Reading this article by Duncan Riach entitled
How to Become World-Class at Anything made me think about my journey to becoming a paid, professional writer
.
My path to writing for a living took twists and turns. In the article he talks about regular practice without focusing on the result (in my case I don't focus on the result until it's time to share the work with my clients).
Years of this type of practice freed me up to write better.
I've been writing professionally for 5 years. At the beginning, I was a solid writer who could do research, assimilate ideas and construct sentences without errors. I created coherent articles. Yay for me!
Yet if I compare my writing from 5 years ago to my writing now, there's a significant difference. I've refined my process, found a style and discovered a voice all while improving my mechanics.
One of the best resources, which I've featured here a few times, is
Elements if Style. The book contains immensely helpful advice like
Omit Unneccesary Words and
Focus on the Unit.
More than any advice, method or how-to, my improvement as a writer largely came the old-fashioned way - through practice, repetition and hard work. I've spent many many hours stringing together words. I've spent many more hours reading books with a critical eye towards things like sentence structure, phrasing, word choice, punctuation and many more things.
I love writing, but love isn't enough. Like any relationship, I want my partner, in this case my writing, to be as great as it can possibly be. That's why I continue to practice and consider my writing skills a work in progress.
