How to become a popular writer and improve your sex life

There are 2 immediate questions that need to be asked from an article entitled such as this is.  1) Am I a “popular” writer?  I wouldn’t say so, but feedback is consistently positive and either people are trying to score points with me, or my writing is decent.  So I’m going to talk about how I write what I write.  Second, does becoming a popular writer improve your sex life?  I have no idea, but I live in hope!

So why the title then?  Two reasons – one, a little experiment and a bit of fun – does ‘sex‘ really ‘sell’?  And two, I hope to be able to refer back here long after this post was written (when I’ve become a “popular” writer) and answer the question definitively. 😀

Word count: approx. ~1100; Image credit: here.

Before you can become a great writer, you must…

WRITE!

Seriously, you need to just start writing.  If you haven’t started yet, you gotta stop with the procrastinating and the internal dialogue about becoming a successful writer.  It’s never been easier to start.

I look back now on the feelings I had just posting my very first blog post.  Nerves, anxiety, embarrassment hardly begin to describe it.  No-one was going to read it anyway since I had told nobody about my blog, but then you never know – that post was a difficult first step.

What will my friends say about me?  Will they have a good old laugh behind my back?  Perhaps.  But I had wanted to share my thoughts for a long time and I knew that to get to there I’d have to just take the plunge.  At 151 words, I published the shortest article I’d ever write and now you can hardly shut me up!

About a 2~3 months ago, I returned to some of my earlier articles and couldn’t help but cringe as I re-read them.  I can’t articulate the difference in the style, but it’s there.  So I set about tweaking them a little – not changing content, but rather just editing for flow and readability.  It was a great exercise in reaffirming that the way to become a better writer is to write, write some more, and then write again.  It is the only way to improve and you must accept that at the beginning, and for a long time thereafter, your writing quality is going to be pretty atrocious.

People have on several occasions commented about how they like my writing.  That’s great, and I love the feedback, but then who’s going to volunteer feedback that your writings are crap?  Not many people, they simply vote with their feet, so-to-speak.  They return to your site, or they don’t.  Granted, it’s not all about writing quality but also topic and content – if I write about stuff that you have no interest in, you’re not going to bother reading it.  I’d be the same.

So how can we improve our writing almost over night?  Well there are many different ways to do this, but I’m going to give only a few of, what I feel are, the most important.

5 things you can do to immediately to improve your writing

The following approaches are those I take to making my articles more readable.  By readable, I mean to make it sound like someone is chatting with you, not writing at you.  Not entirely possible, but you do what you can…

1. Write the article as though you’re writing to your closest friend(s) and imagine them actually reading it and how they will respond.  Why your closest friend?  Because it’s only with them that we are the most honest and we (should ideally) feel safe with them.  If we make mistakes, or we’re too frank, they wont punish us or make us feel stupid.  So write a letter to your friend…
2. Re-read the article outloud and pretend you are talking to 2~3 people you know.  When you hear what you’ve writtain aloud, it changes your perceptions of it because we don’t sound the same in our minds, as when we speak aloud.  You’ll probably realise as you do this, that the flow is often difficult and you use words that are either weird when spoken, or a smaller word will do.
3. Be honest.  Probably quite obvious, but worth saying.  If you’re writing because you want to fill up some space on the site, to assist with SEO, or for the sole purposes of making money, then forget it.  Your article will likely be terrible and downright boring.  I mentioned this deep within one of my travel blog articles regarding “travel” writing itself.  Much of the stuff you’ll read out there is commercial and built/written for the purpose of “selling”.  I try not to overemphasis travel and the experiences I have unless they are extraordinary, simply because few things really are that amazing, incredible, life-changing, etc. and you sound fake when you do.  If you’re writing to get paid, remember to keep to the truth and write about things you’re passionate about or interested in.  Granted, some people will still read your stuff, but it doesn’t make it good.
4. Don’t try to sound too intelligent.  This relates somewhat to #2 above where there’s a risk of using big words and long sentences to sound clever as we write.  Don’t bother, because you’ll sound like an idiot and we can’t read too many long sentences before becoming either bored or confused.
5. Remember why you are writing.  Are you writing to make money, or because you love to do it?  This overlaps a little with #3 and I think it’s pretty critical to writing content that others may want to read.  Everyone has different reasons for it, what are yours?

How to improve your sex life through your writing

This is obviously just whacky theory, but it’s my blog so I have that liberty.  I think that if you write online and you have your own website, it can be considered a view into the person that you really are.  Of course, this only applies if you stick with #3 above.  People can read your writings and learn a great deal about the type of human being you are.  I think too often we hide our true selves from public view (I know I do sometimes) and it makes it difficult for people to know the true you.  Perhaps having public writing available online exposes our character more than normal and that may (or may not as the case may be) attract the opposite sex.

That’s an incredibily anecdotal link between writing and your sex-life, but take it or leave it. 🙂

Of course, if you have feedback on what I’ve just said, I have a special section below where you can comment.  I’d love to hear what you think on my whacky theory, but also from other writers and how you think we can improve our writing.  I know I improve as I write, but I can’t always articulate the changes – perhaps you have some thoughts on that.

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Tagged as: How-To, improve, self-improvement, sex life, writing