If you want to become a writer, you have to write.
I am going to continue saying this, like a mantra, because it is truly the most fundamental habit required in order to write well.
I want you to think of your writing as a wet piece of clay.
In order for that mushy lump to turn into a ceramic bowl, you’re going to have to do a few things.
First, you need to get that wheel spinning (you know the one that turns so you can wrap your hands around the clay).
Think of your wheel as the daily act of writing. If you’re not writing on a daily basis, your wheel isn’t spinning — and if the wheel isn’t spinning, the sculpting process just got a whole lot harder.
Second, you have to get your hands wet.
This is what keeps the clay soft, the writing fresh.
What I mean is you have to read. Reading is what keeps your brain full of words and ideas. Reading is what shows you what’s done before, how it was done, and what’s possible. Reading is a reminder that someone else out there took the time to sculpt their own piece of clay, and somehow turned it into a ceramic bowl. And most of all, reading is the pull to your push, the input to your output, the yin to your yang. It’s food for your thoughts.
Third, you have to remain still.
If you’ve ever watched someone sculpt a piece of clay on a wheel, it appears as though they’re doing nothing at all — the bowl is creating itself. Their job is to keep the wheel spinning and their hands fastened around the clay in a way where the rotation does all the work for them.
This is the process, exactly, of becoming a better writer.
The day I started writing every day on Quora was the day I got my wheel spinning.
Before Quora, I would write short stories here and there, some poetry in my journal late at night. I would write a blog on my website and then delete it, write another one a few weeks later and then delete that one too. My writing process was aspiring, to say the least, because I wasn’t actively and deliberately doing the thing I said I wanted to do — which was write.
Excited by the community on Quora, I challenged myself to write one Answer per day for a year straight. Just one. 300 words. 500 words. 900 words. It didn’t matter. Just one thoughtful Answer, every day, 365 times in a row.
Do you know what happened?
About two weeks in, I had my first Answer get over 10,000 views.
After a month, I had one of my Answers republished by Inc Magazine. A few weeks after that, HuffPost. A week after that, Popsugar. Then TIME. Then Forbes. Then Fortune.
After three months, one of my Answers landed on the front page of Reddit, accumulating 1 million views in two days.
After six months, I had racked up several million views on all my Quora Answers, and been republished by ten of the biggest publications on the Internet.
At the nine month mark, Quora let me know one of my Answers had been selected to be published in their 2014 print anthology — a feat I’d been told by my teachers in college could only be obtained via manilla envelope and carrier pigeon.
And in less than a year, I was awarded a Top Writer badge on the platform.
Now, I didn’t sit down that first day and say, “I’m going to sit here and stare at a blank sheet of paper until I come up with the idea of exactly how my ceramic bowl is going to look — and once I have the idea perfectly positioned in my mind, I’m going to make it, right here, right now, on my first try.”
I just dove in.
And I told myself, “Whatever I write today is what I write today. And tomorrow, hopefully it will be better.”
I kept my wheel spinning. I kept my hands wet. And in doing these two things on a consistent basis, I was able to remain still. I trusted the process, and sure enough the ceramic bowl created itself.
This is what a large majority of aspiring writers fail to understand.
Becoming a better writer is no different than becoming a better musician or athlete or chef or sweater knitter. Every craft takes practice. And as much as we would all love to believe that the greatest writers in history just sat beside rainy windowpanes, smoking cigarettes and drinking wine, the truth is, getting better at anything requires you to show up on a daily basis.
[This article originally appeared on Inc. Magazine.](
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