2024 has been a wild year so far. It has been packed in a way that I didn’t realize a year could be. But in the midst of all of that business, I’ve been thinking about how I’m going to improve as a writer.
Believe it or not, when you’ve been at something for a long time, it’s pretty easy to just coast. It’s easy to say, “I’m pretty good at this. I know what I’m doing. I don’t need improvement. I don’t need to get better. I can just exist where I am. People like my books. People are buying my books. Do I really need to improve?” And the answer is yes, absolutely. You need to improve. Not only you, but I. I need to improve.
There are a lot of things about my books that aren’t great. That’s not to say that they’re bad, but they’re not as good as they could be. So, I want to improve. But the question is, how? How do I improve? What am I actually going to do on a day-to-day basis that will make my books better? That’s a great question, and I’m glad that you, I, asked it.
I talk a lot on my YouTube channel about deliberate practice and continuous improvement and my obsession with optimization. It’s sort of weird as an author to be the guy obsessed with optimization, because most people think of being an author or doing anything creative as sort of this freewheeling, free-spirited deal. But that’s not how I approach it.
In keeping with the way I approach things, I’ve decided that I’m going to try a systematic approach to improving my writing. The hardest thing when you want to improve something is knowing exactly what to improve. There’s a saying in the business world that what gets measured can be improved. That’s because if you don’t measure something, if you don’t have an objective standard, it’s impossible to know if something is good or not.
Take, for instance, characters. Are my characters well-written or poorly written? Well, by what standard? Compared to 99.9% of all stories ever written, I’d say I’m probably pretty good. They’re probably pretty well-written. Compared to The Cream of the Crop, New York Times bestsellers, the stories we were all forced to read in high school, I’d say that I’m probably at the bottom of the pile. Again, it’s perspective. I have to measure it in order to know whether it’s good or bad. And in order to measure something, I have to understand it.
So how do I pick, of all of the things I could improve, what to improve? That’s where measuring my books objectively against other people’s books comes into play. Now, I can hear you already saying, “Seth, you cannot objectively measure a book against another book. They’re just different. They’re two different books. And it all comes down to personal preference.” That is absolutely 100% right.
And so I will objectively measure my books against other people’s books in my own subjective opinion. That is to say, I will read my book and I will read their book and I will say, “Do I like my book more or their book more as a reader? Not as the author, not as the person who put the words on the pages or built those characters, but just as a reader. Which one do I like better? Do I like the way I handled characters or do I like the way they handled characters?”
And once I find something in my books where I say, “Ooh, this other author did it better, they handled it better, they have a cleaner way of writing in this specific regard,” then boom, I have exactly the thing I need to work on.
Once I know what to work on, I can move to step two, establish my benchmarks. I can establish what it is that I’m actually going to improve. Too often we think to ourselves, “Oh, my characters, they’re not quite good enough. I want to improve them.” What does that even mean? What does it mean to improve your characterization? It doesn’t mean anything.
If I take a step back, however, and I say, “What made the characters in that other author’s book better than the characters in my book? Or what did I like about them more as a reader?” That’s where I can start to understand the specifics of what I need to improve.
A great example of this is that I have a habit of not describing my characters ever. When I introduce a new character, I introduce them with the least amount of detail possible. You might think that’s a joke, but it’s not. One of the most common questions I get is, “What do these people look like?”
Unlike a lot of readers, I don’t see images of what I’m reading in my head. I just read it. I don’t have a screen reel playing through my head the way that a lot of other readers do. I don’t bother describing. But I read a book recently where the description of the characters added so much to them, especially because of a few specific quirks that the characters would engage in with their physical body when they were feeling particular emotions.
That is to say, there were physical cues from these characters about how they were feeling. And one of the ways that that was delightful was when one of the characters was clearly angry according to their body language, but was also smiling and pleasant and had very nice things to say. And the fact that that author could highlight that dichotomy was so cool. And I thought to myself, “Wow, I can’t do that. I can’t do that in my books.”
It’s not that I’m not a good enough writer to do that. It’s just that I can’t do that because I don’t describe my characters. And so that is a specific thing that I can improve with a specific metric against which to improve it. A specific benchmark that tells me that is the standard that I want to shoot for.
So once we have our thing that we’re going to improve and we have our benchmark, what do we do next? Well, that’s where writing comes in. We write and we try and we try and try and try. And then we ask people specifically, “Hey, can you read this passage? And can you specifically identify this thing? Or can you tell me how it makes you feel? Can you explain to me what I’m trying to communicate to you as the reader?”
We ask those specific questions, we get that specific feedback, and then we try and we try and we try and we try. I’m not going to all of a sudden start writing the best character description in the world tomorrow. That’s not how that works. Over time, that is something that I can improve, and because I have the benchmark, I can always tell whether I’m getting better or getting worse.
Sometimes I try something and I try it and I try it and I try it and then I realize that it doesn’t fit my style or my voice and I have to modify in order to write something that’s authentic to me. And that’s okay. But that third step is the most important. Keep writing. Keep trying. Keep improving.
YouTube Video Link: https://youtu.be/yWe2Ku-liDo
Thanks for reading and watching.
Want in on all the secrets of writing compelling books? Have burning questions for Seth about the business side of being an author? Join the email list for up to date info on the latest videos!
"*" indicates required fields