The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Writers

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Someone left out a copy of The 7 Habits of Highly Effectively People and I’m not normally a business-book person, but I was flipping through it and found myself wondering what the specific habits would be for writing. This is just my opinion, but this is what I came up with.

They read.

Some percentage of people reading this are probably thinking “what kind of idiot blogger is saying that good writers read? That’s so obvious!” while the rest of you are nodding their heads. I thought this went without saying. Everyone I grew up with as a writer was a big reader, and if anything, one could never be well-read enough. But I know at least a few people who are currently teaching creative writing at the BA and graduate level who report that their students are either uninterested in reading, or actively eschew it because they think it will taint their writing somehow.

I just flat out don’t believe that any of those writers could possibly be good. The best way to improve as a writer is to read a lot. And the only way to know the market is to read what’s in your genre. I can’t help but think that these writers end up being like that Australian “breakdancer” Raygun who I’m assuming had no idea how bad she was relative to the incredibly competitive world of other breakdancers. You don’t want to be Raygun do you??

Writers who don’t read is how you end up with situations of someone who thinks they have invited something so original that they can’t conceive that there are 4000 other lesbian gnome novels out there. When they see a book deal that sounds like theirs they assume their idea was stolen. These are the writers who are really concerned that if they query or send their book to an editor, they will steal their idea. Here’s the thing: if we’re talking fiction, you are not getting a book deal based on your idea/premise/plot. You’re getting it because of the writing. A good premise certainly helps, but won’t overcome bad writing. If you think about anyone who does something at the professional level: basketball players in the NBA, chefs working at fancy restaurants, interior designers—try to imagine a world where those basketball players were disinterested in watching anyone else play, where the chefs exclusively consumed Soylent rather than eating, and the designers were never curious about the insides of houses they themselves have never worked on. It just doesn’t make sense.

But also.. if you’re a writer, you should love to read. You should want to be part of the broader conversation about literature. Think about how incredibly wild it is to not be part of that broader conversation at all and to assume that your work would still be so good that other people would pay for it.

They consume evaluatively.

Related to the above in many respects. Not everyone who loves to read does so evaluatively. Some people read a book and think, “That was good!” or “That was bad!” and not much more than whether or not they liked it. Not all writers consume content evaluatively; I do think that all good writers do. By “content” I’m not just talking about reading books. I’m talking about watching movies and TV, listening to podcasts, literally any form of media. By “evaluatively” I mean the difference between someone who says “that was good” and someone who says “that was good and here is why and how it is good.” Good writers, when they read or watch a movie, have two hats on at the same time: consumer, and writer. A consumer is just a regular person experiencing the movie. The writer is the nagging voice in the back of the head thinking, “this dialogue is bad.” A writer can say, “I want to write a revenge story about a woman going after her abusive ex.” An evaluative writer can write the same exact story, but odds are they are thinking about the story in context with all the other similar stories, they are thinking about how other such stories handled the characters, they are engaging with known tropes and are aware of it. Evaluative writers can break things down into pieces and fit them together. For example, I wanted to write a book that was an homage to It. You can do this at a very superficial level: write a story about kids terrified by an interdimensional clown, but if you’re an evaluative writer, you’re able to figure out what it is that makes so many King fans connect with that book in particular. You can see what makes it special. You can see what functions well about it, and what doesn’t work as well.

This is why the reading a lot thing is so important. I can’t prove this with data or something (I would if I could) but I think the reason why reading a lot makes you a better writer is not because you learn how to imitate other writers better, but because it helps you hone that evaluative skill. I read a lot of thrillers before writing Never Saw Me Coming and part of what drove the writing of that book was my frustration with thrillers for a couple decades: hapless female characters who are responding to things that more interesting characters (ie, potentially evil husbands) are doing, dumb twists, thin characterization, similar plotlines, not being able to remember things as a plot device, etc. People who think evaluatively about content are the type of people who like to either mentally or literally write reviews because it helps them sort out their thoughts about that particular piece of work. They are also great at giving recommendations because it goes beyond “I got you an Emily Henry book because I saw you reading an Emily Henry book before” to something more thoughtful.

They persist.

I’m of the opinion that items 2, 4, 5, 6, 7 have to do with talent, and items 1 and 3 don’t. You can be a really talented writer, but if you give up, your writing will never leave your notebook or computer. Persistence at being a writer is composed of two different things: they don’t give up in the face of rejection, and they keep at it. On the rejection part, if you pick up a random novel at Barnes and Noble, you might think, “God, they are so lucky” and not realize that that person has probably been rejected hundreds of time. I have a few hundred short story rejections. I know that I have 200+ rejections from literary agents. I applied to many juried writers’ workshops and got rejected many, many times. (If you haven’t seen it, I made a video on Instagram about how many times I’ve been rejected.) You can’t make it if your armor is made of glass. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt when you’re rejected. I’m middle aged and it still really hurts. But the persistent writer feels bad, cries, maybe has a few glasses of wine, and picks themselves up and carries on at some point.

Persistence is not just about dealing with rejection, but also about sitting your ass in a seat. Lots of people wistfully say, “I always wanted to write a novel.” But you know what you never did? You didn’t sit your ass in a seat and type out eighty thousand words. Persistence means you keep at it, even if you’re tired or it’s raining or you have whiny kids. The persistent writer has gotten through writers block, has worked through some gordian knot of a plot problem, hasn’t used various life events as excuses to not write. Even when it was hard and there were excuses, they wrote.

When they get edits—from their agent, editor, beta reader or whoever—they don’t throw up their hands, wishing that everyone would just see it for the perfect book it was. They’re willing to take the time to fix it rather than give up.

They adapt.

While we are on the topic of editing… I don’t know what % being a writer has to do with writing content as opposed to editing that content. It does seem like the ability to edit is a make it or break it type of thing. There’s a certain type of person where once they’ve written something down, they think of it as written in stone. But nothing is written in stone. It’s hard when someone says there’s something that’s not working about your book. Sometimes when people say edits you think, “Well that doesn’t make sense at all…” Sometimes you might feel resistance to changing that thing because you can’t imagine the world different than how you’ve already created. If you can’t do it at all, you’re stuck.

I remember reading a book about changing your work life to align with your values and goals in life. One person went to the professor who wrote the book and said they always dreamed of being a doctor, but now that they were middle aged it was too late: med school would take several years, then residency, then etc etc. This is a person who says, “I have a dream, but you see, I can’t have it.” The professor said, “What does being a doctor mean?” Did the person literally just have a dream to be a doctor? Or could “being a doctor” mean “I want to help people who are ill.” Are there other ways to help people who are ill? Do those other ways of helping also involve many years of schooling and debt?

To not be able to adapt is to say, “Apparently people are saying that it makes no sense that Bob is the killer. But Bob has to be the killer. Because I conceived this novel about Bob being the killer.” The writer who can adapt is capable of stepping back and asking, “What if he wasn’t the killer?” This involves both humility and creativity.

They innovate.

Going back to the writer who thinks someone’s going to steal their idea. Here’s the thing: if someone stole one of my ideas, I wouldn’t be worried. Because we would write two completely different books. And I’m confident that what I would write would be good. There’s always going to be a million stories about a detective solving a murder, a girl falling in love, or a chosen one learning their magic. An innovator can take an idea that sounds familiar and bring something to it that feels new and different. Or they can create an idea whole cloth—these are really the best books IMHO. When a writer is innovator, they’re the sort of person where you say, “I’d love to see Margaret Atwood do a take on Frankenstein” (or whatever.) We want to see what they’re doing because they’re doing something we haven’t seen before.

They can use a telescope.

I’ve mentioned telescoping before. But here I’m taking about seeing both the forest and the trees, but also the seeds on the ground and the roots. They can write at a line level. They can see how those lines fit into paragraphs, into scenes, into chapters. They can see how the structure of chapters contributes to the overall arc. They can see the arc overall and feel where it feels too slow. They can move around chunks in their head. If they’ve written multiple books, they can see how each one fits into their overall oeuvre. Telescoping is really important when it comes to editing. If you can’t do it, you’ll never be good at developmental editing.

They have a voice.

When we’re talking about fiction there are two different meanings of the word voice. There’s “voice” as in “the narrative in this book is so voicey.” It’s when you extra-feel who the narrator is through how the book is written, the diction and tone and maybe humor. I’m not talking about that voice- I’m talking about the voice of the writer themselves. They have a unique perspective, and even if all their books are different (hopefully all their books are different…) there’s something particularly them about it. Recently I was in some public place and I heard a song that was new but appealed to my 90s sensibility in the way that most rock doesn’t right now. I shazamed it—turns out Green Day has a new 2024 album I hadn’t heard yet. They have a particular voice, to me at least, recognizable by lots of electric guitars playing power chords, catchy riffs—leaving aside Billie Joe Armstrong’s unique vocal quality. When you read a book that is “meh” and you’re willing to leave it on a side table at an airport after you finish it, odds are you don’t have anything interesting to say about the author’s voice. Lots of books seem interchangeable when the premises are sort of meh, executed sort of meh, and the author has no voice. I actually think you can pull off a meh premise and meh plot if you have a strong voice (er…. this is what a lot of literary fiction is, after all.) Ultimately voice will get tied in to author branding: When people are signing up for a John Smith book, are people able to quickly articulate what that means? Ah, John Smith, the guy who writes smart locked-room mysteries with troubled protagonists who make a lot of quips. Etc. etc.

I have to apologize in advance. I had to write this hurriedly because I picked the worst possible week to try to cell my house and then leave for a retreat thousands of miles away. I am writing this from a meditation retreat where there is no cell phone access and extremely limited internet access. While I normally like to respond to comments and pretty quickly, I’m not sure I can do that this week.

Photo by Matt Ragland on Unsplash