My Journey to Mastering Writing: Discover How You Can, Too

Like learning how to competently play a musical instrument, there is no better lesson than daily practice.

I didn’t really learn to write well until I was in my late 40s. I wish I’d known what I know now when I was in my 20s.

When I was a kid, my parents were both bookworms. My dad was a book collector, with over 20,000 in his basement (where I made my bedroom in a corner made out of bookshelves); my mom was an English Lit major at MSU. My brother Steve has followed in Dad’s footsteps and also has a house full of books that he buys and sells at book fairs.

Mom and Dad gave me a portable typewriter (sourced from the Salvation Army stores we visited every weekend, looking for new books) for my 12th birthday and a used electric one when I turned 15. Dad talked me into taking typing in 7th grade; I was the only boy in a room with 30 girls and terribly embarrassed. In retrospect, it was probably the most useful class I took that decade.

My parents worshiped writers. Mom tried writing a few children’s books; I wish I still had them but don’t know where they ended up after she died. Mom and Dad infused me with their love of good writing and respect for the people who produced it.

By the time I left home at the age of 16 to live in a little rented room in East Lansing, I’d papered the wall of my bedroom with 56 rejection slips, mostly from poetry magazines. I’d sold one slightly pornographic short story to a men’s magazine, even though I was just 15.

And then I got involved in the anti-war movement, got arrested for my SDS activity and thrown out of college, started a small business (the first of 7), got married at 21, and pretty much quit writing in the early 1970s.

I’ve written here before about how I learned to find a conversational “voice” by writing each article or book chapter as a letter to a friend. Over the years that I owned two ad agencies (in Michigan and Atlanta) I used that strategy to write advertising copy, but then, in the 1990s, I discovered I could use that strategy to write an entire book.

My son was having trouble in middle school — he’s a genuinely brilliant person, smarter than me, and now has a master’s degree in science and runs his own science-based business — and was diagnosed with ADHD. I believed the “broken brain” riff from the guy who’d diagnosed him was BS, and came up with an alternative explanation: that he’d inherited my and my parents’ “Hunter” genes, left over from hunter/gatherer times before the agricultural revolution.

In 1994 I wrote my first book, ADHD: Hunter in a Farmer’s World, to him. The experience taught me a few things. First, that I could actually write a book. Second, that when I wrote about something I truly cared about, the words came naturally and people seemed to resonate with my writing. And, third, that getting published and having my first book written up in TIME magazine was a rush!

That book did well and my publisher wanted another, essentially a sequel. I ended up writing six books about the subject; I’m now revisiting the topic over at HunterInAFarmersWorld.com. In 1996, we sold the advertising agency in Atlanta on a 7-year buyout to our employees, so Louise and I had a “retirement” income (writing books generally doesn’t pay much), and we moved to a house in the woods in Vermont where I committed to writing full time.

The first big lesson I learned was that if I really wanted to be a writer, I had to write. Every day. Six or seven days a week. Writers write, after all: everything else is just talk and bluster. I read a quote, perhaps apocryphal, attributed to Arthur C. Clarke that, “Your first million words are practice.”

I wrote three “big” (100,000+ words) novels in the style of Robert Ludlum that were terrible, and five smaller private eye novels derivative of John D. MacDonald that were also pretty bad, although the last in the series actually got published (and is now, thankfully, out of print).

Between those and the ADHD books, though, I hit my million words and was starting to feel comfortable writing every day. Louise and I attended writers’ conferences and subscribed to writers’ magazines looking for tips, but the best lessons I learned were from reading other people’s work and my daily writing practice.

And something I learned from a friend.

One day in the 1980s I was visiting a dear old friend and accomplished writer, Michael Kurland, at his apartment in New York. As we sat in his living room talking, I noticed a 300-400 page manuscript sitting on his kitchen counter waiting to go to the post office.

“How do you do that?” I asked. At the time, just the idea of sitting down to write 300 pages seemed overwhelming.

Michael shrugged and replied, offhandedly, “Five pages a day.”

“What?” I said, having expected some esoteric advice or admission like, “Eat nothing but granola, do Yoga every morning, and strap yourself to your typewriter…”

“I usually only write five pages a day,” he said, as I recall. “At that pace, I can write a book in about two or three months and edit it in one more month. I get up every morning, have my coffee, and sit down to write and don’t get up to start my day until I’ve written five pages.”

“How long does that take?”

“Sometimes I’m done at 9 in the morning, and sometimes I’m still stuck at the typewriter in the middle of the afternoon.”

“Why don’t you write more than five pages when those five pages come easy and you’re done early?”

“Because then the next day I’ll feel guilty for only writing five pages, and that’s the road that leads straight to burnout. I’ll sometimes spend an afternoon visiting friends or just sitting in a sidewalk café in Greenwich Village and watching people, but, really, that’s still writing: I’m imagining those people’s lives, capturing and inventing potential characters, thinking of the story I’m working on.”

Michael’s advice came back to me in the 90’s when we’d moved to Vermont, and I made a real effort to write at least five, and no more than ten, pages a day. It worked!!!

Using his strategy, in early 1996 I compiled and re-wrote a collection of letters I’d written, most to Louise or my late friend Jerry Schneiderman. They encompassed my experiences traveling across four continents with the man who became my spiritual mentor and whose international nonprofit relief agency I did volunteer work for. That book, The Prophet’s Way, has now been translated into a half-dozen languages and is as close to an autobiography as I can come.  

Later that year, hitting my groove, I wrote a book about climate change and the end of the era of oil, titled The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight, which inspired Leonardo DiCaprio and his father George DiCaprio to make a half-dozen or so documentary movies (I’m in all of them but one, and wrote large parts of a few of them). Last Hours has now been translated into 17 languages and is used as a textbook in a few college ecology classes.

By the early 2000s I’d pretty much given up on writing novels and, when Louise and I started our radio show in March of 2003, I began writing every day for the show. CommonDreams.org published hundreds of my articles (and still does), and having my work recognized that way kept me inspired to keep writing.

In 2005, I compiled a collection of my articles — edited for flow and transitions between chapters — into my first political book, Screwed: The Undeclared War Against the Middle Class. That was followed in 2010 by Rebooting the American Dream: 11 Ways to Rebuild Our Country, which Senator Bernie Sanders had his staff hand-deliver to all 99 other senators with a cover letter recommending they read it. He later read large parts of it out loud on the Senate floor during his famous filibuster.

The final lesson I’ve learned from all this writing is that readers’ preferences change over time. In the years before the internet became a big thing in the late 1990s, people were willing to read longer nonfiction books like Last Hours; today’s attention spans (and the time available to read) are much shorter.

Louise caught this long before I did and suggested to the editor who’d published my 2001 book Unequal Protection: How Corporations Became “People” that we should write a series of small books that could be read in a single day or over a weekend. She wanted to call them “rainy day books,” but BK thought that was a bit too cute, so we simply went with a series title that all began with “The Hidden History of…”  

Each in the series has fewer than 170 pages of text, and they’re handy, pocket-sized books. Clocking in at fewer than 35,000 words, I was able to write two of them a year, in addition to the rest of my work writing. The tenth and last in the series, The Hidden History of the American Dream, will be out this fall.

I mentioned earlier that you can learn a lot from reading other people’s writing. It’s fascinating: when you look at a painting or sculpture, it’s difficult to know exactly how the artist created that work. But when you read a writer’s work, you can see and hear exactly how she’s structured it, how the information flows, how personal or impersonal she writes, and how she creates transitions to move from topic to topic.

Reading with a writer’s eye is, in my experience, a far more effective way to learn to write than taking a class or reading books on writing.

When I started writing novels, Louise and I dissected several books by Ludlum, John D. MacDonald, and a dozen others, breaking down their outlines and characters while highlighting particular turns of phrase we thought we could learn from.

Dashell Hammett, Ross MacDonald, and Raymond Chandler are particularly good for learning style, as is Hemmingway, in my experience. That said, you’ll probably find your own favorites: but read them like a writer (rather than like a reader) to learn from their work.

In summary, if you want to be a writer, start writing. Every day. Even if it’s just a journal, or a daily commentary on the news. Like learning how to competently play a musical instrument, there is no better lesson than daily practice.

Substack, in particular, provides a great venue for you to publish your writing and get feedback from readers; the site has an extraordinary internal system for leading readers to new writers, and if you publish every day you’ll probably catch an audience after a few months. It also features a number of great writing newsletters, many of which I recommend. Another site that works for writers is Medium.com, where I started publishing before moving to Substack in 2021.

So, get started!