Giving Advice Seems To Be Easier Than Taking It.

I have no knowledge of where you are in your writing journey. Perhaps you read lots of craft books, or maybe you’ve done a course or two. You might like the monthly writing magazines that appear in your local newsagent. The internet is also a vast source of writing information, some good, some not so good.

Then you also probably find that you do a small amount of writing. And everything is wrong. You’ve overloaded with too much info and lots of it is conflicting. But there is one sure fired way to get better at writing and that’s to find a model of writing you want to emulate because it’s good and then write like that and compare what you write to your model. Write, compare, and repeat. Do this often enough you will become better. It’s like learning anything. Want to play the guitar then practice appropriately and often with a good model and correct, and repeat.

Anders Ericsson & Robert Pool in their book PEAK Secrets from The New Science of Expertise on page 155 They outline how, without a teacher, Benjamin Franklin studied and emulated what he considered good writing by practicing and comparing his own work with his selected model from The Spectator magazine of his day.

So if you need a slogan, as we say in Scotland, then here it is:

Writers write!