Eight Habits of Successful Writers

Love this!

Hey there,

Happy New Year and welcome to your year of Substack success (hopefully!).

I stumbled across a wonderful article today that I thought you might love. It’s called the Eight Habits of Highly Effective Writers by Susan Orlean, a columnist for The New Yorker and bestselling novelist.

If you have a Medium membership (or haven’t yet used up your three free Medium articles of the month), you can check out Susan’s article on Medium here: https://medium.com/creators-hub/eight-habits-of-highly-effective-writers-b08bda213bf6

If you don’t have a Medium membership, the eight habits include annoying advice like “you have to write a lot to get better at writing” - but put more eloquently than that - and “Be brutal” - by which Susan means that you have to be willing to delete phrases and paragraphs that are not working. Other writers sometimes call this “killing your darlings”.

“I’d say the biggest change in my work these days versus twenty years ago is my willingness to edit myself. I just don’t get stubbornly wedded to phrases and sentences like I used to: I’m much more willing to assess objectively and remove things that don’t work (which requires being much more willing to notice when something doesn’t work). If I’ve written a section that I love and it just doesn’t fit, I cut it and paste it into a new document rather than putting it in the trash. Somehow that makes it easier to do, probably because if I change my mind I know I can retrieve it. But the truth is, I rarely do.” Susan Orlean in Eight Habits of Highly Effective Writers

My favourite part of the article is Habit #8: Remind yourself that being a writer is a really awesome job.

Hell yeah.

I’m on Substack because I want writing to be my full-time job. And it’s a really awesome job.

What about you? Do you like writing, or, like American poet Dorothy Parker, do you like having written?

Cheers!

Karen

Cover image: Markus Spiske on Unsplash