Everybody Writes: Your Go-To Guide to Creating Ridiculously Good Content

Introduction

Last Tuesday, for the first time in my life, I did a push-up. That wouldn't be remarkable for most of you, probably. It might even seem pathetic to most of you. But for me it was an occasion to celebrate, because it capped five months of hard work that followed a lifetime of resolutely thinking of myself as spectacularly incapable.

I hail from a stunningly unathletic family: most of us are more Eeyore than Seabiscuit; we are the ones picked last for the team, the ones who are afraid of the ball. And I was (quite literally) a 100-pound weakling. So the idea of my being capable of a push-up (or 5, or 10, or—maybe, eventually—50 or more!) seemed as improbable as my writing this in Russian.

Why am I telling you about that pathetic-but-epic push-up…in a book about writing and content creation and publishing?

Because learning to craft better content can involve nothing more than developing some necessary muscles. Right now you might not consider yourself much of a writer, or much of a content creator, just as I never considered myself someone who could drop and pump out a set of push-ups.

In our world, many hold a notion that the ability to write, or write well, is a gift bestowed on a chosen few. Writing well is considered a kind of art, linked murkily to muse and mysticism. That leaves us thinking there are two kinds of people: the writing haves—and the hapless, for whom writing well is a hopeless struggle, like trying to carve marble with a butter knife.

But I don't ...