Writing for the internet, you’re up against increasingly high quality and well-written content. It’s a competitive industry, and there’s no room for amateurishness. For success, budding writers should learn to avoid the commonest writing traps.
The inspiration trap
If you write for a living, you can’t afford to wait around for inspiration. The myths of creativity have a lot to answer for. Sitting and waiting for the spirit to move you just doesn’t help. You have to force yourself to produce words and sentences, or you may get to the end of the day, week or even month without writing a single word.
A writer is someone who writes, not someone who thinks about writing. To escape, have a system and a routine, and aim at writing a minimum number of words per day. How many words is up to you. Some people can write much faster than others. It’s ok if you can’t produce thousands of words a day, but 500 is a reasonable minimum to start with.
You will get quicker over time, but the most important thing is to keep going.
Using fancy language
You want your writing to be individual and you enjoy putting your thoughts in unusual ways, with arresting metaphors and eccentric punctuation. The trouble is that your work isn’t selling. To escape, remember that writing is communication. Read back over what you’ve written after a day, checking for clarity.
If it’s not crystal clear what you mean, even to you, then it’s probably unreadable. Cut out the fancy bits. It’s hard to believe that your writing would be better without the bits that you are proudest of, but, sadly, it’s usually true. Simple is best.
Indulging in digressions
You need to write a certain number of words to fill your daily quota, or maybe to complete an assignment with a fixed word count.
You have to write, come what may, and sometimes you find yourself straying off the subject, and end up with a rambling discourse.
If you can’t stick to the subject, then try allowing yourself to go off at a tangent. Let yourself rip, then edit ruthlessly later.
Maybe whole paragraphs have to go, but the surprising thing is that more often than not, what’s left hangs together quite well with a little tweaking.
You sometimes have to let yourself write too much in order to get back to what needed to be said.
Don’t make do without an eye-catching title
You need to strip your prose down as much as possible and cut out the verbal flourishes. But don’t fall into the trap of believing that your solid research and workmanlike writing will do the job alone. Take time after you’ve finished your piece to dream up a really good title that will get the reader’s attention. Nobody will get the chance to appreciate your writing if they don’t click on it in the first place.
Don’t send your piece off straight away
After writing your piece, editing it down, letting it sit overnight, then reading through again for grammar and spelling, you notice a stupid error just as you’re ready to send your work off as complete.
It’s tempting just to make that last correction and to send it straight off. If you do that though, you risk submitting an article that doesn’t read well.
Every correction that you make is likely to have knock-on effects on the rest of the article. Say you’ve put a passive sentence into the active voice.
That involves inserting a new subject for your verb. But maybe that same word occurs immediately after the sentence in question, making the whole section sound clumsy and repetitive.
The solution to this one is obvious. Never send off a piece without reading it all the way through, after you have made what you think is your last edit.