Seven principles to write better than most people ever will

Executive overview

Most writers plateau because they cling to first drafts, wait for inspiration, and surround themselves with non-writers. Joanna Wiebe — a professional copywriter with 20 years of experience and two published novels — lays out seven concrete practices that force improvement regardless of talent. The framework spans identity, craft mechanics, community, and AI use. The writers who break through are not the most talented — they are the ones who never stop writing despite feeling inadequate.

Massacre your drafts

• Rewriting is not failure; it is the mechanism of improvement — Melville rewrote Moby Dick three times.
• Writing is layered experimentation: word-level phrasing, chapter structure, and whole-work coherence.
• Separate writing from editing — fill the page first, tighten later.
• Give yourself permission to write badly; the ruthless edit comes after, not during.

Shift your identity to writer

• Calling yourself a writer changes behaviour — James Clear's Atomic Habits principle: identity precedes action.
• A writer asks "what would a writer do right now?" and then does it.
• Identity shifting is more powerful than goal-setting ("I'll finish a novel in 12 months" vs. "a writer carves out time today").
• Daily writing practice can be as small as improving a work email or Slack message.
• Claiming the identity also grants permission to dare to embarrass yourself on the page.

Cut what the reader skips

• In medias res — starting mid-action — is one of the most powerful tools across all writing formats.
• In email: stop the story at peak drama to force a click; in fiction: end the chapter mid-scene.
• Cut warm-ups and conclusions by default: delete the first paragraph, then delete the last — the piece is almost always stronger.
• Every sentence earns its place by advancing the argument or pulling the reader forward.

Destroy your clichés

• Overused phrases ("at the end of the day", "emotional roller coaster") make writing invisible and forgettable.
• Brian Eno's oblique strategies technique: visualise the inverse of a cliché to generate specific, fresh language.
  • "Emotional roller coaster" → "helplessly bobbing on happiness" — same concept, concrete image.
• Identify and ban your personal recipes for three weeks (e.g., the rule of three) to force new patterns.
• Use AI (Claude) to flag clichés — but rewrite them yourself; that rewrite is where the brain develops.
• Study great writers' choices: ask why Ogilvy wrote that headline, why Austen opened that way, then research it.

Surround yourself with writers

• Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, Hemingway and Gertrude Stein — elite writers have always worked in proximity to other elite writers.
• Take the junior copywriter job at an agency; osmosis from skilled colleagues accelerates growth faster than solo practice.
• Even with 20 years of professional experience, still taking every class available — staying in student mode is a competitive advantage.
• Writing is isolating; a writing group or community provides both craft feedback and psychological sustenance.
• Extract one actionable insight per experience and apply it immediately.

Use AI to challenge you, not replace you

• AI has already displaced writers who treated it as a replacement rather than a tool.
• Frame: AI handles roughly 75% of the mechanical work; the writer's job is to do the remaining 25% ten times better.
• The 25% that matters: strategy, creative direction, big ideas, customer interviews.
• Practical workflow: upload brief, copy, and survey responses to Claude, then ask it to challenge the copy line by line with the objections the target persona would raise.
• To keep the brain sharp for that 25%, read constantly — cereal boxes, poetry, essays — and tackle one genuinely difficult book per year (Gravity's Rainbow, Finnegans Wake).

Stop comparing yourself

• Paralysis by admiration is real — even a masterwork like Carol Shields' The Stone Diaries can shut down writing for a year.
• Every author, including the masters, privately wishes their published work were different.
• Daily writing does not require a separate laptop or a perfect block of time — greater ambition inside ordinary writing (emails, messages) counts.
• Lower the bar for starting; raise the bar for effort within the attempt.
• The writers who win keep writing despite feeling inadequate — they do not wait until they are ready.

Practice exercise

From Ursula K. Le Guin's Steering the Craft — "Being Gorgeous": write a sentence meant to be read aloud where the words, punctuation, and structure sound like the thing being described. Le Guin's example: "She slipped swift as silvery fish through the slapping gurgle of sea waves." Try it with any physical process — building a wall, pouring water, folding paper.