9 Tips That Will Make You Sit In The Chair and Write Better

Good teachers share lessons in their purest form but make all attempts to make the tips relatable and more importantly — actionable. Joshua Fields — one half of The Minimalists team is one such.

The Minimalists pick wide range of topics and look at them through the minimalism lens. Money, Career, Education, Relationships are just few of the topics they tackle in their weekly podcast. They have published quite a few best-selling books as well.

Recently, Joshua took up the topic of ‘Writing’ during the podcast and he blew me away with his tips to become better at writing. No matter what you are writing — business emails, ebooks, blog posts, books, website content or anything else, his tips will make you better.

Am embedding the 1 hour podcast for your listening pleasure. If you don’t have more than 10 minutes to spare, I summed up the best takeaways below:

Rising tides lifts all boats

Treat your text messages like prose. Outside of work, we often spend a lot of time writing on Whatsapp, SMS or Twitter. Here our punctuation, spelling and sentence construction goes for a toss. Time to tighten it up.

“Be more deliberate with your most common form of casual writing and automatically you will become deliberate in other forms of writing.”

Answer 2 questions whenever your write even in casual scenarios:

- What are you attempting to communicate
- What are you trying to express

Good writing is about achieving the above 2 objectives.

1. Words are your tools. Build your toolbox

Joshua shares how he used to pick one new word a day. The dictionary app on your phone is a good place to start learning. If you start using it in your daily conversations, your vocabulary builds without much pressure.

At first, it may be a strange habit to learn, but pretty soon it grows on you and the impact starts showing up in your writing.

2. Don’t write something which you won’t speak

Have you seen writers use fancy words just because they can? These words are rarely spoken in our natural conversations and it puts many off.

3. Writing habit is like a muscle. Use it daily

Joshua shares a valuable analogy of how writing as a habit is like a muscle. If we don’t use it daily, it will soon be become pretty useless.

Simply put, write everyday. Write anything. A blog post, a diary entry, a personal email to your friend. Anything.

4. ‘Sit in the chair’

Why are so many of us ‘aspiring’ writers? Have you seen an ‘aspiring carpenter’?

Well known author Donald Pollock summed it all with a quote “Sit in the chair”. These 4 profound words changed Joshua as a writer forever.

For a writer, the grunt work of writing is all about sitting in a chair and keeping at it. Writing.

Keep your phone, internet or anything that comes in the way far away. No more aspiring. Don’t have any self induced ‘rules’ of writing. Like using the perfect writing app, the perfect writing stance or the perfect soothing music.

5. Get to your flow state

Studies say that it takes us at an average 22 minutes to get to a ‘flow state’. It is the most productive and creative state of our mind to write.

Any distraction, excuse or interruption before the flow state is not helpful. Avoid the habit of replying to tweets or checking your inbox when you are in the chair.

For Joshua, waking up early helped him achieve this habit.

6. Shitty first drafts are actually priceless

Get your words on the page. Joshua likens it to a band’s jam session. The session is not meant to go to a live audience or meant to be critiqued. Your shitty first draft is like that. Just get the words on page.

Don’t be scare of grammatical errors, spelling mistakes, punctuation misses or such. Just let your thoughts bleed in the form of your own words.

7. Punctuation is your pace

Colons, semicolons and full stops: Punctuations give velocity to your narrative voice. It’s important to find the right punctuation to meet your intent of communication.

8. Ditch the nonsense. State your point

A clear sign of amateurish writing is the habit of throat clearing using words. Joshua asks us to conduct a tough test of just deleting first 2 paragraphs of our first writing drafts. Has it made our content piece better? Most often, it will.

Respect your reader’s time and intelligence. Your reader is spending valuable time — which is not free.

One of the best selling books from The Minimalists — ‘Everything that Remains’ was about 750 pages long when they first drafted it. Eventually the authors got it down to 200 odd pages.

9. 30% composition. 70% editing

Joshua stresses on the importance of shaping your work. It’s all about the art of re-writing. It’s a fight with your own mind sometimes.

Many sculptors cut away from a large piece of stone to carve out the eventual structure. Writers are like sculptors who even need to create the stone and then cut quite a bit of it.

I am just halfway through the hour long podcast w.r.t to the number of insights shared. Listen to the entire episode — Joshua tells amazing personal stories behind every best practice and how he acquired it.

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