No matter what you do, learning to write well is fundamental. People who can’t write clearly are destined for disappointment when it comes to a choice between them and someone who can. We are in the living in the information age, and those who communicate clearly will continue to prosper.

Don’t worry; learning to write well is nothing more than hard work and persistence. Anyone can become a great writer; it’s just a matter of putting in the time. That being said, here’s 15 tips outlining how to become a great writer:

Write More Often

Most people are afraid of any amount of writing, and by starting to write in little bits you’ll become comfortable with the feeling of writing. If you haven’t written anything in a while, setting a goal to write one full page every day for 30 days will give you a huge head start. So will keeping a journal.

Write With Complete Focus

It’s impossible to multitask while writing. Shut off the phone, close all browser windows, and just focus on what you’re trying to say. Don’t get sidetracked, and work with whatever you’re doing until it’s done. Putting this kind of a focus into anything is difficult for most people, guarantees instant results.

Give Yourself Enough Time to Write

You need at a bare minimum 60 minutes, uninterrupted, to write anything worthwhile. The first 15 minutes of writing are always lost trying to find a flow and your real topic. By giving yourself more time, you ensure your writing has unity. It was all assembled at once, in a logical thought order.

Eliminate Distractions

The key to staying focused for such long periods of time is eliminating distractions. If you’re in an environment where you can’t guarantee an elimination of distractions, wear headphones and go to a park. You can’t write well when you’re being interrupted.

Learn What Good Writing Looks Like

90% of everything written on the internet is crap, built for the moment, soon to be forgotten. Get away from your computer every once and a while and read a good book. Good books were written to span centuries in their relevancy. Notice the amount of thought and work that goes into a book. Then start writing everywhere with that in mind.

Read the Classics on Writing

There are a lot of books out there that will make you feel good about writing. All of these are crap. Get a classic book on the craft and assimilate what it says. Here are the must reads:

The Elements of Style
On Writing
On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction

Rewrite Your Work

I write every article in a Moleskine journal before I transfer it to my computer. Writing in my journal first makes me rewrite everything I write, and ensures I read what I just wrote. I can see errors and fix them before I print out my first draft. This saves time, and makes sure I’ve rewritten everything I wrote, at least once.

Edit Ruthlessly

According to Stephen King, strong editing is the best way to improve your writing. Eliminate 10% of what you wrote in your first draft to produce your second draft. That means eliminating unnecessary words and getting rid of sentences that are redundant.

Stick with It

Learning to write is a process like everything else. Either put in the hours and enjoy the rewards, or shut up. It’s not going to come easy, but with hard work, it will come.

Share What You Write

This was the biggest mistake I made when I started writing. I wrote for an entire year, and shared nothing. My writing hardly developed at all, because I was never writing at a quality level I wanted to share. By sharing everything you write, you have to take pride in everything you write. And that’s a powerful tool to improve your quality.

If You Get Stuck, Keep Writing

There is no such thing as writer’s block. It’s only you thinking about what to write. Stop thinking about it, and start talking! Tell me what’s going on with you, tell me why you can’t write, tell me why you feel miserable… anything! Sitting there thinking about how you can’t write gets us nowhere.

Speak from Your Heart

Please don’t try to sound like an organization when you write. It only makes you sound boring and lifeless. People want to hear the human side of everything, not the organizational. So incorporate a piece of yourself into everything you write.

Make Your Writing Work for You

Make your writing do something for you. Get you a better job, a higher salary, anything. By getting rewarded for writing well, you give yourself a reason to keep writing. Starting a blog and making money from it is probably the best way, though.

Give Your Best Work Away

There are a whole lot of charities and open source developers that need a clear voice. Give them your time and help them out. You’ll get back exponentially what you put in.

Help Others Become Better Writers

There is no reason for bad writers in the world. Help turn someone you know into a good writer, so you can become a greater writer. By raising standards of quality in writing, we all have to work harder, and end up creating greater quality of work than we ever thought possible.

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Laziness has got to be the biggest problem holding back intelligent people. It seems to me, the smarter a person is, the bigger a problem they have with laziness.

I’ve had the problem since high school, where I found out the importance of laziness when programming. Bad programmers rush to start implementing solutions to a problem without thinking their solutions through. It’s the lazy programmers who sat around all class, goofing off and letting their subconscious “digest” the problem before tackling it that did the best work. And so I assumed that life worked the same way, the people who ran at problems right away did more work, enjoyed themselves less, and ultimately got a worse end result than the people who took the time to let the right solution come to them.

After a few years implementing this mindset in life, and now I see just how incomplete of an approach it was.

See, I started with the assumtion that life is a closed system. You gathered data (knowledge), and interpreted it to find an ultimate solution that led to becoming happy and successful. The process of taking data in and converting it into a meaningful solution is what everybody else misses, and what I figured I had on the guy who just followed whatever society told him to do.

But life is not a closed system. It’s an open one. There is no ultimate solution that is going to bring us ultimate happiness and success. That’s something that can only be approached, by consistent testing and implementing. Being lazy means we don’t get to the implementing part of life, and waste all of our intelligence on the theoretical, and ultimately not real.

Being alive is a constant stream of information coming in, getting processed, and then going back out. The closest thing to a real solution (in life) is changing the processing part so that the information that comes from the world leaves changed for the better. This creates a better world for others, and ultimately, us. (Yes, a positive feedback loop)

But that’s only possible if we’re constantly implementing our ideas. And staying lazy is the surest way to make sure your ideas never get seen. So how do we eliminate laziness, without losing the benefit of letting the solutions come naturally?

First figure out exactly what you’ve been putting off. Make a list of everything you know needs getting done. Been meaning to get out of debt? Make a financial turnaround. Imagine what will happen if you don’t get each one of them finished, ever. Eliminate the trivial, and prioritize the important. Motivated yet? Good. Then do the hardest one, as soon as you’ve finished writing the list.

Because getting the most difficult things done first is the most important tool for anybody with a problem with laziness. By getting the most difficult thing done, you set yourself up for things to be easier and easier. There’s no big looming idea of how much needs to get done over your head. The worst is already over.

So what are you waiting for? Get started on that thing you’ve been meaning to do. Today, before another year goes by.

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