Do You Want to Be a Good Writer? Don’t Focus On Writing
Do You Want to Be a Good Writer? Don’t Focus On Writing
I wish somebody had
told me this years ago.
A few months ago, I listened to an interview with New York Times bestselling author Ryan Holiday. The host posed a straightforward inquiry about his creative process midway through. “What does a typical day look like?”
Writing wasn’t the
first thing Ryan talked about... despite all of his success. Instead, Ryan spent the majority of his
response talking about reading and how he got ideas from business, philosophy,
history, and whatever else caught his attention. To be honest, the actual
writing process was barely mentioned. Spend enough time online, and the internet
usually has a different narrative. There
are a lot of articles on how many words to write, when to be most productive,
and reliable methods for keeping track of every hour spent typing. So, after
listening to Ryan Holiday’s interview, I started looking at the routines of
writers whose work I actually admired.
A surprising number of successful authors and poets spend time doing things that don’t look like
writing at all. They read widely, learn
new subjects, pay attention to people, follow unusual interests, and gather
experiences that later become material.
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