How to Improve Your Writing

By Mason Engel

Featuring interviews with bestsellers like Andy Weir, Jodi Picoult, Greg Olsen, and more, How to Improve Your Writing presents an uncommon but effective method of becoming a great writer.

How do you get better at writing?

The "write a lot and read a lot" method of improvement is insufficient. Writing and reading are both necessary, of course, but if that's all you do, you're eventually going to hit a plateau. What then?

Engel has the answer. Actually, he has seven. After conducting an online survey, asking over 1,000 writers how they improve their fiction, Engel grouped the answers into seven main categories, 7 Drills to help you write better. With these writing habits, you can level up your craft and reach your publishing dreams. If, that is, you have the secret sauce.

The 7 Drills are effective in their own right, but to get the most out of them, you need something called deliberate practice. Pioneered by the researcher who coined the "10,000-hour rule", deliberate practice is practice on steroids, crafted from several principles. This book explains those principles in the context of the 7 Drills, gives real life examples, and provides a step-by-step guide for how to convert your knowledge into effective habits.

Take ownership of your talent. You can be better. You just need the right drills.

“After surveying the working methods of over 1,000 writers and researching best writing process techniques in available literature, Mason has distilled that information into a very solid, practical, clear, and accessible approach to writing.”
-Steve Adams, Pushcart-winning author and writing coach

• Language: English
• Publisher: Mason Engel
• Release date: Feb 18, 2020
• ISBN: 9780463102329

Mason Engel

Stories. They can give an escape. They can give hope. They can give perspective, laughter, joy, inspiration. All they need is to be told well. That is my mission, and since the age of 17, I have written thousands of pages trying to figure out how to accomplish it. Now, five years later, I am ready for my stories to be heard.My name is Mason Engel, and I am a 24 year old science-fiction writer from Columbus, Indiana.

Book preview

How to improve

your writing

Write Better Faster: 7 Practice Habits to

Improve Your Writing Process

Want the free audiobook instead?

If you’d rather listen to the audiobook, you can download it as a podcast for your favorite platform at engelwrite.com/thepracticebook.

Heads Up

If you’ve watched the Writer’s Practice Regimen videos from YouTube or EngelWrite.com, some of this will be review. But there’s also a lot of great new stuff in here, digging into the specifics that the videos don’t cover. I’d love to have you along for the ride.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction

Drill 1 – Write

1.1 – Copywork

1.2 – Short Form

1.3 – Long Form

Drill 2 – Read

Drill 3 – Get Feedback

Drill 4 – Study

Drill 5 – Edit

Drill 6 – Enjoy Art

6.1 – Consume

6.2 – Create

Drill 7 – Live

Turning Drills into Habits

Conclusion

About the Author

Introduction

I’d traveled 700 miles for this moment. I’d fed myself with flour-stretched oatmeal for five dollars a day, slept in a three-bedroom house with 15 roommates, and trekked around the city with a bag of books on my back, which still hadn’t healed from surgery. Now, I was sitting in a packed subway car hurtling under Manhattan, taping a contact lens to the front of a book wrapped in white printer paper. If they didn’t agree to represent me, they would at least remember me.

That was the thought running through my head as I double checked the address and walked into the high rise lobby, as I dodged past the doorman and ducked into the elevator. Floor 17. I found the receptionist in a white room lined with bookshelves, and a minute later a woman walked out to greet me, looking annoyed.

Hello, I began, introducing myself and offering her the wrapped-up book adorned with the contact lens. I wanted to deliver my query in person.

Yeah, that’s right: my query. The thing you email to literary agents to see if they’ll represent your manuscript. The thing that creates the most important first impression you can make as an author. The thing where you self-publish a novel, order the paperback, wrap it in printer paper, tape on a friend’s medical necessity, and deliver by hand … right?

It was the climax of my big plan. I’d used my meager savings to move to New York City, mapped out some agents in Manhattan, and took to heart the age-old querying advice: personalize. Well, I’d gotten a little too personal. It turns out, as any cursory Google search would have told me, agents don’t like being hunted down and ambushed. So I was rejected every time. But as I went back to my overfull brownstone and thought things over, I wondered if my insane, in-person approach was the only reason for my failure. It hadn’t helped my chances, sure, but neither had it eliminated them—if an agent really loves a book, she will represent it. So if my office intrusions weren’t why I’d been rejected, what was?

Why do you get rejected?

Why does an agent, publisher, or reader walk away from your work? If you’re anything like me, you blame your query or your first page or the market, and you ignore the voice in the back of your head that has the answer.

Hi, my name’s Mason Engel, and I’m the author of eight science-fiction novels, one of which I self-published and decorated with One-a-day contact lenses, and seven of which are locked in a vault in the basement. You have to be pretty stubborn to write a million words without outside validation, as I had, so it’s no surprised that I ignored that voice in my head that was trying to explain my rejections. After all, I was already following the advice of the people rejecting me: I was writing as much as possible, and I was reading like an absolute maniac. But I still couldn’t get a yes. And I saw plenty of other hardworking writers with the same problem. It didn’t make sense until I listened to what that voice was telling me: Your writing isn’t good enough. You’re falling short of your potential. You’re not being the best you can be at this craft.

Hard words to hear, but I needed to hear them, and so do a lot of us who aspire to take our fiction to the next level, because our current method of getting better isn’t working. Writing a lot and reading a lot are necessary, of course, but doing only those things has left many of us at a wall of rejections and a flatline of sales. So how do you change that? How do you actually get better?

To answer that question I turned to my past, considering what I had tried, and how it had worked out.

My early writing career

I’d always loved fantasy novels, so I’d decided it was time to write one of my own. It was seventh grade. The words flowed quick and easy but 80 pages in, I realized my story was a blatant rip off of Pirates of the Caribbean, and I put down the pen. I didn’t pick it up again until my senior year of high school, when I needed a way to ask my girlfriend to prom. I’d set a high bar for myself in prior years, one year hanging Christmas lights that spelled out the question, and the next year riding up on a horse decorated with prom signs. So for this last go-round, I needed something better.

The answer came at the end of my high school soccer season, presenting itself in the boredom of my newfound free time. I decided to write. Keeping the old pastime a secret, I finished a novel, got it printed, and gave a copy to my girlfriend as a surprise. Inside the front cover, I’d dedicated the book to her and asked her to prom. The dance was the next day—the project had taken me right up until the last minute—but her answer had been a yes all along.

In hindsight, that first book set the tone for what my writing process would look like and what things I placed value on. Nothing mattered more than getting the book done in time to use for my big ask. Combining that focus on timeline with my Type A, productivity-centric personality, I became obsessed with word count. That’s how I measured my success, and it made sense: writers write, so to be a great writer, I would write more than everyone else. During the next four years, I did just that, cranking out 6 full-length novels by the time I was 22. I self-published, fully expecting to be picked up by a traditional publisher and whisked away to stardom. The reality was different.

After my garbage fire query attempt, and after receiving a series of unfortunately insightful negative reviews on Amazon and Goodreads, I started to worry that I wasn’t as good as I thought I was. I hired a freelance editor, and this thought was confirmed: I had a ton of bad habits. My prose was cluttered, my characters flat, my dialogue and setting cringeworthy.

I considered what had gone wrong. I thought I had done everything right. I’d read a lot. I’d written a lot. My ideas were creative. My parents were supportive. I had all the advantages that could have accelerated my progress, mentally, socially, economically, and still, after writing over a million words of fiction, my writing wasn’t good enough to be published.

Before we go any further, I should be clear about something. I’m not saying there’s some magical cutoff—measured by words or novels or anything else—past which you should expect publishing success. My disappointment after self-publishing had less to do with metrics and more to do with trajectory. When I