How To Become A Writer in 5 Minutes

There’s just one important advice for all aspiring writers: write. As simple as it sounds, that’s all you’ll ever need. Or at least it’s the most important when it comes to starting. Write, write and write! Focus on quantity. That has to be your goal.

If you want to start a blog go ahead and do so. If you want to write a novel, write it. If you want to start with short stories, write them. That’s the first step and the one that will kick start your career and your dreams. To actually writing is what will make you polish your technique and what will get you closer to your goal.

Make it a habit to write at least five to ten pages per day. Put yourself that as a top objective, find the time (there’s always enough, be it inside the bus or before going to sleep) and do it. In no time you’ll have an impressive amount of material. It’s that big, that simple.

Write a short and concise (one page, maximum) plan or outline first and then let yourself flow. Once you are actually writing better ideas will come up, your thoughts will be unbelievably deeper and your hand will do the job. If you focus on the quantity and keep on writing you’ll see impressive results.

Sometimes, of course, the quality will be horrible. That’s something to be expected but not to be dramatized about. You’ll have to focus on getting your material done first and then, yes, you’ll go ahead and edit it. Editing and giving your material that extra quality is equally important but it’s not where you start. You edit once you have the final draft done, not once you wrote the first ten sentences.

A simple example of how this is put into action is the story of a friend of mine who had the goal of writing a novel. The ideas were there, the outline was quite clear and the characters already quite developed. One good day he started writing for real and wrote about a hundred pages in one week. He then continued and wrote another couple hundred over the following weeks and beyond. He didn’t stop to edit, he just let himself flow forward.

About a month and a half later he had already written so much material that all that was left was some serious editing. Many pages were skipped and many others had to be rewritten, but the novel itself was already done. The marble was there, all he needed to do now was to carve it through.

The same applies if what you want to write is a blog, an article, your graduate thesis or a non-fiction book. Focus on the quantity first, build the marble and then, once down, carve it. This is the way to go if you want to get things done.

Photo credit: Nicole April

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