Art Archives | Page 3 of 12

3 Ways To Handle Criticism as a Writer

August 19, 2020July 30, 2024 Nik

Neil Gaiman once captured all you’ll ever need to know about criticism:

“When people tell you something’s wrong or doesn’t work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.”

Thankfully, most negative commenters on our art self-identify by telling us not just why our work sucks and what we should have done instead, but also that, by the way, we’re an idiot for taking the path we have chosen. In theory, it should be easy to ignore them.

In practice, however, the amateur gives far too much weight to any kind of feedback, especially the negative, mostly because thank god, finally, there is something to give weight to at all. After months of laboring in the dark, finally, someone descended from their throne of busyness to comment on our work. It must have been important to them — but it’s definitely important to us. This is a mistake, because 99% of criticism isn’t helpful at all.

The Best Piece of Writing Advice I’ve Ever Received

August 6, 2020July 24, 2024 Nik

In my first 3 years of writing, I wrote over 1,000,000 words — thank god that was all of them. Who knows how much more redundant verbiage might have flown from my fingers if it weren’t for William Zinsser’s three-word lifesaver:

Bracket unnecessary words.

This is the single greatest piece of writing advice I’ve ever received. Here’s how Zinsser explains it in On Writing Well:

12 Habits of Deeply Inspiring People

June 24, 2020June 28, 2024 Nik

What makes humans awe-inspiring? What makes someone magnetic, glowing, irresistible? Why do we hang on their every word, watch every single video, or read every one of their articles?

Every day, I ask myself these questions. I write inspiring stories — mainly because I need lots of inspiration.

Sometimes, the only way to be a hero is to ask for help from another hero. Most of the time, however, looking at them for inspiration will do.

When we see someone else showing courage, refusing to give up, or doing the right thing, it inspires us to do the same. We’ll go a little further, wait a little longer, and love a little harder when we feel that, somewhere out there, someone once made the same choice. This is the best thing we do.

Inspiration led to humanity’s biggest achievements, our grandest sacrifices, and our greatest acts of love. So what makes someone inspiring?

Here are 12 habits of deeply inspiring people.

No One Is Coming to Save You

June 9, 2020September 25, 2023 Nik

Your parents aren’t coming to save you. They’ve done that often enough. Or maybe never at all. Either way, they’re not coming now. You’re all grown. Maybe not grown up, but grown. They’ve got their own stuff to take care of.

Your best friend isn’t coming to save you. He’ll always love you, but he’s knee deep in the same shit you’re in. Work. Love. Health. Staying sane. You know, the usual. You should check in with him some time. But don’t expect him to save you.

Your boss is not coming to save you. Your boss is trying to cover her ass right now. She’s afraid she might get fired. She’s fighting hard to keep everyone on the team. She’s worried about you, but she has no time to save you.

What’s the Point of Online Courses?

June 3, 2020June 28, 2024 Nik

There are two schools of thought on teaching: One is that, “If you’re good at something, never do it for free.” The other is, “Teach everything you know.”

As impressively as the Joker demonstrated the first in The Dark Knight, burning his $6 billion reward seemed a little excessive.

Meanwhile, Nathan Barry can think of 89,697 reasons to share your knowledge freely — that’s the amount of dollars collected by his friend Chris in a Kickstarter after teaching CSS for five years.

Both philosophies come with their own set of benefits and problems. If you always hold back a little, you’ll never find out how good you actually are, but if you teach everything you learn in real-time, your expertise will build slowly and can never quite ripen in your mind.

Today, we’re facing an epidemic of fake teachers. For every time I go, “I wish this person gave a class,” there are a hundred where I think, “I wish this person didn’t.”

The 4 Kinds of Well-Earning Writers

May 23, 2020June 28, 2024 Nik

In the 21st century, there is no such thing as “a writer.” Everyone is a writer. Everyone knows how to write — but that doesn’t make them a professional.

It’s easy to lump word jugglers together under the generic, catch-all term — and, often, we do — but it makes it hard to answer what should be a simple question: How do writers make money?

Professional writers use their skills to achieve certain outcomes, outcomes desired by others, and that’s why they get paid.

It could be creating a feeling, making a sale, providing information, or one of a million other things, but it’s always a specific activity. Therefore, the term “writer” always breaks down into a more exact description.

There are, however, many of those descriptions, and we usually have to look hard at any one person’s profile in order to come up with it.

Blogger, author, journalist, creator, reporter, essayist, freelancer, marketer, artist, copywriter, the list goes on and on. Where should you begin?

You begin by doing what humans do best when facing the chaos of the world: You look for patterns.

You Don’t Need To Be Great — You Just Have To Be Good

May 16, 2020July 9, 2025 Nik

When he was 12 years old, Stephen King received his first rejection slip in the mail. It was “the only personal response I got over eight years of periodic submissions.”

When he saw the personal note at the bottom, he was thrilled — until he read it: “Don’t staple manuscripts,” it said. Ouch.

The #1 Pattern All Writers Must Break

May 7, 2020June 28, 2024 Nik

If you design a cockpit based on the average pilot body, not a single pilot will fit in it. Just ask the US Air Force.

In 1950, they measured 4,063 pilots on over 140 dimensions. Then, they took just the top ten (like height, sleeve length, etc.), and designed a cockpit that’d fit anyone who lands in the middle 30% on each of those dimensions.

Unfortunately, no pilot did. In The End of Average, Todd Rose tells the story. Even when they reduced the number of dimensions to just three, less than 3.5% of all pilots would fit in the resulting cockpit. The conclusion? “There was no such thing as an average pilot.”

That’s the problem with average: It’s calculated, not real.

How long is an average blog post? Five minutes? Three? Seven? It doesn’t matter. “Long isn’t the problem. Boring is,” Seth says.

You don’t always talk for exactly one minute. Sometimes, you talk for five. Sometimes for 20. Why should writing be any different?

4 Ways To Not Write an Introduction

May 6, 2020June 28, 2024 Nik

The number one thing stopping people from reading your article is its title. If they don’t open the wrapper, all the effort you put into the gift is lost.

The number two thing is your introduction. In the cruel obstacle course of “hurdles to jump over so people will read my writing,” the introduction is one of the most neglected, most easily dismissed elements.

In turn, a lot of articles are dismissed by readers, leaving authors scratching their heads, wondering what they did wrong. “My title scored 78 in the analyzer! I picked a relevant image! Why aren’t people reading?!”

They’re not reading because you wasted their time. You just waited to do it in the intro, and it made them even angrier than a bad title. Now, they clicked on it for nothing. They unwrapped the gift, and it sucked.

It’s easy to let clutter sneak into your introductions. It happens to all writers, and we don’t always catch it before it’s too late.

Most of the time, bad introductions are the result of laziness rather than lack of skill or imagination. The mistake would have been easy to spot, if only we’d made the time to look for it. We chose to ignore it. We were in a hurry. So we tossed our bird out the window, hoping it could fly with a broken wing.

Sometimes, a miracle happens. But if we don’t want to spend our lives scraping dead birds off the street, we better learn to respect our readers’ time.

Below are four instructive examples of how to not start an introduction.

These before-and-afters show how we try to fight clutter at Better Marketing. All authors agreed to be listed as examples in advance. We’re grateful they write for us, and we hope this study will serve them and others well.

Let’s do away with bad introductions.

How To Not Waste Your Life

May 4, 2020August 10, 2024 Nik

If you’ve wasted your whole life, can you make up for it in a single moment?

This is the question at the heart of Extraction, Netflix’s latest blockbuster and, at 90 million viewers in the first month, biggest film premiere ever.

Following Chris Hemsworth as a black market mercenary trying to rescue the kidnapped son of India’s biggest drug lord, the movie is full of car chases, gun fights, and a whopping 183 bodies dropping at the hands of Thor himself.

At the end of the day, however, it is about none of those things. It’s a movie about redemption.

After freeing his target, 15-year-old Ovi, from the hands of a rival Bangladeshi drug lord, Hemsworth’ character Tyler shows true vulnerability in a brief moment of shelter.

When Ovi asks him if he’s always been brave, Tyler claims he’s “just the opposite,” having left his wife and six-year-old son, right before the latter died of lymphoma.

Sharing the kind of wisdom only children tend to possess, Ovi replies with a Paulo Coelho quote he’s read in school:

“You drown not by falling into the river, but by staying submerged in it.”