Category Archives for Writing
Your Un-Ideal Routine: Getting Your Writing Done When Your Perfect Writing Routine is Impossible
Once again, you’ve planned out your perfect writing routine. Maybe it’s a detailed spreadsheet, a list of writing appointments on your Google Calendar, or maybe you kept it old-school with a paper planner and colored boxes.
Once again, you’re excited to get started. Surely, this time, you’re going to hit your self-imposed novel deadline or finally write consistently for your blog.
But, once again, your routine falls apart.
Maybe you didn’t even get past day one. Even the thought of rescheduling your writing into your week makes you feel disheartened—because there’s no way you can fit in as much writing as you want and no way you can write at your best time of day.
All the advice in the world on constructing your perfect writing routine can fall flat when your life is packed full of other commitments, and prioritizing your writing feels like an impossible task. Before learning to use your un-ideal routine as a strength, you must first learn to let go of the ideal, as I’ll show you in this post.
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How To Write for Your Target Readers: 4 Important Steps for Success
So you want to write for an engaged audience, gain new followers, and meet your writing goals, but you’re unsure how to go about it?
Fear not because you are now in the right place.
Whether you are a fiction or nonfiction author, whether you write blog posts, video scripts, emails, case studies—or anything else really—writing for your target readers makes a lot of sense no matter how small they may be in size or number.
New writers or those just starting their writing business or career sometimes make the mistake of trying to write for everybody. This is often because they want to write for a large number of people—all while becoming a successful writer or author overnight.
Unfortunately, writing for everyone doesn’t work because the content produced usually ends up being too generic to appeal to an appreciable number of people or attract and engage any specific group.
But, when you make it a habit to write for your target readers, you can:
- Develop a strong connection with them
- Attract more readers, followers, and subscribers
- Convert readers to customers
- Achieve your writing goals faster
Now, let’s look at four steps that can help you write for your target audience, no matter your niche, your genre, or the kind of content you are creating.
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Hip Hop Hooray: Ramp Up Your Writing with Rap
Many of us tune into a specific playlist when we write. This soundtrack helps the mind weave words into meaningful clusters of thought. For some writers, it’s a classical selection of Mozart, Beethoven, or Bach. Others lean into soothing lo-fi and jazz.
Me? I blasted J. Cole on my headphones as I wrote my master’s thesis.
Hip-hop has been in my ear since the sixth grade, back when Nelly was topping the charts and Baby Keem was a toddler. I blame Eminem for starting it all: “Lose Yourself” was a morning routine along with breakfast and academic lethargy. When I got to college, I had T.I. telling me to live my life and Drake hooking me on “Forever.” (My high school hip hop presence was John Cena. Don’t ask.)
Now, I’m a grizzled professional still listening to rhymes and beats. After all these years as an ardent rap fan, I realize that this genre is not just background music to me. Far from being banal Spotify stimuli, the art of rap directly influences another one of my passions: writing.
So now, I’m putting together a mixtape of advice for my fellow writers. In this piece, I’ll be breaking down how rap music can revitalize your writing. Whether your affinity for rap is limited to Ludacris’ verse on “Baby,” or you’re a true aficionado waiting for Dr. Dre to drop “Detox,” you can find rhyme and reason in these writing tips. At their core, rappers are writers themselves, so we can learn a thing or two about what they do, ya dig?
So now … like the late, great Big L, let me put it on.
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22 Ways You Can Be a Better Writer in 2022
You’ve probably heard someone somewhere claim that writing is a muscle; if you don’t exercise it, it’ll shrivel up and atrophy. But that’s not entirely true. Writing isn’t a single muscle. It’s more like a muscular system, made up of a great many parts, each of which need their own kind of exercise.
That’s why—just like athletes—we reach plateaus in our writing journey. Sometimes pushing past that plateau means changing our strategy a bit. Other times we need to try something completely new.
In this post, you’ll find 22 tips that’ll help guide you towards becoming a better writer. They cover reading, building better writing habits, and improving the technical aspects of your writing.
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