He is most known of his novels Slaughterhouse-Five, Cat’s Cradle, and Breakfast of Champions.

In 1980, he wrote the article “How to Write with Style,” which was published in the Times. In that article, he made seven suggestions on the literary style which every new writer should frame and put on her desk.

Here they are in a nutshell:

1. Find a subject to care about

Kurt said, “Find a subject you care about and which you in your heart feel others should care about too. It is this genuine caring, and not your games with language, which will be the most compelling and seductive element in your style.”

He couldn’t be more right. Your writing shines when you write about something you care about; whether it is a novel or a love letter to the girl next door or a petition to the mayor about a pothole in front of your house.

One of Vonnegut’s favorite pieces of writing was an open letter his daughter Nanette wrote to a stranger who was so mad at the service he received from a waitress that he complained to the management, in writing. In her letter, Nanette made a plea to be kind and humane to young wait staff and don’t break their spirit if they happen to found it difficult to juggle correct balance and timing.

2. Do Not Rumble.

And he said he would not ramble about it.

3. Keep it simple.

There is a belief that the writing that is convoluted and sprinkled with big words is somehow elevated and more intelligent. Kurt Vonnegut wrote in simple words.

As for your use of language: Remember that two great masters of language, William Shakespeare and James Joyce, wrote sentences which were almost childlike when their subjects were most profound. “To be or not to be?” asks Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The longest word is three letters long. Joyce, when he was frisky, could put together a sentence as intricate and as glittering as a necklace for Cleopatra, but my favorite sentence in his short story “Eveline” is this one: “She was tired.” At that point in the story, no other words could break the heart of a reader as those three words do.

Vonnegut continues,

The simplicity of the language is not only reputable but perhaps even sacred. The Bible opens with a sentence well within the writing skills of a lively fourteen-year-old: “In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth.

4. Have the guts to cut

It takes guts to cut the words you have spent hours writing and polishing. Yet you have to develop the courage to be able to do just that.

But the problem is more significant than having the courage to cut.

It is “not knowing” what to cut, and Vonnegut knew that. He wrote, “The most damning revelation you can make about yourself is that you do not know what is interesting and what is not.”

He goes on to say:

It may be that you, too, are capable of making necklaces for Cleopatra, so to speak. But your eloquence should be the servant to the ideas in your head. Your rule might be this: If a sentence, no matter how excellent, doesn’t illuminate your subject in some new and useful way, scratch it out.

He never talked about separating the process of writing and editing because perhaps he never wrote like that. In an interview, when asked about his method of composition, he responded:

There are swoopers and there are the bashers, and I happen to be one of the bashers. That is, you beat your head against a wall until you break through to page two and you break through to page three and so forth…But the swooper’s way, you know — and I envy them too because it must be exhilarating — is to write the book any which way and in a month maybe, whack it out, and then go through it again and again and again and again. I’ve never been able to do that.

5. Sound like yourself

When writing, most of us make an extra effort not to write the way we speak. Yet this is exactly like we need to do.

Many writers waste too much time finding their voice, without knowing they already have it. It is the voice in which they speak every single day. Even if English is your second language, you should write what is your natural way.

The writing style which is most natural for you is bound to echo the speech you heard when a child. English was the novelist Joseph Conrad’s third language, and much that seems piquant in his use of English was no doubt colored by his first language, which was Polish. And lucky indeed is the writer who has grown up in Ireland, for the English spoken there is so amusing and musical. I myself grew up in Indianapolis, where common speech sounds like a band saw cutting galvanized tin, and employs a vocabulary as unornamental as a monkey wrench.

All varieties of speech are beautiful, just as the varies for butterflies are beautiful. No matter what your first language, you should treasure it all your life. If it happens to not be standard English, and if it shows itself when you write standard English, the result is usually delightful, like a very pretty girl with one eye that is green and one that is blue.

6. Say what you mean to say.

Have you ever started writing something and found that it went in a completely different direction. Many modern writers writing to SEO guidelines find themselves in this conundrum.

The primary goal of good writing is to say precisely what the author meant to say.

My teacher wished me to write accurately, always selecting the most effective words, and relating the words to one another unambiguously, rigidly, like the parts fo the machine. The teachers did not want to turn me into an Englishman after all. They hoped that I would become understandable — and therefore understood…If I broke all the rules of punctuation, had words mean whatever I wanted them to mean, and strung them together higgledy-pigggledy, I would simply not be understood.

If you have something worth saying, you too should avoid Picasso-style or jazz-style writing and write to be understood.

7. Pity the readers.

Vonnegut was acutely aware of the skill required if the readers to decipher and understand the written word.

Readers have to identify thousands of little marks on paper and make sense of them immediately. They have to read, an art so difficult that most people don’t really master it even after having studied it all through grade school and high-school — twelve long years.

He wanted writers to sympathize with their readers. To be patient with them. To be ever willing to simplify and clarify.

It was this advice of his that impacted me the most.

We writers are so focused on ourselves that we forget the readers.

Yet surprisingly, most writers are the readers too.

As readers, we consume a lot of information in a day. We spend a lot of mental energy to select what we want to pursue and what we want to discard.

If your writing is convoluted, difficult to read, has lots of rambling, the reader will discard it.

I started this column to help writers write from the reader’s point of view.

You will find a new article here every fortnight.

Leave me a note if you want me to write on anything particular.

Photo by Houcine Ncib on Unsplash

Did you know that until the early forties, there was no consistent sway system to grade diamonds? Diamond merchants used various, usually broad, terms to talk about the quality of a diamond. They used words like river or water to describe colorlessness. The term Cape was used to describe pale yellow diamonds from South Africa’s Cape of Good Hope region. “Without flaws” or “imperfect” were used to describe the clarity. And very subjective terms such as “Well-made” or “made poorly,” were used to describe the cut of a diamond.

As a result, it was challenging for jewelers to communicate the quality and hence the value of the diamond to their customers.

Then in the early 1940s, Robert M Shipley, a former retail jeweler, came up with a system to consistently rate a diamond. He called it the four Cs of diamonds – Colour, Clarity, Cut, and Carat.

The concept was simple but revolutionary. Four Cs became the universal markers to determine the quality of the diamonds.

Writing too need markers to determine its quality.

After long deliberation and reading what prolific and established writers have been saying about writing, I figured out that writing has four Cs that can determine its quality.

What are the four Cs of writing.

1. Good writing is clear
2. Good writing is clean
3. Good writing is concise.
4. Good writing is compelling.

Clarity is the first goal of writing.

Clarity is about you, the writer. You need to be clear about what you want to say. If you are not clear about what you want to communicate, you will not be able to write clearly.

Clarity is also about the audience. Every piece of writing, whether it is an article or a story, is for a particular audience. As a writer, you need to know who you are writing for. What does your audience want to know? And how can you explain that so that the information is understood effortlessly?

Know your subject well and write it as if you are describing it to someone you know. Articles written with one person in mind always read well explain more clearly than the articles written for a generic audience.

Use examples, metaphors and stories to illustrate your point.

Don’t make assumptions. Research, and research well.

Write what you know and write with authority.

Cleanliness is a virtue, even in writing.

When you are communicating verbally, you have the luxury to use broken sentences and body language. You can speak in a roundabout way and still be understood. But when you are writing, the only tool you have at your disposal is the “well-constructed sentences.” You need to learn to use them well.

Write good sentences.

Write easy-to-understand sentences.

Write grammatically correct sentences.

Being concise is being a good writer.

Good writing is concise.

Make your writing tight. Tightness comes through editing. Learn to edit your work. Edit your draft several times.

Editing is done at three levels – words, sentences, and paragraphs.

Go over your article word by word. Chose the right words. Make every word count. Cut superfluous words.

Sentences should be crisp and correct. Use sound and rhythm to make them sing. Learn to use literary devices to make them effective.

Paragraphs are the building blocks of communication. Make sure that each paragraph contains just one idea or a point. Wordy paragraphs are confusing and ineffective. Cut repetitive words and sentences. Cut redundant paragraphs too.

If you’re unsure whether to cut something or not, cut it and see if your argument still works.

Use the 50% rule: Once you have the first draft, cut 20 percent in the first edit, then another 20% in the second audit, and finally 10% in the third audit.

You are writing to make a point, make it compelling.

Good writing presents an argument . With your writing, you are either trying to influence, prove, or share your point of view. Make sure your argument is compelling.

At the beginning of every article, you are making a promise to your readers. You need to make sure you deliver on that.

It helps to state that promise at the beginning before you commence writing. You may or may not use it in the article but having it written stops going off the tangent. It could be as simple as:

In this piece, I will _______________ so that the reader can _______________ .

You should write down the promise statement for every article, every blog post, every book chapter, virtually every piece of writing you create.

There only two ways to make an argument – influence or enable. You can’t do both at once . If you try to do both, you will confuse your readers. If you are influencing, you are writing a “why” article. If you are enabling, you are writing a “how” article. You shouldn’t mix the two.

Many writers tend to jam pack all they know in one article. That is a big mistake. You’re done when you’ve made your argument.

I have covered a lot. Let me summarize.

Like diamonds, the quality of writing can be determined by four Cs – clear, clean, concise, and compelling.

Good writing is when the writer is able to convey her message clearly.

Good writing is clean, easy to read, and grammatically correct.

Good writing is concise and it is achieved by several edits.

Good writing presents a compelling argument.

Just like a quality diamond, good writing creates a sense of awe in the eyes of every reader.

And just like good diamonds, good writing takes a long time and a lot of pressure to materialize.

Concentrate on the four Cs – clear, clean, concise, and compelling – and you will be able to make your writing worth cherishing.

I recently came across a writing exercise that I found very benefiting.

Chris Fox talks about it in his book “5000 Words Per Hour.” He calls it writing sprints.

A writing sprint is a pre-defined length of time when you do nothing but write. It has a start-time and an end-time. And while you are writing you will do nothing else but write. No answering the phone, no research on the web, no checking the mail. Not even going to the bathroom. All those things need to happen before you sit down to start the sprint.

Once the sprint has started your fingers should fly across the keyboard. You can’t stop until the time is over. You do not go back and edit or even correct the spelling. You keep going until the buzzer goes off.

The goal of the sprint is to get into the flow state where brain naturally starts focusing on writing and exclude everything else. It is like silencing the left brain (the logical brain) and letting the right brain to take over. For most people, these sudden bursts of flow are unpredictable and elusive.

Writing sprint help get into a flow state on command.

It allows cranking more words than we think is possible.

The way to get started on writing sprint is with micro-sprints. Just five minutes.

Just focus on writing a small article. Or one scene.

It is like training for a marathon but starting running for just five minutes.

Five minutes is the most important. You are not going to stop writing before the five minutes are over. You are not going to correct spelling mistakes or grammatical errors. You are just going to type out the small article or the scene for five minutes.

Why?

Because the goal is quantity, not quality. You need to train yourself to generate a massive volume to test without editing it. You start with five minutes and then build it up to half an hour to forty-five minutes.

There are several advantages of this exercise.

1. You learn to complete projects. A vast majority of writers don’t even finish a short story, let alone a novel or a book. Writing sprint propels you to the end of your project.
2. You start seeing the common problems with your writing over and over again. You start correcting them mentally and your future drafts start getting better.
3. You learn to structure your article or scene on the fly. Rather than starting clueless you give your piece a beginning, middle and end.

I wrote this article using this technique. Wrote it in five minutes and then spent another ten to correct the spelling mistakes and other errors. Not bad outcome for fifteen minutes.

Photo by Greg Rosenke on Unsplash