The Best Writing Advice I Ever Got

Recently I asked this on LinkedIn: "I'd like to start writing longer articles around one idea or topic, but I'm at a loss on where to start. I'm hoping you can take a moment and suggest in the comments below what you'd like to see covered."

I got a few questions so I made a vow that I'm going to take one question and answer it in a post every Friday for as long as I have questions.

By the way if you have a question, ask away here.

Before I ran away and joined the circus that is game development, I was a journalist. I was not a great one. Well, I was fine. Just harried. I got a couple of degrees in journalism and found myself working at a daily newspaper in Idaho by the Washington state border. It was between two college towns, so education was a mandatory beat, but we at the paper found ourselves covering forestry, mining, argiculture, and tourism. Also, small paper. Few writers. We wore many hats between reporting, editing, and production. We were constantly churning out issues, stories, and features. It never stopped. Looking back, it prepped me for the buzzsaw that is mobile narrative production.

As one of the few writers, I had to write fast. I was always chasing deadlines and trying to not fall on the bad side of that line. You do that, you delay publication and now you have the printers pissed at you. Sometimes though, I would get swamped and have to smash out copy I was knew could have been written better. Other times, rare times, I faceplanted. Really crap-tier copy that I dreaded handing off to the editors for their read.

The editors we had were stellar. Not just in line editing, but also finding the core of it and bringing it out. They could tell you what the soul of the story was and why we should ask our readers to devote their precious time to read.

When I would send over crap copy, I dreaded the feedback. It was a pride thing. We reporters were fiercely competitve. We jockeyed every day to see who the best of us was. Who covered the best story. Who got the killer quote. Whose words were just fire. So, it was withering when you had to do a massive rewrite because everyone knew when you had to do it. You were hunched over your terminal with a terrified-rat glaze in your eyes as you tried to rescue what you failed to get right the first time. Writers who had good copy... they were getting coffee, talking with the edit board, generally goofing around. They were cool; you were dying.

One day, it was my turn in the crap-copy town. My managing editor (one layer below editor-in-chief) came out, chuckled a bit, gave me his notes, and playfully bellowed as he walked down the hall to a meeting: "Words mean things, Ryan."

For the record, our editors never yelled, never cut you down in public, never belittled a writer. Our punishment was our sense of embarrassment at crap-tier copy. They knew they could never hurt us as much as we punished ourselves.

I took his notes and went back to the story.

"Words mean things, Ryan."

The clouds parted and I see the text anew. I remove my emotion from the equation. I see the lifeless, overwritten sentences like big logs flowing down a river. I see the flat prose like it's glowing. I know I can improve this.

Okay, what am I really trying to say here? What's the most elegant way of getting it across. Words have power. Words evoke. Go back, find the right words. Stop being scared and stop pussy-footing around. Go for the throat. Exorcise weasel words. Gut adverbs. As Colin Chapman of Lotus Motorworks fame once said, "Simplify, then add lightness." The same holds true in writing, no matter if it's prose, news articles, or game dialogue.

"Words mean things, Ryan."

It's meant to clear the mind. It's not a solution. It doesn't help your craft. Instead, it's the start of something better. It's a mantra to pierce the clouds. "You know words, John," my managing editor was saying between the lines. "It's why we hired you. Slow down, think clear, find the soul, make the sentences sing."

I think that he was kind and not sneering went a long way to burning it positively into my brain. Whenever I feel like I'm writing crap-tier story or dialogue (and as a writer, you always know), I stop, corner the inner critic, and tell myself:

"Words mean things, Ryan."

It always works. I dunno why. Let's just call it magic and go get some ice cream.