Reader, I've been on Pinterest for a while now, and if there's one thing I've noticed, it’s that you motherfuckers suck at giving advice, especially when it comes to writing. I suspect this is largely because the body of writing advice to which I'm principally exposed consists mostly of low-resolution screenshots of reblogged Tumblr posts. Word to the wise, don't trust Tumblr about anything. That so-called “writer” on the other side of that screen is probably a fourteen-year-old whose only exposure to narrative theory comes from having watched two separate television series written by Steven Moffat.

Therefore—as someone who does this shit for a professional penance—let me give you a moment out of my busy schedule to learn you a thing or two about stringing a sentence together, cause if I see one more pithy pronoun-user saying something about how “you need to advance the plot with every sentence,” I might drop out of my current degree and become an enemy of the state. Listen, I abhor numerically organized lists. Readers of my film column will know the best I can do is usually to organize my thoughts into ambling, semi-thematically coherent sections entitled with some snappy cultural reference. What I’m trying to say is, you better be thankful, cause I’m putting my neck out for you on this one.

So, here it is: the lazy cheater’s guide to writing well enough to cruise through the rest of university, or even turn it into a professional career. All the best programs have steps to work through, so who am I to break with tradition? If you follow those I will subsequently lay out in more or less the order I do so, I can promise, if not guarantee some modicum of improvement in your practice. I am dead serious when I say this worked for me, and assuming you’re not stupid, it can work for you too.

But enough talk, have at thee. 

1. Steal Prolifically. 

The first thing everybody tells you about learning to write is that you have to read a lot. This itself is true, but it's only half the answer. Reading a lot does not magically make you a better writer. 

In order for that to happen, you need to steal.

Becoming a good writer is primarily about identifying and implementing into your practice the components and techniques which make writing compelling. You can do this the conventional way—through formal education (performing arts high school, ENGL undergrad, MFA, et al.)—or, through theft. I, for one, have never had the patience to be told what to do (either in the classroom or any other room), and so have developed through force of habit a sort of literary kleptomania.

Read something by your favourite author, paying special attention to what makes their writing resonate with you. Now the next time you write, steal it—originality is dead anyway. 

Your “style” and written voice is necesarily a product of your own experience. Rather than being innate (no matter how much some parties might like to claim), it’s something which inevitably reflects elements of your cultural background, as well as your experiences, your beliefs, and your influences. Hone in on your influences now, and think about why you like them.

Chances are it’s not only what they write about. 

Most people implicitly have some sort of idea of what constitutes good and bad writing. At the very least they make a self-conscious distinction between that which they like and that which they don’t. If you can deconstruct that—train yourself to take note of the technical flourishes which make your favourite literary works your, well, favourites—you can begin to identify the literary techniques worth imitating. 

Once you’ve done that, then you can steal ‘em.

I, for one, wear my influences on my sleeve and crib from them shamelessly in both structure and style. I once read a long-form review of Mario Kart Wii in which the journalist reviewing it wrote an entire paragraph, several hundred words in length, which comprised only a single sentence and decided then and there “Yeah, I want to write something like this.” My prolific employ of em dashes (—) was not borne of thin air but rather a desire to cram more thoughts into each and every sentence, a tendency I myself stole from an academic who, before killing himself, wrote effusive essays about the cultural decay wrought by late capitalism and also New Wave albums.

If you look for it, you can find the inspiration behind any, and every, thing.

Inspiration is another word for “theft.” 

Annotation really helps in this regard, and is an important habit to get into. Scholars do this so as to be able to steal quotes, passages or paragraphs wholesale, though in academia we call it “citation,” and it’s not so much frowned upon as it is the only way to get things published nowadays. Even if it’s just writing quips at some poor academic’s expense in the margins of your Trent University Bookstore rental, annotation helps to get the brain whirring just a little bit.

In an age where everything is referential, originality comes down to something akin to improv. In journalism, we call this your angle—the spin you put on an idea to make it stick with your readership. If I could put it this way: despite the game having been released in 2001, players of Super Smash Bros. Melee still periodically discover new techniques and glitches which radically rebalance the game’s tier list. A game like Melee can at once be—for all intents and purposes— “solved,” yet still contain the possibility of innovation. It’s hard to do something radically different in writing these days, as the techniques therein are notoriously well-tread. Still, that’s not to say someone with sufficient vision can’t recombine elements of the English language in such a way as to produce something compelling. 

It all comes down to a matter of theft. 

2. Buy Expensive Toys. 

One of the biggest parts of making writing a habit is conditioning—you’ve got to trick your brain into wanting to do it. 

A while back some guy named Pavlov (no relation to the video game Pavlov VR, in case you were wondering) did an experiment on dogs or something and now we have twenty-year-old men dressing up in maid dresses and collars, recording themselves barking for their TikToks. What this demonstrates, as I’m told, is that conditioning works, and in order to condition myself I did what I do best—develop a new hyperfixation and/or fetish. 

Those having read my March Cinevangelism will likely remember the odd amount of attention I paid there to my mechanical keyboards, but there’s a rhyme to my reasoning if you’ll just bear with me. Typing on a keyboard is one of the most satisfying sensorial pleasures besides “the knee thing,” consuming copious amounts of marijuana, and missionary sex while sucking face. Having a keyboard on which I enjoy typing has facilitated my output more than any other component of my process, I would claim, hence why I own three of them (my home board, my office board, and my portable/school board to be precise). 

For those who don’t know, the “feel” of a keyboard is largely mediated by its key switches, which are the mechanical components which determine what it registers as a key press. This can be either linear (a “smooth” press up and down), tactile (with a slight perceptible “bump” at the point of activation) or “clicky” (as the name implies, they shriek like a typewriter when you press ‘em). I like my keyboards inhumanly loud, hence why I run Cherry MX Blues on my home board. 

This trick is not, however, limited to multi-hundred dollar analogue computer peripherals in its application. Once you get started, you can never really run out of ways to burn money as a writer. 

The first and most obvious is pens—everybody and their mom has an opinion on these (I know mine certainly does). If you’re doing any amount of writing in a conventional notebook (which you should), you’re gonna need to get comfortable with a pen. It doesn’t matter which one—you can theoretically write your novel in Bic ballpoint for all I care—but it probably helps if it's expensive (this is going to be a recurring theme). 

If you want my opinion, I’m a sucker for a good fountain pen. However, getting a fountain pen means you do need to buy a separate ballpoint if you plan to do any sort of business travel. I understand this might be too high a barrier of entry for some, but for me it all comes down to the love of the game, baby. 

I write the majority of my notes with a Waterman Allure, which, at around $40.00, is the closest you’re going to find to an “entry level” fountain pen. A couple years ago on a trip to Montreal, the clerk at a stationery store in the Plateau let me test a $990, never-before-inked pen, and let me tell you it very nearly ruined me. 

In situations wherein I’m unable to use my heinously-pretentious fountain pens, however, (be it from plane travel or them inevitably running out of ink the moment I need it most—in the middle of an exam or an interview, most often) I do have a few recommendations for ballpoint pens. As far as the clicky plastic guys go, I swear by the Zebra gel pens (SARASA clip all the way). I use a 0.7mm black ink for writing and 0.5mms in assorted colours for annotation. If you’re looking for bare essentials, though, I’ve used Pentel EnerGels for as long as I’ve had cause to devote thought to remembering the name of a pen, and you can get them at the dollar store for like four bucks.

A pen alone, though, does not a writer make. Good luck writing on thin air, it may well prove hard to keep track of those notes later on. If the pen is invoked in idiom as analogous to the sword, the unspoken corollary is that of the notebook and the shield. In much the same way as any good medieval infantryman would not be caught dead with one and not the other, nor should you as a writer forgo a notebook, lest you get stabbed. 

Let’s just get it out of the way and say that Moleskines are the poser’s notebook. Flaunting your Moleskine is the writerly equivalent of wearing a Nirvana shirt to a Boris concert, or buying an officially-licenced The Last of Us flannel work shirt instead of just thrifting a better one. What I’m trying to say is that in the world of writing peripherals, showiness rarely equates to substance. Ultimately the value in these expensive items comes down to their practicality. You don’t want to end up, say, purchasing a set of Pantone-branded notebooks because they look cool only to realize they’re about six inches tall.

Really, the best notebook is the one that feels best to you and is best suited to accommodate your needs. That is going to largely be dictated by how much you’re writing and what you’re writing with, though I don’t really have the scope in this article to get into the specifics of ruling vs. grid, and all the different paper weights. I tend to go for a large notebook, lined, with a heavier stock of paper better suited to fountain pen writing, but really once you find something that works for you, you’ll know what you like. 

Still, it’s a given that most of the writing we do in this day and age is on our computers (or Goddess forbid on our phones). I thus recommend getting a word processor you enjoy using. I swear by Microsoft Word forever and always, but there’s other good options out there for the aspiring asshole academic.

If you’ve got some money to burn (or, like me, you know a guy) you can also find a lot of value in a paid option like Scrivener. However, you must not (and I mean you must not) use Google. Fucking. Docs. Get that garbage out of here. Docs is great for an introductory writing practice because of its upfront cost of zero dollars and uber-convenient cloud saving, HOWEVER, it is a program riddled with enough issues that I could write an article detailing my hatred for it on that subject alone. One of the biggest issues I have with Docs is its lack of keyboard shortcuts for special characters (em dashes, en dashes, ellipses and so on), meaning you’re either forced to dig through the program’s Unicode menu or at the behest of whatever it's autocorrect assumes you are intending with punctuation. Speaking of said feature, Docs’ autocorrect shits the bed at around 10 000 words, making it all but useless for long projects unless chunked out into multiple documents, which quickly becomes more trouble than it's worth. Docs is poor for markup with its at-times baffling spell-check and the decision to make hidden formatting symbols a pale blue. Considering I’m the kind of person who enjoys seeing every bullet and pilcrow when she types, that to me is a deal breaker. Plus, if I’m being honest, the program is ugly and I hate the user interface. While Microsoft Word is not comparably fancy as word processors go—certainly more of a Mercedes-Benz than a Rolls Royce—the Google Docs experience is most analogous to being a passenger in your best friend’s parents’ Dodge Grand Caravan whose backseat is perpetually filled with garbage. 

You should also very seriously consider writing with markup symbols turned on. Many of the most common basic errors are formatting ones, and in this respect, a pilcrow is a girl’s best friend. As anyone who’s had me edit their work will tell you, double spacing drives me up the wall, and having visual reference for formatting tasks is indispensable in improving the consistency of it across all your digital writing. 

3. Always Look Forward. 

There's a concept I was taught in a Driver's Education class at sixteen (remarkably not yet the subject of a Cinevangelism) which says you shouldn't look at where you're going, but ahead of it. A car is moving so fast that looking at the asphalt two meters ahead of you is not only pointless, it’s also a recipe for ending up in a crash. 

The same concept applies to writing. 

You need to have something in mind beyond the next word you put down. To some degree, you have to know where you're going. This can be as simple as stringing together the next sentence, or as complex as having a Charlie Day murder board in your room of everything you’re ever going to write and how they intertextually relate to one another to build up to a massive narrative arc. 

People in the writing community generally divide themselves into "planners," and “pantsers,”—people who plan everything out in exhaustive detail beforehand, and those who write more or less on the fly. I long thought of myself as a pantser before discovering my love of obsessive indexing in high school, and having more notes about anything that I so much as planned on writing than spreadsheets I’ve had to keep for the last three years of my freelance employment. 

For planning I generally use Fantasia Archive. It’s a free, open-source alternative to applications like Campfire and World Anvil but, like any open-source program, it’s full of weird quirks which means you have to kind of treat it like a high-maintenance girlfriend (which is exactly why I love it). You can equally use one of the aforementioned (paid) programs (which aren’t necessarily very good), or a better word processor like Scrivener, but it really comes down to your needs. 

For years I bungled through worldbuilding exclusively using Microsoft’s OneNote ecosystem, but that was a level of jank even I can scarce recommend to anybody.

You may well find yourself struggling to find the appeal in maintaining a veritable Sillmarillion’s worth of lore known only to you, but it works for me, and what’s more important is that you find something which works for you. If you want to write a Dostoevskyan epic without so much as a name thought out for your protagonist, hey, it’s your funeral!

I have written works which I meticulously planned which have turned out not very good in my estimations, and I’ve equally pantsed stories and essays alike which I look back on fondly to this day. Neither method is a guarantor of success. Rather, your ability to implement either method well is what is most indicative of your ability to produce something that somebody (other than yourself) would like to read. 

I write in a way that people who, like me, play video games, would describe as “non-linear.” 

I write things out of order. 

While you might protest that this seems antithetical to the point I’m trying to make here, I would argue that it’s not so much hypocrisy as it is resourcefulness. Progress is progress even if the path it takes is not necessarily a straight line. Often, writing the thought to which you’re trying to build can prove instrumental in finding the right way to get there. I believe that (most) good writing is fundamentally modular. A solid paragraph can be repositioned and—with sufficient context and support— can be placed in different parts of a piece of writing to impart different framing.

It doesn’t matter so much in what order you write the particulars of whatever it is you’re working on. Rather, keeping an eye on the overarching structure of the project is necessary to see it fully realized. All of what I’m trying to impart in this section is that, having learned to think about the granular technique of writing (by means of theft) in section one, you equally need to learn to consider application of those techniques on a broader structural scale.

Writing is a conscious practice, and you’ll never get better at it if you don’t think ahead.

4. Say “Fuck it” and Give Up.  

If there’s one thing I’ve learned in the short duration of time for which I’ve been professionally responsible for editing other people’s work, it’s that most people suck at taking advice. Almost everyone, universally, despises getting copy edits (myself included) because really, you don’t want to be told that your writing could be improved, as though that itself means it is truly and unequivocally bad.

You might as well stop trying to improve yourself, because no advice really works—at least, not in the long-term—and the people who don’t like your work simply don’t understand your underlying genius. Clearly, no one else knows as much about writing as you do, and those who deride you for grammar and spelling mistakes don’t understand that those were stylistic decisions.

Being an artist this talented so unrecognized in your time is a fruitless labour, so why do something for which you’re not appreciated?

Fuck it, down with this writing shit anyway. 

Why don’t you just give up?

5. OR Keep Going and Never Stop. 

Or, you can keep at it.

Getting good at writing takes the rest of your life. There’s not really any shortcuts along the way, either. So long as you keep changing as a person (which you always will, one hopes, if you know what’s good for you), necessarily, so will your writing. 

As Vladimir Lenin once said, “there are months where you write two pages, and there are days where you finish a thirty-thousand word manuscript.” The only factor you can control in the pursuit of your own self improvement is you, you have to want to get better.

You have to want to love writing more than you actually love writing itself.

And now, having thoroughly exhausted my stock of aphorisms which sound more or less lifted directly from a Cognitive Behavioural Therapy training manual, I turn it over to you, reader. You asked me for help, and I’ve done my best, but in reading this article you’ve demonstrated that you possess the most important quality for improving your craft—determination.

Improvement is a brutally slow and arduous process. It’s never easy, often boring, and usually makes you feel all sorts of bad about yourself. 

It really takes one to know one, and trust me love, I’ve been there.

Having decided that this is something you, for some reason, want to do, it’s up to you to pick up that slack and keep running and never, ever stop. The reason I say I write compulsively is because it is well and truly an itch for me, a process upon which I’m always seeking to hone, improve, and refine. It’s a bit like walking up a never-ending staircase, and for that reason alone it can feel daunting. I don’t think I’ve ever met a writer who doesn’t have one nagging thought about how to improve. Mark my words—it will take forever, and you might never get there in the end, but that in itself is what makes it worth trying. 

Keep at it, though, I believe in you.