I’ve written probably 300-400 pieces (about 20% of them 10,000-40,000 words) in the past 10 years with thousands of social shares across them. I’ve got some tough answers but I’ve found them to be most true.
The first part is you have to like writing. If it’s not fun to you, if it sounds like work…there really isn’t much strategy to help you want to do it. It’s like trying to make a game out of eating something you hate. Sure, you can try mixing it into other foods and what not but you’ll never like the way it tastes. And you can’t just be about the money, that’s just not enough motivation (even money can’t make lawyers love their jobs). Those who write only for the money, will never last long. Just my two cents.
The 2nd part is that you have to write from the heart and write from what you know. Most bloggers I see don’t have enough experience about the thing they’re trying to write about, they don’t have any strong opinions or knowledge about it to share with the world. Imagine trying to write a movie review about a movie you either didn’t watch, or didn’t finish, or kinda fell asleep while you were watching it. Your review would not only lack substance but also lack heart. You may even try to write your movie review based on what other people were saying about it (regurgitating information). If you want to be a real writer and write a lot, you need to have a lot of opinions on the topic.
The 3rd part is this is a real strategy of mine is that I write ONLY when I’m inspired. I might be inspired for 8-days straight…if so, I write every minute of all 8 days. If I’m inspired at 3am in the middle of the night, I wake up and write it. F**k sleep. And if I’m NOT inspired, then I don’t friggin write anything. I don’t care if I’m not inspired for 6 months. Being a good writer is like being an artist…so treat yourself like an artist. I know some people try to do that thing where you write consistently. IMO, doing that only makes you hate writing even more. If I were you, just write only when you’re inspired and if you’ve lived an exciting life, you’ll have more written down than what you release and so you always have a bank full of pre-written articles. Even now, I have 200 unreleased articles…I could be lazy for 1-2 years and still have unreleased “masterpieces”. Think of like how musicians are with their unreleased work.
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