My guide to writing an essay that doesn't suck

Muay Thai but for words

Art for The Intrinsic Perspective is by Alexander Naughton

A perennial question: “Do you have any advice on how to be a better writer?”

My usual answer: “Don’t be a writer at all! Don’t do it unless you can’t do anything else, unless you’re terribly in love with language, and unless you don’t care if you’re replaced by AI in five years.”

That’s an obviously bad answer. So the purpose of this post is to give a less facetious and pessimistic answer and offer a more practical and hopeful one, which is primarily that what we call “good writing” is more about avoiding predictable mistakes than it is about aiming for a particular target. Being a good writer is multiply-realizable: there are a ton of ways to be a good writer. Some writers are succinct and to-the-point and minimalistic, others create sentences that thunder down the tree line like avalanches. But all bad writers are alike, in that missing subtleties immediately scream “amateur,” even to readers who are not themselves writers, and even if the reader can’t say why they dislike the piece—and so I think this guide is actually interesting for readers as well, if only so that they can articulate why they prefer certain writers to begin with.

So here are five of what I think are the most common mistakes that give off the aura of amateur when it comes to writing, particularly writing online (blogging, newsletters, etc), and direct ways to improve on them.

1. You’re not thinking about the reader.

What I mean is that the writing is for you. Now, I’ll follow this up with the acknowledgement that all writing is sneakily for the writer. If anyone says otherwise, they just aren’t being honest. But this inevitably self-obsession that drives writing (and perhaps all creative endeavors, if we are being honest) must be curbed. It is a bad habit, and it must be combated. You, a writer, an artist, are an addict of the self—but the whole point of writing is to communicate with others! So like any addict you must make your addiction explicit, go through the equivalent of a 12-step program, and then continue to fight fight fight it with every line until your fingers type your last word.

Refusing to do this, refusing to step outside yourself, is one of the main producers of bad writing. You may be interested in a topic, but why is the reader? What does the reader know, right now, at this point in the piece? Sometimes writers, even good ones, create atemporal paradoxes with their work—their argument is piecemeal and spread out, and assumes you already know the conclusion in order to understand why any of this is worth paying attention to. And sure, there are some popular authors who don’t think much about the reader, and yet have large audiences. But it’s still a flaw—they just make up for it by being very good at other stuff.

Here’s a technique for fighting this bad habit: unless the piece is extremely topical and needs to go out right away, when you finish a draft, don’t publish it. Just. . . sit on it. Sit on it for like a week (a month is ideal, but the world isn’t ideal). Then re-read it and make edits. What this does is actually put you in the position of being the reader, rather than the writer, because you literally no longer remember the exact mental context in which you penned each sentence, and you’re left with the text itself. By waiting to edit a draft, you come to it fresh, because the “you” a week later is different than whoever wrote it. Use the power of your stupid forgetful human brain to your advantage.

2. You didn’t edit it.

Everything you read in a magazine has had a set of eyes upon it. Such pieces are bricolages of opinion—too often, this makes them indistinguishable, but it also ensures they are readable. That’s the tradeoff outlets make, exchanging originality and a singular voice for an amalgamated product formed by the opinions of multiple editors. But you can, and should, edit your own work, and act as a committee of one. The only person spitting out unedited prose onto a scroll and then shipping it to a publisher should be Jack Kerouac. You’re not Kerouac (in fact, Kerouac was not even Kerouac, given that he wrote 13 books and is known solely for On the Road), so you should edit your stuff. By which I mean re-read it after it’s done and think about how to improve it. It doesn’t really matter when you do this in the process. Some writers write a first draft to completion, and then edit it. Others, like myself, compile their pieces magpie-like, one paragraph at a time, often in no particular order, constantly re-arranging and sorting, and so we very much edit as we go.

Implicit in the editing process is the idea of deletion. This is, ultimately, the most important editorial move: to excise something unnecessary. A little voice should be saying “Did I just repeat myself? Why do I need this adverb? Why do I even need this sentence? Is this metaphor too strained?” and so on.

What’s interesting is that the importance of editing is just a concrete expression of #1 (“You’re not caring about the reader”), since by not editing you’re really saying: “Please direct your attention to this, this thing that I wrote, a thing that I didn’t even bother to spend time improving; in fact, I care nothing about your time, you illiterate peasant.” As you’ll soon find, actually every common mistake listed here can be conceptualized as just a specific rehash of #1, which crops up, hydra-like, in different guises.

3. You’re making grammatical mistakes.

All writing relies on a pool of faith. The reader is trusting the author to take them somewhere interesting. And trust is a gestalt thing—you trust someone because they don’t mess up the small stuff. Grammatical errors, mistaking “their” and “there,” or just plain old misspellings, are the easiest way to break the enchantment you’re trying to cast. To mix metaphors yet again in this overly-metaphorical paragraph: grammatical errors rapidly shrink the pool of faith.

But oh look, it’s #1 again. You didn’t care enough about the reader to make sure they didn’t stumble over a stream-of-consciousness interrupting error.

This common problem also has a couple simple solutions. One might be getting a first reader, like a spouse, who is willing to read drafts with fresh eyes and look for mistakes. Alternatively, you can find another writer to share work with, or just read your work aloud multiple times slowly to yourself (which I do). When doing this little self-performance, different formats help, like changing the size of text—many errors exist at, e.g., where a sentence jumps to a new line, and a change in size or formatting will make errors you didn’t see pop out (Substack’s “Preview” function is helpful for this).

4. You are not writing about anything particularly interesting or original.

This is a hard truth that applies to all authors. No writer is immune to it—I could make the case that plenty of my pieces have been far less interesting than others, and this is usually in direct proportion to how much they lean into my own (quite niche) notion of “interesting,” playing on my own peccadillos. The truth is that content is king. Give me a poorly-written essay about a fascinating subject over a beautifully-written essay about a boring subject any day. Of course, it’s also true that you can make any initially boring subject interesting by your powers of observation. There is, somewhere, an incredible essay about dentistry waiting to be written. But really this is just saying that dentistry is actually interesting, it’s just interesting in a previously hidden way. Most essays take on the properties of the things they are about—they are diaphanous in their intentionality. You are what you eat, and all that. Too often, writers will aim to be topical, thinking that this guarantees the subject is interesting, and it does, but it also guarantees the subject is not original.

5. You’re trying too hard, especially in the beginning of the piece.

The key to consistently good writing is mostly just avoiding embarrassment. A common mistake of talented young writers is overwriting, by which I mean indulging in unnecessary prose contortions. This betrays a lack of confidence. No smart person worries about appearing smart all the time, and so they make happy losers in games like Scrabble or Chess, whereas those who have never done anything with their intelligence are the most defensive about it, and make sore losers in games of wit. Similarly, only unconfident writers are worried about appearing like good writers with every sentence.

For the last time, I’ll point out that this is another specific expression of #1, since the majority (not all, but the majority) of prose contortions are less interesting to the reader than they strike the writer as initially being. The reason good prose favors simplicity is for the same reason that Muay Thai boxers favor an uncomplicated stance—it provides a flexible power position from which to strike. Make your prose too stylish and you will find many subjects are suddenly beyond your purview; it is simply impossible to discuss Modern Monetary Theory while breaking into poetic exultations.

Here’s a way to avoid the draw of overwriting for talented beginners: what I like to do is save the really good writing, the risky stuff, the literary gymnastics, for the end of an essay. It is there that a reader’s pool of faith, even that of a new reader, is finally large enough for something interesting. A first sentence is not the time to be experimental, but a last sentence, in a good essay, should almost always be experimental. It is as if I start each essay as a normal tax paying citizen directing your attention to a subject of interest, in my case often some nerdy scientific or cultural question, but by the middle of the essay this costume of normalcy has begun to break down and loosen. This disintegration culminates at the very end, when the mask is sloughing off with sweat, the makeup running and the fake wig hanging off like a wound, and it is then, my true form revealed, that I am terrible to look at, all composure gone completely, for behind the dissolving mask there is only a flailing figure dancing wildly to a private music, and as the mask slips even lower you can finally see them: those dervish flaming eyes.

Those terrible eyes!