How To Quickly And Powerfully Supercharge Your Writing Skills

If you want to get better writing, you’ve got to write. There’s an old saying (or maybe not so old) that goes like this: In order to achieve mastery at anything, you’ve got to spend at least 10,000 hours practicing it. Wow, that’s a lot. But mastery is one thing. Being good enough to earn a decent living is something else.
Most car mechanics aren’t world class car mechanics that are in high demand to work the Daytona 500, but they still earn a decent living, and live decent neighborhoods. As a writer, you don’t need to be Stephen King to earn a good living. But you do need to be good enough to get people to buy your stuff.
How do you do that? The same way you get to Carnegie Hall: Practice. This can be difficult, especially when you are writing. Feedback is essential. Without feedback, you have no idea if you are getting better or getting worse.
Imagine if you were learning to cook. You bought the ingredients, you followed the recipe, and you cooked up a good dish. Then you fed it to your dog. How would you know if you were any good? Would you figure that as long as you dog didn’t die, you were getting better?
Some things are trickier to get better at than other things. Imagine if you wanted to get good at playing golf. Feedback would be pretty straightforward. Either the ball would be going toward the hole or it wouldn’t. Whatever you tried would either help you or it wouldn’t. There wouldn’t be any question.
But how about writing? How do you know you’re getting better? Plenty of writers spend their whole lives writing all kinds of stuff. Articles, blogs, stories, screenplays, but nobody ever reads them. They could be award winning material, or they could be utter garbage. And don’t think you’re going to get away with asking your mom. She’ll always tell you you’re awesome.
What you need is objective feedback. People whom you never met. One way is to set up a blog. Write a bunch of stuff. Set up Google Analytics. This will tell you how much time people are spending on your site. If they come there, and leave twenty seconds later, you aren’t such a great writer.
But if they come there and spend ten or twenty minutes and read three or four pages, then you’re doing pretty good.
Keep writing stuff and putting it up on your blog. Notice the pages that are getting the most attention, and have the most time spent. That’s your good stuff. Write more like that.
Also notice the pages where people visit for only a few seconds. That’s your junk. Write less like that.
As long as you focus your writing based on the feedback you’re getting from the real world, you’ll be a fantastic writer in no time.