1 Writing Rule Every Writer Should Swear By
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If you are a writer you must swear by the rule of ‘COPYING’.
I would want to ask a question.
We all have our own rules, don’t we?
Some of us do not invite intruders into our personal lives, some of us like our emotions as clean as a slate and do not even try to explain us to others, some of us do not wake up without our morning coffee, some of us do not talk back only about the people we love, some of us make it a life rule to pre-plan everything, some of us wake up at 5 no matter what happens the day before, and a lot of us try to make rules but fail every day.
I do not know what rules you live by in your life but I do know that if you are a writer you must swear by the rule of ‘COPYING’.
‘How much you can copy and what you copy probably describes your entire writing career.’
How many times have you seen a writer and thought ‘Damn! How did he/she even think about this?’
To your knowledge, they did copy the idea from somewhere/someone and then pasted it with their creativity and you are wide awing at it.
No idea is a unique idea, it is how in-depth the research is and how finely it has been copied.
Every content creator, every writer, every artist is surviving because of the art of ‘Copying’.
The other day I asked one of my team’s writers to prepare a blog. With the experience she has, I expected a lot more than what she wrote. Before even reading the entire blog, I called her and asked about the sources of the blog. What she presented was the problem. Not her writing tone, not her vocabulary, not the sentence formation but the only problem was- she did not copy the right words. She failed at researching the best blogs on similar topics and therefore the produced content was not up to the mark.
And honestly, this is the secret to every best piece of work out there.
If somebody is writing better than you, they are probably doing a better job of copying than you are.
In my years of writing experience, I have practised this so many times.
Whenever I find a brilliant idea or a written piece, I go to the write-up, learn about the author and their inspirations and then research about their writings which takes me to the people they follow and their work. I have always ended up finding what the other person does is a refined copy of their inspirations’ work.
Austin Kleon, in one of his podcasts, has talked so much about the practice of copying from the right sources.
Copying is an art indeed.
So now when you start writing something, find the right sources and copy them with your intelligence and you are almost there with the perfect write-up cooked for your readers.