Always Think of the Hook First

In his pop­u­lar book, Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell made the case that there was one num­ber that pre­dicted your skill level in a field: the num­ber of hours of ded­i­cated prac­tice. In pop­u­lar cul­ture, this idea has been sim­pli­fied. Some think that if you just do some­thing for 10,000 hours, then you’ll be­come a world-class ex­pert. This is false.

What does the word “dedicated” mean in the phrase “dedicated” prac­tice? It means ap­ply­ing fo­cused, de­lib­er­ate thought to it. It means re­flect­ing on your own per­for­mance. It means seek­ing help from mas­ters in the field. Above all, it means achiev­ing mas­tery is not easy.

I aim to mas­ter the skill of writ­ing. In my free time this week, I’ve been work­ing on my de­lib­er­ate prac­tice of writ­ing. In do­ing so, I’ve come to some con­clu­sions. If you’d like to join me in pur­su­ing mas­tery of the writ­ten word, here’s what I think you should do.

Proof it Yourself

Two-time Pulitzer prize-win­ner David McCullough says “Writing is think­ing. To write well is to think clearly. That’s why it’s so hard.”

Because the act of writ­ing is also the act of think­ing, the process of re­vis­ing text clar­i­fies thought. I per­son­ally find that my ar­gu­ment when I first touch my key­board usu­ally stands in stark con­trast to when I hit “publish.”

Heavy-handed re­vi­sion tools like ChatGPT ac­tively dis­rupt this great ben­e­fit of the re­vi­sion process. Sure, they can rewrite tone to be more at­trac­tive on­line, but they also rob you of the op­por­tu­nity to de­velop your con­cept. That’s why I turn every­thing else off and only use Harper: be­cause it gets out of the way of what I am try­ing to say. You can’t re­flect on what you’ve writ­ten if you are not the one re­flect­ing.

Read The Work of Great Writers

When I sit down to write af­ter spend­ing time on­line, I feel de­flated. The com­pe­ti­tion of so­cial me­dia and the churn of the news cy­cle both lead to poor prose.

When I sit to write af­ter read­ing Bonnie Garmus or Cal Newport, I feel in­vig­o­rated. I can imag­ine a shape for the words on the page which pre­cisely cap­tures the ideas I’m try­ing to com­mu­ni­cate. Read­ing great lit­er­a­ture gives you an in­tu­ition for what your own work should look like.

Think of the Hook First

In rap­per cir­cles, it’s a com­mon point of de­bate whether to think of the verse first or the hook.

One one hand, the verse is the sub­stance of the song. It con­tains the mes­sage, the de­tail, and the per­sonal mean­ing. Mu­sic de­rives much of its com­plex­ity from the verse. On the other hand, the hook is what gets peo­ple to lis­ten. It is what makes them stop flick­ing through Spotify and fall into the beat.

If you’re writ­ing for an au­di­ence, you have a lot of com­pe­ti­tion for their at­ten­tion. Spend more time on the in­tro­duc­tion than any­thing else. It should cap­ture your read­ers, de­light their imag­i­na­tions, and put them in your shoes.

Don’t Get Attached

I spent a long time on a post sim­i­lar to this one. I was quite proud of it, for I had spent hours adding lay­ers of de­tail and quite a few case stud­ies from my own work. Alas, Gutenberg de­cided it was not meant to be and chucked it into obliv­ion.

Although I was ini­tially crest­fallen from the loss, I now be­lieve the sec­ond round ended up even bet­ter. To truly re­vise your work, you’ll in­evitably have to delete parts of it. Get com­fort­able with that.