Professional writers make their living on ideas and words. They must stay relevant, to the point and interesting, each and every day. It’s impossible to force creativity, but with a few little known rules, creating great articles and ideas can become a habit.

1. Clear Your Head First

For most of us, our heads are filled with worries and clutter. Professional writers know, they’ve got to let all that crap out before they can get started writing.

I enjoy exercising before writing to clear my head. Most great writers get active before writing too, Stephen King enjoys long walks, and Chuck Palahniuk likes gardening.

Keeping a journal also clears your head. Journaling gets you into the habit of putting words down, without worrying about quality or an audience’s reaction.

2. Let Ideas Gestate

It’s usually not good idea to tackle big ideas right away. Instead, it’s best to gather information about an article, or an idea, and let them stew for a couple days. It may seem like a waste of time, but writing flows much easier after gestation.

Pro writers are always juggling multiple ideas, and there really is no time wasted by gestating. One project is being written as another is being gestated. It works in cycles, and when it’s going, there doesn’t need to be a pause.

3. Write First, Judge Later

There are two different parts of the brain at work when writing. At first, the right side of the brain thinks creatively, growing new ideas and plotting them out into words. Afterwards, we go back and revise critically, using the left side of our brain to judge what works and what doesn’t. The problem is, the only way to get into a right-brained writing pattern is to write a lot, without judging.

This is critical, you must learn to suspend your judgement if you ever want to write well. We cannot be conscious of using the proper grammar while we’re creating new ideas. We must let things “hang loose” while creating. That’s just the way the brain works.

4. Write Everyday

Writing well takes time. It means working out your mind every day, keeping it sharp. And the way writers work out is by writing. It doesn’t matter if you’re writing poetry or horrible fiction or just shopping lists for imaginary people. Just write, feel the words flow, and feel the creative process. Your internal muscles will grow stronger, and slowly, you’ll become more sure of the words you choose.

Ideas will come easier too, especially if you keep a journal and allow your thoughts to flow freely. I often take long winded worrying diary entries and turn them into short stories. I like to play out my worries from another perspective, so I can get a grasp on them. Nobody may want to read a long whiny diary entry about financial worries, but set within a story, people can identify with real life problems facing a character.

5. Get Passionate

This one comes from Ray Bradbury (of Fahrenheit 451) in his book, Zen in the Art of Writing. In it he says, basically, life is too short to write things you don’t feel strongly about. First, before writing he recommends stirring up some emotions. Find something your passionate about, get excited, and explode with the pen.

It’s a long hard grind to write anything well. Writing takes time, revisions take time, spellchecking takes time, you might as well write about something you care for, you might as well enjoy some part of the writing process. Writing from a passion is the only way I can make myself sludge through the hard parts of revising and editing.

6. Speak Naturally

Nobody wants to read long fancy words. People want small, easy, everyday words. There’s nothing gained from speaking using long words and putting on airs. Let your personality shine through. If your words are ever going to come to life, we’ll need to know there’s a life behind them. Let your personality show through then.

This doesn’t mean get lazy, though. Speak honestly, from your voice, but do not ramble on with poor grammar and punctuation. If somebody’s doing you the favor of reading your crap, you might as well make it easy for them to slug through it.

7. Tell A Story

We humans want a story behind everything. We see ideas in stories, our entire lives work out in personal stories. Share them. A short story, a short aside can improve dull nonfiction immensely.

Nobody wants to read about a vacuum world of idea and processes. We must put our ideas in places, create worlds for them, and involve them in their own drama.

8. REWRITE

I put number 8 in capitals for a reason. Rewriting is so fundamental, but nobody does it. Rewrites are the difference between a great piece of fiction and a piece of crap. Our brains are always approximating, we must especially rewrite in fiction, because we are just beginning to create a universe on the first draft.

Rewrites work like this:

First, we build an imaginary world. We figure out what’s there and who’s in it.

Second rewrite, we figure out there’s drama within this world, and it’s not from where we originally thought.

Third rewrite, we begin to pull things together, to see new details, and so on.

We can continue on, through the fourth an fifth rewrite, and indeed, in fiction especially, sixth and seventh rewrites are not unheard of. We write and write so we can afford to throw things away.

This was the hardest advice for me to implement, until recently. I simply did not want to do the rewrites, I wanted to get stories out as quickly as possible. It wasn’t until after I read about writing about something your passionate, that I cared enough to rewrite five and six times.

9. Cut Ruthlessly

Great writers are always writing, and great writers are always deleting. A great writer will write 30 pages to get one great one. That’s just the nature of writing, the nature of how it works out.

Stephen King said in his book, On Writing, that we should all aim to remove 10% from our final drafts. He doesn’t count rewrites, those all get thrown out. In actuality, you’re throwing away 95% of what you write. Get used to throwing things away.

10. Focus on Beginnings and Endings

In On Writing Well, William Zinsser says it best:

“The most importance sentence in any article is the first one. If it doesn’t induce the reader to proceed to the second sentence, your article is dead. And if the second sentence doesn’t induce him to continue to the third sentence, it’s equally dead.”

We must pay especially close attention to the lead and ending if we are writing for the internet. Internet ADD means people only glance at a page for a few seconds before deciding whether or not to read further. Make the lead count, or you won’t be read.

11. Just Write as Well as You Can

As a writer, there is always that voice in the background, that says the article isn’t good enough. That nobody will want to read it, it’s too messy, it’s too off the wall. We will never write the perfect story, just as we will never write the perfect sentence. We must just produce as best we know how, and keep producing.

The one writer we all love to quote, Kafka, never released a single thing he wrote before he died. He cared about nothing more than writing, and yet he could see only imperfections and embarrassment in his words. Don’t be a Kafka. Share your mistakes, let people judge you. But don’t let them condemn you or make you feel incapable.

Write as best you know how, and then share. It may be imperfect, but so is everything else in the world. Don’t let imperfection keep you from getting started.

What does genius look like?

For the longest time, I thought of a genius as a person burried in their thoughts, behind a huge desk burried in papers. They’re constantly absent minded, and not paying attention to what’s going on around them. Their brain is jumping around from one thought to another and back again a thousand times a minute.

But that vision sucks. Genius shouldn’t mean you disconnect from this world completely, and rely on other people to support you while you solve “big problems”. It especially shouldn’t mean your mind is incapable of focusing on a specific problem for an extended period of time.

As a matter of fact, if you’re not an eccentric professor with students worshipping your every move, it’s probably impossible to live this “genius lifestyle”. For people with gifts of above average intelligence, they’ve got to figure out a way to relate to the rest of the world in a meaningful way. One that challenges them without boring them.

For intelligent people, solving difficult problems is how to give back to the world. Flipping burgers won’t cut it, and neither will empire builing. Finding and solving difficult problems the world needs solved will ensure a better future, and a greater financial power for you to solve more problems.

But the process of finding the right problems to focus on can get an intelligent person stuck. They realize that time spent finding the right problem guarantees the most effective results. So they get stuck in a loop of looking for the right problem. Or, once they’ve found it, they begin to work on it, find an even more important problem and move onto it.

They constantly start solutions, work them out in their heads, but rarely see them through in the real world.

It’s the genius’ curse. They finish problems much quicker than they can be translated into the real world. By the time a solution is 50% completed in the real world they’re already bored and moving on to the next problem.

The Solution: Being doubly intelligent means you need to develop double the self-discipline to break even.

Smart people are less efficient with their time because of the constant distraction of side-thoughts. The professor with his cluttered desk only enhances his propensity for side-thoughts and distraction while working. He would be better off breaking his time into chunks of hyperfocus.

By chunks of hyperfocus, I mean devoting chunks of time (at least and hour and a half) to accomplishing a specific task. Breaking things down into chunks makes staying on task a whole lot easier, and boosts your productivity exponentially.

So for the professor, he should clear his desk completely and shut his door. Then speed read the material for a specific problem for an hour and a half, one page at a time. And focus only on the information being processed. Then, take a break to let the material “sit”. Finallly, do an hour of eyes closed, no distraction concentration on while working the problem out. If the problem is too complex to be solved visually in your head, solve it with a pen and paper. Make drawings, make diagrams, make mental maps, whatever works for your specific brain. It sounds like a lot of work, but again, the quality of your solutions will rise exponentially, and the time necessary to get hyperfocused will be less and less.

If you don’t understand the idea of hyperfocus, a good way to get started is by picking up Drawing on the right side of the Brain. There are exercises in the book designed to help you understand what hyperfocus feels like by drawing. For people who learn best visually, there is no better place to start.

Athletes at a professional level already know what hyperfocus feels like. When they reach a professional level, they’re consistently pushing the human body to its limits. If they had the same level of focus they had when they began their chosen sport, they’d be hurt all the time. It is only because they’ve developed a higher level of focus that they can compete without injury.

If you’re not an athlete or a visual person, and do better with words, just devote an hour and a half to writing about your problem. Start out by writing a question, “What is the problem I’m trying to solve?” Then just start writing. When you’ve found out what it is, ask, “How do I solve this?” Let the words come and don’t try to force a solution right away. Keep writing and the solution will come.

You will probably have problems getting hyperfocused at first. But stick with it. Even the smallest increas in your level of focus while working will pay off in the long run.

This year was a very successful one for a group of my friends. Their band got picked up by a major label, they’re touring with a band they grew up admiring, and they’re getting more success every day. I spent a good bit of time with them on tour this year, and it made me realize the real danger and temptation of living through other people.

See, each of us live through someone (or something) to an extent. It may be a child, a lover, a friend, or even a job or a TV show. Either way, you’re letting someone else’s work give purpose to your life, instead of taking the time to find your own. You’re setting yourself up for a fall.

Stop Living Through Others

Nobody else wants to be in charge of your life. Giving yourself over to a cause (or a person) is the quickest way to get taken advantage of. No matter how good the cause, nobody is ever going to magically give you a direction you’ll be happy with. It’s something you’ve got to discover for yourself.

Vicarious living happens a lot in relationships. One partner is successful or extremely gifted, and the other decides to live to enhance and facilitate the others gift without developing their own gifts. The “gifted” partner is under constant pressure to produce from the one who doesn’t, and when he or she does, the other feels as though they can take some credit. Round and round they go, until the gifted partner decides they don’t need the “ungifted” anymore, and that’s where the “ungifted” suffers big time.

See, they never developed their own gifts, figured that was too difficult. But nobody is ever going to develop our gifts for us. We’ve got to get out there, figure what they are (by ourselves), and start working on them every day. The universe “owes” them nothing, because they were already born with everything they needed — the tools to become successful or gifted themselves. Because they chose the path of worshiping someone else’s gifts instead of pursuing their own, they’re destined to suffer the consequences.

Not taking the time to find and develop your own gifts should be illegal. But most people don’t do it anyways, and instead decide to seek out people who do, and latch onto them. But that person owes you nothing. You can undergo the same difficult growing process they went through, only on your own. You may do it slower, but you can still do it.

This is why I think it’s so important for kids to take a year off to travel between high school and college. If that’s out of the question, then between college and career. It becomes so much more difficult to take a year off for yourself later.

Discover Your Own Gifts

Long term travel is the best way to find out your gifts. But most people think it’s only for the rich, or people with huge savings. Let me be the first to tell you, taking a year off to travel doesn’t necessarily have to cost a million billion dollars. I took my entire first year off after high school for under $2,000. I moved to Costa Rica, began volunteering, and got my room and board paid for. I spent very little money in an entire year, and when I decided I wanted to back to the United States, I still had enough left to ride a bus up through Central America. I got to see every country in Central America after a years stay. It was a great gift, and it made me realize how lucky I was to have been born in a first world country. It also made me realize how brave the people who come to the United States illegally really are. It’s a hell of a trip to make; a human life is worth a whole lot less in most of those countries.

But after I left, I really had no clue how I could make my travel keep paying for itself. Sure, I could volunteer in one spot long enough, but then what about the cost of a flight to another country? I couldn’t really earn it working in that country, that’s illegal and very sketchy in corrupt governments. It also sucked to come back home and save money. I now realize the solution is the internet.

Technology has improved 100 fold since my time in the jungle. Even the smallest countries have an internet cafes; and if you can write in English, you can run a website successful enough to pay you to travel around the world. Just write stuff people want to read about, build a readership, and then put advertisements on your site.

You may have to start with a time of volunteering while you get your website up and running, but that’s really no problem. There are plenty of great organizations that will put you up with room and board in exchange for a few hours work every day. At the most, building a profitable website will take you six months. Just save up enough to go where you want to live, volunteer for six months, and write something of value every day. If you’re a horrible writer, take the time to become a great one. Post to your website daily or weekly for six months, and eventually you’ll have a large enough readership to pay you to travel around the world. On a budget, yes, but you’ll be seeing the world nonetheless.

You’ll also develop into a much more complete human being than you ever thought possible. Seeing different cultures firsthand is a quick way to learn compassion, and to understand the shortcomings of your own culture. By stepping outside of the environment you were raised in, you allow yourself to grow beyond it. That’s one thing people who never leave their home country can’t do.

The tools to do it are all there. But very few people ever really take the plunge. It seems so much safer to do what society tells us to, but how rewarding are 40 hour work weeks, really? I’d much rather take my chances with personal discovery than wait for the world to produce more people for me to worship.

Getting things done is impossible without the motivation to do so. Most people have enough motivation to pay their bills and keep a roof over their heads. A lucky few seem to have unlimited motivation to create and do awesome things with their lives, taking years off to travel, starting businesses, and creating and participating in meaningful work.

So what gives the lucky few the extra motivation to do so much more?

First off, there is no such thing as “extra motivation” from the people who get more. Take the single mother, about to get evicted from her home. Does she not have more motivation than the guy who’s a millionaire and works three hours a day? Rather than the amount of motivation, successs in life is determined by the type of motivation that drives us.

Let’s look closer at the two different types of motivation, and how we can incorporate the better one into our lives.

First, let’s take the employee’s motivation. They work only when being told what to do, and stop when done. This type of person is motivated primarily by survival, focusing only on immediate needs. How to pay the mortgage, stop feeling so lonely, get over being sick, whatever. This is the wrong way to look at life; this is a “negative” motivation. This viewpoint looks at the world, and says “I have to do (x), because if I don’t I’ll suffer these consequences”. By doing so, they are constantly looking at the world asking where things are going to come from.

On the other hand, there’s the entrepreneur mentality. These type of people are motivated by a desire to create what doesn’t yet exist. These people rarely think of their own survival, and instead focus on what they can create and give back. I call them “positively” motivated people, because their motivation comes from a primary need to help provide what’s needed. This subtle difference in motivation creates huge rewards.

Nothing great is ever created by someone with negative motivation. It’s a viewpoint that does just enough to dodge the negative consequences and then gets distracted. With positive motivation there’s an unlimited amount of focus to create what must be created. Positive motivation has no deadline, only a level of quality and a quantity to the people it helps. Positive motivation is where the world’s greatest books, businesses, architectures, and people come from. Ideas and concepts that span the test of time are only created when we ask what’s missing.

It’s a scary mindset to adapt to, especially if you’ve come from a background of negative motivation. I know I sure did.

For me, the conscious adoption of a positive primary motivation started on the 7th of December (2006). Months of work on my website weren’t producing the amount of visitors I needed, and something needed to change. So I decided to start giving away my web business ideas, write an article a day on what I thought would change somebody’s life for the better. I did this mostly out of frustration.

Within a week traffic to my website doubled, and revenue quadrupled.

I was ecstatic. I started making projections of how much I would be making in a year, two years, and I just got so excited to keep giving back. So I continued doing what I started, and soon my traffic started going back down again. I panicked after a few days and spent two days focused on promoting my website to other people instead of creating what I thought the world needed. My traffic went down further still.Then I had an “Aha!” moment. I realized I was just circling back down into the negative motivation. By focusing primarily on promotion, it’s impossible to create a site anyone would ever want to be loyal to. Ultimately, providing value to the world is how things grow. Not by telling others their worth. This post is my makeup for falling off track.

So how can you apply positive motivation to your life?

First ask yourself, “What would I give to the world if I knew everything else is taken care of?”

Then, take the time to let the power of a fundamentally positive motivation sink in. It took me hundreds of times of hearing it for it to sink in, but you have no reason to be as inattentive as me. Grasp the fact that we can look at the world in two ways: asking where things are going to come from; or asking what we can give. Realize that giving and creating is the only way we’ll ever live in a world we want. (Both for ourselves and the people around us.)

Finally, realize the path of positive motivation is more difficult, at least in the short term. We don’t see instant results like people who are motivated by shallow, negative motivation do. We come from a higher calling, and it’s not necessarily instantly rewarded. Patience is a fundamental part of being positively motivated.

Remember, if you steer off course, don’t beat yourself up. Just notice that you went off course or slipped up, fix it, and move on. Beating yourself up will only cause you to fall back into the negative motivation trap all over again.

So what are you waiting for? Start giving now.

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.