Now I suddenly have two jobs! I work at Whataburger in the mornings, Wed, and Fri and on Sat. and at the Jason Little Road Animal Clinic in the evenings Mon-Fri. I feel I am precariously perched on both jobs and on tenuous ground.
I do bring some value to the jobs, but on the other side of the world, I sometimes feel like I'm practically useless at the people aspect of things.
So I'm going to start writing. This is a start right here. I want to write, but not for myself, but for others. They are going to get the satisfaction that I get writing about myself. Really the truth is, I'm a horrible writer. When I write for other people I tend to copy other people verbatium. Mama Melania would be proud. How do I get from A to B, though. When I research, I really really suck at writing and try to reword exactly what they said with different words and sentence forms. That's what I remember about my brief stint as a copy writer.
They say fake it til you make it, but how do you comfortably move from writing I did, I said, I am, to another topic? Knowing that the topic is one I know little to nothing about, doesn't reassure me in the least. I am very afraid. Most niche writers, don't come from writing school, but from the niche itself. So to say you are purely a writer and don't just have a career and also write about it is a frightening prospect indeed. It's like weighing anchor and then throwing that same anchor overboard.
Similies aside, a lot of people believe in practice. A lot of people believe in spurts of inspiration. There's three types of writers. Practice writers and spurt writers. I know, I know I said that there are three types. Well, there's a middle ground. People can be practice writers, but they lose steam after a couple of pages and have to call it day and come back to write the next day. There are spurt writers whos spurts last years, which is encroaching into practice writing. So that's the middle ground, third group of writers.
Today, I'm talking about the first two, practice writers and spurt writers. Practice writers are those who work everyday and write everyday, regardless of the quality and the interest of the work. Spurt writers, on the other hand, write only when inspiration strikes, and they usually end up with the highest quality or lowest quality work. (I'm thinking lowest quality happens if they writer takes drugs and then uses that as inspiration.) They write in a passion, quickly as if they are about to breathe their last breath.
So what am I? I'm pretty sure the late nights at the keyboard in high school, and the long gaps between my blog postings would label me a spurt writer. Now all of this types of writers is distraction against the real problem of how do you move from a journaler and blogger to a person who writes for and about other people? No matter how you write, this is going to come up, because people write what they know and if they aren't experts why are we reading their work? And most everyone by age thirty is an expert at their adult self. How do we write about things we don't know?
We (and I) have to develop the talent of becoming deeply knowledgeable in a topic we know little about in a small amount of time.
Here's what I learned from a few internet searches.
1. Find the expert and interview them. Things will be more interesting and engaging than reading information on the internet and you will remember the information more. They know everything about the topic. Let them be the guide.
2. Filter. Don't let the unimportant information bog you down in your search for the most important, interesting, and relevant information. Learn to scan. Learn to identify poor resources. How do I do this? Through practice. I thought I was just surfing the internet for fun in the '00's but really I was learning to discern what was click bait and what was real fish. If you want to become an expert quickly, you have to weed out what's unimportant and irrelevant.
3. Where you write matters. Where you learn matters. You recall things better if you are learning them in a similar context. This is one place where I take the middle of the road and we come up against a spurt/practice writer dichotomy. You may like to take your computer to a different side of town to write. However you may like to go to the same coffee shop. It's really just your ability to recreate context in a given place. Practice remembering what you had for breakfast. Recall helps not only Philip K. Dick write a book that is turned into a movie starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, it helps you recall your experiences and knowledge base to help you, as an instant expert, to remember the details I learned last week to write the article this week.
4. Active learning. Write as you learn. Write notes. Write funny and insightful notes. Write notes that are detailed and inspiring. Write notes that interest you. If there's anyway to experience the topic other than reading about it, do so. You'll not only become a better writer, you'll become a better person.
5. There's this thing called grit that people have been trying to popularize lately. To me, grit is the number of times people have said no to you and you have recognized it. You have to be careful, because if you personalize grit, you will end up personalizing your writing. I definitely know this mistake. Impersonalizing your writing, is the other end of the stick, with none of your grit being personal, just about other people in a castle in the sky, not about anyone or anything in particular just a bunch of random prepositions and pronouns that don't mean anything to anyone. You see what I mean? So instead of completely internalizing or externalizing something that strikes us the wrong way in our research, we need to analyze it. You know that thing your English teacher in high school made you do to poetry?
6. Spend 1/3 of your time researching, then 1/3 organizing your notes and then 1/3 writing. You simply can't memorize large amounts of information about a topic. So use your filtering skills to research, your organizational skills to arrange and your writing skills to write. Don't try to memorize everything on the subject. Just take what you have and arrange it in a different way. In a way that you know your reader will understand.
7. Don't forget to reward yourself. Take a nap. Writing is hard work.
I got most all of this information from a TIME article titled "How to Become an Expert at Anything, According to the Experts."
Becoming an expert at a topic you know little about will help you write to others and for others.
Next week, To write to your reader or your client?
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