There Are Only Two Ways to Become a Better Writer

All the rest is “content creation,” and no, they are not the same

Photo by Jeremy Zero on Unsplash

If you’re at all like me, you’ve probably grown tired of writing advice from people who are not writers, or at least not really.

Oh, I mean, sure, they write stuff down.

Captions on Instagram also amount to “writing stuff down.” So does pounding out 280-character tweets (I do this one a lot).

Also, scribbling grocery lists on Post-it-Notes.

But none of those are writing, and when we do them, we are not being writers. That would remain true, by the way, even if we self-published our Post-it-Notes, put the collection on Amazon as an e-book, and managed to convince enough people to purchase it to make us a lot of money.

Or offered an online course to help others learn how to publish their Post-it-Notes to Amazon and make a lot of money. Which someone would totally do, although that person would damned sure not be a writer, whatever else they might be.

When it comes to those who promise to provide you the secret to great writing, most of their advice isn’t about writing at all.

When someone tells you the key to better writing is making headlines no more than seven words (and not…