First, make sure your writing is worth reading

You have a writing project in mind that you hope to have published. This, of course, is an awesome and noble ambition. But you are asking yourself, “How do I make my writing good enough to publish?” Good question. Consider this: the first step in publishing anything is to have a manuscript that is worth publishing at all. Sure, that’s a no-brainer, but some people are intimidated at the prospect of perfecting their manuscript. They are unsure of their ability to create something “good enough.” It shouldn’t be that way though. Everybody should have confidence and faith in their ideas without feeling insecurity about sharing them

What needs to happen is we need to understand that we all have ideas worthy of sharing, but making them sharable is a process. There are a few steps involved, but if you take those steps seriously, you’ll be taken seriously- as a writer.  

The first step in perfecting your writing is to get your words down. Simple as that. Just get them down. You can fix them up later. For now, just get them down. Open your brain and spill the words onto the computer screen. Or journal. Notebook, perhaps. Wherever or whatever you like to write on. Just spill the words onto it with abandon.

Editing your writing is like frosting a cake

Do this: consider a blank page to be a cake. Your job is to put frosting on that cake and make it look delicious and to make people excited to eat it. Make them feel as though it was money well spent if they paid for this cake. Your ideas and your words are that frosting.

What do you do when you frost a cake? You put glops of the frosting on top of it, then you take a knife or a spatula and spread it out and make it look even and nice. Right? That initial glop is not perfect, and it is not meant to be. It’s just that- a glop of frosting on top. It is the effort you make to smooth it out that makes it attractive. After that, you can add any other decorations and touches to it to make it look even better. This is what impresses people and makes them say, “Wow! Nice looking cake!” Approach writing the same way.

The brain dump draft

Treat your first draft as a brain dump where you get all your thoughts and ideas down on the page like that glop of frosting on the cake. Don’t worry about making it pretty or perfect right from the start. You’ll only make yourself crazy doing that. Just get all your thoughts down on the page as best you can. This is your first draft. The brain dump, draft.

Now fix your writing up and make it look nice

Once your words are down, you can smooth them out just like frosting on that cake. Get the phraseology just right. Notice what you can add, what is too wordy, what can be eliminated. Fix grammar errors, get the paragraphing just a right- all that kind of stuff. This is how you make it nice and presentable, just like that cake. This is the second draft where you make it presentable.

Step back and take a look

Now that the second draft is done, step back and take a look at your writing and see how it looks from a distance. A baker will step back and look at their cake to decide if there are any last details to add, or if there is anything they overlooked. A great way to do this with your writing is hear how it sounds when read out loud. Hearing it out loud gives you a good idea of how it will be interpreted by a reader.

We all hear voices in our head when we write, but the voice our readers hear may be very different. So to hear it read out loud helps us to hear what the reader hears. We may hear extra words we don’t like that can be eliminated. Or we may hear entire passes we think could be better, so now we can go fix them too.

You can read your writing out loud to yourself, but it would be better to record yourself and listen back as you will be hearing it from more of a distance that way. Better yet, if there is somebody you can have read it to you, let them do that, or even use one of the many text to voice apps available now days, Speechalo, for example.

We all have ideas worthy of sharing

We all have ideas, and those ideas are worthy to be shared. Somewhere, there is an audience for what you have to say. Don’t be intimidated by the process of getting those ideas out there. It is entirely doable for anybody. Don’t rush your writing. Treat it as a process. Take it a step at a time and the result will be a well-written piece. — Jim Larsen