The best and only tip for aspiring writers

Do you feel confused and overwhelmed by the endless, often contradictory writing advice?

The most important rule for aspiring writers is also the most simple. Yet it is the one most often applied in the wrong way.

As an aspiring writer all you have to do are two things:

1.) write

2.) learn

That’s it: write and learn. And you know this.

But here is the issue: most writers do this in the wrong order. And this is probably the reason why you feel confused, inferior and often hopeless. Not because there is a lack of educational material, but because there is too much of it.

To solve your problem I don’t want to offer you more advice: I want to make you conscious of the process of how you acquire advice.

The solution is not to stop soaking in advice, nor to apply all of it, even if it seems counterintuitive. The solution is to first write, and only then search for the advice.

Instead of taking advice and then taking on writing, you first have to write and then learn. Don’t learn to write, write so that you can learn.

BODY

And that is where the mistake lies:

Don’t learn so that you can write – write, so that you enable learning.

If you don’t write then you cannot improve anything. Learning only makes sense if you have made mistakes: without recognizing mistakes, moreover, without making them in the first place, learning cannot take place.

This process between action and learning can be extrapolated to not just writing, but also anything from entrepreneurship, to coding, to sports and anything else where mistakes enable learning.

You do not learn to avoid mistakes; you make mistakes so that you can enable learning.

CONCLUSION

Instead opening YouTube or abusing the Google search bar yet again, I urge you to first – write.

After that, you are free to educate yourself, because only then is it education and not procrastination.