The Only 3 Writing Tips That Actually Matter

(Just to be fully transparent, everything in this article is 100% grade-A horseshit.)

Let’s get this out of the way first.

I know what you’re thinking: who the fuck is this asshole, propped up on some invisible pedestal of bullshit and chicanery, plumbing the depths of fuck-all, and proselytizing heretofore unheard of essential tips that can improve anyone’s writing? It’s a fair question and one I’ve answered plenty of times prior, but if you’re new to Hydrate & Caffeinate, here’s the short version:

My name is Jordan Krumbine. Writing has been an essential part of my professional career for the past decade (plus change). This creative career has spanned the likes of AAA National (the roadside assistance company), Orlando Sentinel (the newspaper), Visit Orlando (the advertising/marketing arm of the Central Florida tourism industrial complex), a major technology company in the logistics/trucking space, and countless freelance (and other) projects.

I have a library of content available on Kindle. In the last two years, I’ve written two feature screenplays on contract, banged out my Abraham Owens Punches Nazis novel, and am currently deep into outlining my next two novels. (To be fair, the novel writing and outlining all happened in the last six months.)

There’s a reason I do this: I enjoy it. And I learned in the last few months that it severely helps calm my easily-traumatized brain.

So that’s who I am, that’s the bullshit pedestal of expertise I’ve propped myself upon, and this is how I make writing work for me.

Just Write, Right?

I took a run at this from a hundred different angles, and the result was the same each time: it is impossible to write an article about writing and not write about the most famous, infamous, and infuriating writing tip known to writers across the universe. So, you know ... sorry.

“Just write, motherfucker.”

It sounds simple enough. Sit down at your word processor of choice (or pen-and-paper of torture) and just … write. I don’t need to tell you why that’s bullshit, nor why it’s just as equally (maybe) divine. What I can tell you is that word count -- that thing that’s produced when you “just write” -- doesn’t actually matter, not even one little bit.

Well, actually ... never mind.

It actually does matter. And yes, I pay very close attention to it, as I’m sure you do, too. You might even pay an obsessive amount of attention to it. Maybe you care about your word count so much that you’ve set up a Trello board and track your writing sprint word counts so you can look back at all that green and say, “Yeah, bitch. I did that.”

And if you get the sense that I’m projecting my own obsessive tendencies onto the ephemeral “you”, well, you’re a shrewd one, Mister Grinch.

But let’s get back to writing tips and how, deep inside the philosophical core of “just write”, word count doesn’t mean Jack Shit, and Jack just went on vacation to Cabo.

If there’s going to be a theme to this article (aside from the aforementioned grade-A horseshit), it’s going to be the snowball effect. (And, no, I’m not talking about my favorite, nastiest line in Punched Drunk.) The snowball effect (and I can’t believe I’m describing this) is when “an initial state of small significance […] builds upon itself, becoming larger.” The quote continues to say it can also become dangerous, but I’m not interested in getting that nihilistic. At least, not until I’ve had a few more drinks.

Here’s what I discovered while writing Punched Drunk: when I sat down for my daily designated writing time, it didn’t matter if I wrote 100 words or 1,000 -- as long as I wrote something and moved my story forward, I felt accomplished.

Eventually, those small writing sprints snowballed into a ~60,000-word novel.

And by eventually, I mean roughly three months.

Because, like LEGO, small actions build to glorious masterpieces.

So, you know ... just write, regardless of word count. Trust your process -- your structure -- whatever that may be. And just write. Okay? Okay.

Now about making that writing easier …

Fuck Your Pants, Structure is Life

There’s a never-ending debate in the writing world about plotting your story versus writing-by-the-seat-of-your-pants (pantsing). Here’s a secret (that might get me kicked out of Twitter’s writing community -- fingers crossed!): the only people debating this are amateurs. Serious writers are too busy writing.

And they’re writing because, one way or another, they’re leaning on a structured process to keep them on point.

Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

Structuring your writing is hands-down the best way to help yourself write. First, structure your environment and schedule. Make space for writing so that writing works for you.

I have a room dedicated to work, and when I’m in focus mode, this is where I go to hammer out long-form writing. I have complete control over the lighting and sound in the room -- usually, it stays dark, and I have non-distracting ambient sounds and visualizers on my TV monitor. I regularly block out about two hours of writing time a day, but realistically am happy if I get about 30-60 minutes.

(Procrastination is real, yo.)

Right now, I’m writing on an Alphasmart Dana. Previously, I wrote a good chunk of material (some 40,000 words across multiple projects) on an Astrohaus Freewrite (which, spoilers, I ultimately hated). The moral of the story is that dedicated writing tools -- single-purpose (or limited-purpose) devices -- can dramatically help you create a physical and mental structure that facilitates writing.

Because, boy, there are a lot of distractions out there. And holy fuck on the frosted flakes of fuck-all, is it gonna get way fucking worse.

If structure is the freeway that helps you get to your writing destination, then your attention is the fuel powering the car. See all those billboards and signs and inflatable tube guys flapping in the wind? They all want your attention, and the more you give to them, the less fuel you’ll have to get to your writing. It’s as simple as that.

You don’t need a dedicated, prehistoric word processor like an Alphasmart to save your focus -- but it certainly helps, and if you’re lucky, you can find one for reasonably cheap. If you decide to go this route, I recommend aiming for the Alphasmart Neo 2 -- it’s one of the best pieces of focused-writing tech ever created, plain and simple. Don’t waste your money on Freewrite -- I’ve explained why, in-depth, over here. And the best one-size-fits-all writing solution, in my professional opinion, is an iPad and Magic Keyboard, running iA Writer in focus mode (be sure to set your iPad to “Do Not Disturb”).

Finally, to circle back to the beginning of this section, inserting structure into your writing -- yes, frigging plotting and outlining versus pantsing -- is like having the Pope himself bless your writing routine.

“Hey-oh! Fuck-o yo’ pants-o! Aaaay!” -- The Pope, probably.

Even though I’m a reasonably strict adherent to structured outlines, I still pants my way through the outline process. (For what it’s worth, I personally call it “freeballing the outline”.) The beauty of a structured outline is that it’s your blueprint. And when you finally sit down to hammer out those 100 words, you already know what you’re supposed to write. And since you already know what to write, those 100 words can quickly become 1,000 or even 2,500.

And while everyone else is debating plotting versus pantsing, you and I can agree that 2,500 words is a pretty fucking good writing sprint.

In environment, time, tools, and story, structure sets you up to win. Putting effort into structure is your way of telling the universe: hey, I’m serious about this shit. Structure surfaces problems in your story before you get to them, giving you time and tools to figure out solutions. Structure is a goddamn fucking brick wall that keeps distractions at bay and lets you finally -- blissfully -- just write.

When you apply structure to all of these different elements, it creates that aforementioned snowball effect. Small, seemingly insignificant steps to optimize your process build on each other, propelling you toward a singular task: just write.

Fuck the Trees, Buy a Printer

I love my gadgets. They’re my toys, my interests, and my happy little distractions. I love e-ink, and I love my tablets. I love being paper-free because who the fuck needs that shit?

And printers? They fucking suck, dude. Inkjets, explicitly. Ink smudging, ink running out, always taking so long to print, fucking wireless setting that somehow end up being a literal pain in the ass (please don’t ask how they got up there).

But here’s the thing: there is no greater satisfaction, no purer sense of raw accomplishment, than printing off your writing. More importantly, there’s no greater motivation than printing off pages and seeing your manuscript physically grow.

And despite, you know, printers, there’s even a practical reason to printing, beyond the invaluable motivational aspect of holding your physical pages. Let’s (once again!) circle back to structure and apply consistent formatting to our manuscripts -- 12-point Times (although I’m partial to Baskerville), double-spaced, and numbered pages. This dramatically facilitates reviewing and line-editing, and the consistent formatting will also help locate edits in the master document.

Consistent formatting also helps with motivation in the long run. It’s something that I really came to appreciate during my screenwriting days where those overly-formatted and structured pages can add up fast -- applying an equivalent structure to traditional writing really helps you feel the progress.

500 words in a word processor is just another round of digital detritus. Two printed pages -- 12-point Baskerville, double-spaced -- is substantive material snowballing into a more significant manuscript.

Print your work. Skip the inkjet and get a laser printer. For $100, it comes with your first cartridge, and you probably won’t have to invest another dime for a year -- or at least many, many months.

Feel bad about all that paper? After your first few projects, you’ll end up with reams of useless drafts. I turn those around in my scrap pile, printing new outlines on the backside of the old pages.

At the end of the day, printing your writing is wholly unnecessary, and the benefits are almost entirely psychological. It’s wasteful and, for the technophobe, might even require more work than sitting down to write in the first place.

But if you’re serious about writing, print it out.

You can thank me later.

The Twitter Writing Community is Garbage. Now Excuse Me While I Share This Post.

I know, I know. The title said three tips, and here’s an inexplicable fourth. Why? Is it just to shit on Twitter’s writing community while simultaneously milking said Twitter community for useless internet clout?

You’re goddamn right.

Even the premise of this section is self-fulfilling, underscoring how utterly inane the online writing community actually is. Of course I’m going to shit on it while simultaneously promoting this blog to the exact same audience -- because that audience is almost never going to read this.

The Twitter writing community is a digital get-rich-quick scheme for writers. It’s a way to build a massive, artificial audience of writers who are only interested in self-promotion and Twitter users who’ve been programmed to scroll endlessly. These users -- because of that programming -- are incapable of digesting anything beyond 240 characters.

You know who I’m talking about. All those people in your life who claim they’re “not readers” while endlessly scrolling endless feeds of internet garbage. Of course they’re readers -- they just have been programmed to read junk. Even our phones tell us how much of that garbage we’re reading!

And even if someone from the Twitter writing community clicks into this article, they most assuredly won’t be able to read far enough to see that there are four writing tips, not three, and that the fourth tip is about how godawful shitty the Twitter writing community actually is.

Self-fulfilling premise. It boggles the mind.

Look, I’m not saying don’t engage on Twitter (or Reddit or wherever). But I am saying, if you’re serious about writing, understand that social media is total fucking horseshit. It always has been and always will be. Most importantly: social media is designed to rape your fucking skull, and don’t you dare fucking think about it any other way. Yes, it is deceitful, manipulative, destructive, and it is reprogramming your brain with every swipe, scroll, and like.

Social media is designed from the ground up to distract you, steal your attention, monopolize your time, and rape your fucking brain.

And for what?

Literally: nothing.

There is absolutely nothing quantifiable to get out of Twitter and its writing community. There are no book sales. There are no readers -- again, those are in-your-face contradictory premises because people programmed to consume “content” 240 characters at a time also self-describe as “not readers”.

So why the fuck would you waste your time trying to share your long-form creative with them?

(Is what I’m constantly asking myself, thankyouverymuch.)

Twitter is garbage. And you’re still gonna use it. This is why, once again, we circle back to structure: at least try to protect yourself from the incalculable damage done by social media. Structure your writing time and structure your Twitter time.

I’ve set up my Emergency Creative feed as the promotional/marketing arm of my website. I give all of two-shits about engagement and am merely interested in showcasing my creative work.

Yes, I know this is a fool’s errand for all of the reasons I’ve already (repeatedly) laid out. And yes, I’m still doing it -- while it remains a wasteful exercise in building an audience, it remains (for now) a good way to stretch my other creative muscles, creating animation, graphics, and marketing copy that I otherwise would never get to play around with.

They don’t call me a Creative Wizard for nothing.

These days, I structure my Twitter time fairly simply: one hour of mixed-use, first thing in the morning. That’s it. For the most part, social media stays on ice until the following morning. Most of the time, it works. Sometimes it doesn’t.

Today, my structured Sunday blogging day, I’ve cranked out a 2,000+ word “writing tips” article, and later I’ll put another 500 words into my snowballing outline for my Monster Penis novel.

Today ... it works.

Tomorrow … I’ll fuck around until my 2-hour writing block is reduced to only 15 productive minutes.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to print this shit out and get inexplicably (sexually) excited over how many pages I just wrote.

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