Our number one piece of writing advice is, “have something to write about.” People always go straight to worrying about technical skill, but a great thought or story honestly relayed by a mediocre writer will still be great. While no amount of technical skill can cover for having nothing to write about.
If you can write an email, you can write a blog. If you can message your friends on Discord and be understood, you can write a blog. The bar for functional prose is very low.
If you really can’t express yourself in a discord message then ok, maybe you need help. But most bloggers don’t need help with their prose; meanwhile many blogs have perfectly fine writing but are fundamentally about nothing.
Almost no one is bottlenecked on their ability to string together a sentence or be a good prose stylist. If your ideas are good, you can go straight to: “See spot run. Run spot run.” You can manifest Grug Mode. What you can’t compromise on is having something to write about.
An idea doesn’t need much to be “good”. Bad writing is when you don’t care about it!!!! Even “the time I got gas for my lawnmower” can be interesting if you care about it and write down the part(s) you care about.
With nothing to write about, you fall into default modes like writing about writing. And if all you ever do is writing, you fall into worse clichés like writing a short story about a writer with writer’s block. It’s all you know! This is the most unfortunate thing you could possibly write.
Gene Roddenberry was a pilot in WWII and survived multiple plane crashes. On August 2, 1943, he aborted a takeoff on a B-17. The plane ran 500 feet off the end of the runway directly into palm stumps, crushing its nose, and the bombardier and navigator both died. In 1947, he survived the crash of a Pan Am Clipper in the Syrian desert. Later he made Star Trek. J. R. R. Tolkien spent decades steeped in Old English and Norse myths, and fought at the Somme in WWI. Later he wrote The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.
Tolkien and Roddenberry drew on their deep background reading and the things they experienced, while their imitators draw mostly on Tolkien and Roddenberry. Hayao Miyazaki said, “The problem with young anime artists today is that the only thing they study is anime. When we were young, we studied French literature, we studied impressionism, we read Dostoevsky. We swallowed everything. And then we went and created original anime. But if you grow up and all you watch is anime, you’re just regurgitating spinning wheels.” Don’t write in circles.
Think about how many words you lay down every day in emails, or in texts, or on discord. Think about how easy it would be to get 500 words a day if you chose to cover a live music show every night. One hour listening to music. Two hours writing. One hour editing. Hit send. That’s a generous time budget, you are guaranteed 500+ words every time, and if you go to the show at 5pm, you’d be all done by 9pm. Watch a Tiny Desk concert, and tell us what you thought. That’s 500 words.
So the writing advice is: “go out and have experiences.” Get beat up on a camping trip. Eat test packages of chocolates. Work the graveyard shifts at a psych ward / volunteer for MKUltra. Tell your young daughters stories about rabbits on long drives. Serve as a British sub-divisional police officer in Lower Burma. Fail to save a pig and feel sad about it. End up in two love triangles right after each other. Drop out of Harvard and do a stint in a halfway house. Drive a taxicab. Have something to write about.
