Become a better writer: write until you’re bored

Performance improves through practice. It’s as true in the art of writing as it is in sports, plumbing, or knot tying. The act of writing, however, often does not provide an author the immediate feedback inherent in other activities.

Working alone, the author has only his own mind as challenger and referee. The performance of his pen, the dictate of whether or nor what is written is good writing, relies on the discerning brain of this solitary, self-reflexive editor. How can one learn to write well if one’s constant companion is no better than oneself, and that companion tends to sympathize with the author’s verbal spewing.

I have found that the practice of writing often, writing tens of thousands of words and hundreds of little pieces and long pieces and existentially sublimated pieces and poetry and definitions and diary entries; all this—rather than incrementally sharpen some quillish intellect to producer ever crisper, neater, and more original prose—simply tires me of my clichés until I am so bored of my own voice that I have to make drastic changes in my style of composition simply to bear the sight of my assemblies of words.


From time to time, I will fall to this sad state. I will write on a notepad or in a journal and furiously negate line after line of horrible, hackneyed text. I become so bored with myself that I write cliché on purpose, unable to accept that I could do better or that I could be so terrible.

Yet I persevere. To overcome this disgust I reinvent my voice and style in some way that allows me to once again find some interest or value in the phrases self-provoked. And, as a writer, some kind of writer, I survive to set down another page.

I believe that most real change occurs only when painful frustration erupts out of some sort of crisis. Break-ups happen when one lover can no longer handle the miserable faction within the relationship. An auto manufacturer finally addresses latent safety issues when millions of recalled cars cost the company billions. Revolutions occur when the unbearable and sickening weight of oppression transforms into a moment when the insurmountable suddenly becomes the goal.

So I eagerly await the next crisis in my writing, knowing that whenever my eyes roll and I sigh and scream at the sight of my words, shortly thereafter I will be a new and far better writer.