Writing Handbook: How to practice writing

Key learnings from this guide

This is the last page of a guide to Writing Well.

All of these takeaways, and more, are recapped in a cheatsheet at the bottom of this page.

For aspiring writers: Your ultimate goal isn't building a writing habit. It's falling so in love with interesting ideas that you can’t help but tell the world about them. Writing is the medium—not the objective.
Don't wait for an idea to be fully formed before writing. You write in order to think through the idea. The act of writing compels your brain to connect the dots.
Avoid guessing what readers want. Instead, be a proxy: Selfishly entertain and surprise yourself, and you'll entertain and surprise many of them too.
Your writing is succinct once everything unimportant is removed.
Your writing is intriguing once the average reader effortlessly makes it to the end. A hook, peak, and satisfying ending are your trifecta of intrigue.
Rewriting your thoughts to be clear, succinct, and intriguing is a lot of work. You won't love writing until you find a way to love rewriting. Make a game out of it by seeing how concise you can make it without losing its resonance and complexity. And see how page-turning you can make it—do readers consistently get to the end?
There is no right way to write—just like there’s no right way to paint. In this handbook, I present frameworks that reliably work for me. Ultimately, you can break every single rule if your writing is still useful or interesting.

When writing, consider listening to atmospheric music. It may help reduce your susceptibility to distraction: a steady beat without vocals helps put you in a trance. Here's my Spotify playlist.

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Overcoming writing blockers

I became a writer when two things were true:

I had strong opinions to express and nagging questions to answer.
I could build the discipline to fully reason through my ideas.

And I'm ready to write a given post once I've reached two thresholds:

I can't shake the idea. It won't stop nagging me.
I've uncovered at least one novel insight about it. (I'll unravel more through the process of writing and rewriting.)

Even if you reach these thresholds, sometimes you'll encounter existential blockers. Let's tackle them.

1. Blocker: Lacking good ideas

Four shortcuts for sourcing topics to write about:

Trigger ideas that bug you — Your most empassioned opinions often make for the best writing. To trigger opinions, you can consume other people's views (via Twitter, news, and conversations) and note when you strongly disagree. Then crack open a laptop and argue your counter-position. Assuming, that is, you have a position of logic, evidence and merit—and aren't just ranting.
Capture real stories you tell — Readers love being privy to authentic stories from a writer's life. Write down a vulnerable story you'd tell a close friend. Intersperse cliffhangers throughout.
Be a diligent note-taker — Save every idea you come across that's interesting or surprising. After a few months, you'll have a backlog of intriguing ideas to mold into something worthwhile. This is how I write.
Explain concepts to others — Put yourself in a position to synthesize your life experience for others. Teach. Mentor colleagues or call friends to explain the ideas you're working through. While explaining, pay attention to how you explain key concepts: occasionally, you'll articulate the essence of a concept beautifully—and that articulation will make for a great piece of writing.

2. Blocker: Concerned no one will read

Write in order to make sense of your mind and the world around you. Accept that most of writing's value comes from helping you clarify your own logic. The resulting clarity makes you a wiser speaker and decision-maker.

When clarity is your goal, having an audience matters less. For a writer to have a long career, I find it's critical to approach writing this way.

Fortunately, getting to the bottom of the ideas you passionately care about is also how you grow a loyal audience. Thanks to the algorithmic nature of Twitter, YouTube, and SEO, truly great and authentic content eventually surfaces over time.

If you're looking to learn about content distribution, here's my guide.

3. Blocker: Fear of being judged

Some writers fear their writing opens them up to attack: they worry that if a reader finds fault in their writing, they are finding personal fault in the writer.

If you're frozen by the fear of judgment, you can hedge against it:

Add a disclaimer to your writing: "I'm sharing early thoughts. I encourage readers to share their own experiences to help refine my thinking."
Instead of sharing original ideas, curate those of others'. Many newsletters, blogs, and Twitter accounts exclusively curate third-party content. Over time, you can weave your original thoughts alongside the curated ones. Continually increase the portion that's original until you're comfortable being a dominant voice at the forefront.

Candidly, an unspoken ingredient to writing success is having a bit of shamelessness about getting things wrong in public. Too much shamelessness means you're a charlatan. But too little means you'll never publish.

No writer is always right. Hedge accordingly, remain humble, and accept it.

4. Blocker: Procrastination

If you procrastinate occasionally, that’s normal—forgive yourself. However, if you procrastinate endlessly, that’s a problem.

Overcoming short-term procrastination

Procrastination is the result of two reflexes:

Indulging in immediate rewards like browsing YouTube instead of writing.
Avoiding work you perceive to be uncomfortable or tedious.

Let's tackle these two blockers.

1. Avoid distractions

Have you noticed how much writing we can get done on airplanes—despite having our knees and shoulders uncomfortably squeezed together for hours? Why is that?

It's because there's nothing else to do on an airplane.

This reveals a contrarian truth about writing: needing a comfy chair, room, or "the right ambience" is often an excuse you're giving yourself.

Your blocker may not be comfort, but rather distractions. Two potential strategies:

Listen to flow-inducing music — I listen to atmospheric music with a steady beat and without vocals. Here’s my Spotify playlist that works wonders. It reduces the occurrence of errant thoughts popping into my head. Errant thoughts are what lead to time-wasting YouTube searches.
Remove the Internet — Disconnect from WiFi and leave your phone in another room. For most people, this isn't optional.

2. Speed past tedium

One trick for getting yourself to write is to only write sections that immediately interest you. Perhaps it's the middle of a post—that's okay. You don't have to write in order.

Sit down and write any three paragraphs you can. And do it fast. You'll find that by forcing yourself to start with speed, momentum carries you forward.

If this doesn't work for you—and you find yourself procrastinating for months—you may have a deeper underlying problem. A common one is choosing a topic you’re not sufficiently passionate about.

Blockers recap

Focus on the ideas you can't get out of your head.
When struck by inspiration, sit down and speed through a few paragraphs.
Don't worry about whether people read your work. Writing is first and foremost a process for clarifying your own thinking. Readership is a bonus.

Practicing writing

Writing a high volume of posts is important for building a writing habit and generating new ideas, but volume itself is not the goal. Getting better as a writer is the goal. This requires deliberate practice and feedback.

For example, turn writing into a game:

How young of a reader can I successfully convey my nuanced argument to?
How many unnecessary words can I delete?
How much of a page-turner can I make this?
How much higher can I push my feedback score out of 10?
How beautiful can I make my prose?

Feedback from friends is how you validate you're making progress. In writing, feedback is inseparable from practice.

Dissect good writing

To learn what a job well done looks like, dissect your favorite posts: highlight the best and worst parts of each and identify what makes them so.

I find that writers who post frequently (say, twice weekly) are rarely worth reading consistently. I read for insights. And no writer can generate profound insights on a fixed schedule. I aggregate writers who publish sporadically. When they post, they truly have something to say.

This doesn't mean you shouldn't write a lot. You should get your practice in. I'm just telling you how I personally seek content.

Writers I like

The past few years have shown that the Shakespeares, Twains, and Austens of the future won't emerge from the book publishing industry. They’ll come from YouTube, podcasts, and blogs.

Here are some contenders whose writing I like:

The difference between good writers and bad writers is good writers know when their writing is bad.
—Dan Brown

Example of dissection+

First, read the post below in its entirety. Then, re-read it while referencing my commentary underneath.

My dissection

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Starts with an insight and zero preamble. This is a decision to be hyper-succinct. He's signaling: "I will not waste your time here."

He signals that his objective is to challenge a widely held belief. This draws us in—a claim that our intuition of the world is wrong. Hmm, tell me more.
He's writing in a conversational style to improve flow and help his voice shine through:

A. "How to explain" is awkward phrasing—it would normally be "How do we explain?" But he's choosing to write like he speaks.
B. "Well" is filler that would normally be cut, but he includes it to echo the call-and-response rapport you'd have in conversation.
C. "Kind of" is the conversational way of saying "somewhat."

Neither of these two sentences are necessary to make his point, but they build stakes and anticipation for the punchline—so that you better appreciate it once it comes. He's telling you a story, and no good story skips a good setup.

This is the punchline: our belief that physics is the only rational choice had no good reason to be believed in Newton's time. Lesson learned: We must assess past views and accomplishments in the lens of their time. We are not our past selves.

Ends with a poignant takeaway that prompts readers to reflect.
Uses staccato sentences to add emphasis and compel readers to slow down.
"Risky" is both the last word in the body and the first word in the title. It's the point of the post: the biggest breakthroughs require taking the biggest risks.
He chooses not to explore the implications of risk. His post is focused: he succinctly makes a novel point then lets readers work through its implications.

Now, were all these choices deliberate by Paul, and do they reflect his true intentions?

I don't know or need to know. I think about it like this: Find what you love about great writing then deconstruct them, take notes, and experiment yourself.

Ultimately, keep rewriting until your writing is clear, succinct, and compelling.

Writing is clear once your ideas are self-evident.

Writing is succinct once everything low-value is removed.

Writing is compelling once the reader effortlessly makes it to the end.

The wonder of writing

What an astonishing thing a book is. It’s a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you’re inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you.
—Carl Sagan

Cheatsheet

Below is the cheat sheet for this entire handbook.

If you enter your email below, the cheat sheet is emailed to you so you can easily reference it in your inbox. I will not send you any other emails. Don't worry!

Check your inbox and respond to the email with "Yes." If you don't get an email, tell me on Twitter: @Julian

Writing process

Choose a topic
Write your intro, and use it to brainstorm talking points
Get feedback on your intro
Create a starting outline
Explore talking points within your outline
Rewrite for clarity, succinctness, and intrigue
Cycle between rewriting, resting, and receiving feedback
Copy edit for grammar, word choice, and flow

Objectives

Open people’s eyes by proving the status quo wrong.
Articulate something everyone’s thinking about but no one is saying. Cut through the noise.
Identify key trends on a topic. Use them to predict the future.
Contribute original insights to a field through your research and experimentation.
Distill an overwhelming topic into something approachable.
Share a solution to a tough problem.
Tell a suspenseful and emotional story that imparts a lesson.

Motivations

Does writing this article get a weight off your chest?
Does it help you reason through a nagging, unsolved problem of yours?
Does it persuade others to do something you believe is critically important?
Do you obsess over the topic and want others to geek out on it too?

Introductions

Start your brainstorming process by prematurely writing your intro. In discovering how to make your intro interesting to you, you'll also discover how to interest and hook readers.
Hooks are half-told stories. Tease something fascinating, but don’t fully reveal the details.
How to generate hooks: (1) Ask yourself, “If someone else wrote my intro, what are the most captivating questions they could pose to make me excited to read this?” (2) Write those questions down. Even if you lack the answers. (3) Rank your questions by how much they interest you. (4) The top questions become your hooks: Pose them in your intro and don't reveal their answers.
Ask others for feedback after you've written your intro. Sanity check your hooks.
If feedback-givers have skepticisms, proactively address them in your intro. And if they have other questions they care about, swap them in if they captivate you too.
Browse the list of skepticisms and their solutions here.

First draft steps

Choose an objective for your post.
Write a messy braindump of your ideas.
Transfer your best talking points to an outline. Use supporting points and resulting points: what is needed to make your argument, and what are the implications of your argument being true?
Write your first draft using that outline.

First draft writing process

Your talking points come from hooks, experience, research, experiments, brainstorming, and mental models.
When ideas stop flowing, ask yourself: How can I make my point more convincing? What are the interesting implications of what I just said?
Be self-indulgent. You are a proxy for your reader. What interests and surprises you will interest and surprise them.
To generate surprise, use Graham’s Method: First, learn all the basics on a topic. Then, if you can find new information that surprises even your knowledgeable self, it’ll surprise laypeople too.
Outros should frame why your article was worth reading. Share a poignant takeaway that summarizes the article's wisdom, and tell readers where they can go to continue the journey they started with you.

Clarity

If you imagine you're writing for an audience of thirteen-year-olds, you'll think and write more clearly.
Use simple wording and focus on one idea per sentence. Remove grammatical overhead.
Provide examples and counterexamples when simplified language isn’t enough to achieve clarity.

Succinctness

Rewrite sections from memory. Focus on the key points and let the fluff fall away.
Then remove unnecessary words from each paragraph.
Then rephrase paragraphs to be as succinct as possible.

Intrigue

The trifecta of intrigue: 1. A captivating intro. 2. A section of intense surprise or insight. 3. An ending that satisfyingly justifies why the piece was worth reading.
Ask feedback-givers to highlight every sentence that gives them a dopamine hit — the little moments of "that was interesting." For each hit, increase a counter at the end of the corresponding sentence. Like this (3). If there are sections without dopamine hits, make those sections shorter or inject more insight and surprise into them.

Feedback

Ask readers to score your writing from 1 to 10. Aim for 7.5+.
Use your future self as a source of feedback. Take breaks to defamiliarize yourself.

Style

An authentic voice resonates best with readers: your way of speaking, interests, and perspectives on the world are a breath of fresh air.
Shed the style you’ve absorbed from others. Write nonfiction the way you sound.
Optionally incorporate multimedia, anecdotes, analogies, and humor to reinforce your points and to entertain.

Copyediting

Optionally learn to punctuate with my companion post.
Use paragraphs of five sentences or fewer. This cushions paragraphs with white space, reducing the perceived reading workload. Short paragraphs also provide readers more opportunities to pause and reflect on your ideas.
Use verbs that embed the meaning of their adverbs. For example, “She spoke loudly” could be “She shouted.”
Only use adjectives and adverbs if they add important details.

Practice

Practice by writing persuasive essays. This helps you focus on improving (A) the quality of your thinking and (B) your eye for rewriting. Try writing posts that persuade your friends to change their minds.
Ask them to score how much your writing sustained their interest.

Practicing Writing