The Writing Advice I Wish I'd Heard Ten Years Ago

I started my writing career about 10 years ago.

At the time, I ran a science blog called The Quirky Inquiry, where I wrote about why maggots grew on food, how much we'll weigh on another planet, and my favourite of all time: what would happen if you jumped out of a moving vehicle.

But this was the 2010s, and every grandma and their dog had a blog. My work disappeared into the abyss of dead domain names, and I eventually ran out of money to pay for WordPress hosting.

All this continued for 3 more years. I would submit stories to magazines and get rejected. I would write a novel no one would want to read, and I almost flunked a creative writing elective at university.

But in 2019, everything changed.

I went from a casual blogger to a full-time career in the humanities. I built a YouTube channel with over 400,000 subscribers, got invited to speak at elite universities (including Oxford) and even landed my first book deal in 2024 with Bloomsbury Academic.

And in retrospect, all my success in writing/sharing my ideas came from one mindset shift, and it's this:

Readers don't care about how brilliant you are if you don't give them what they want.

See, we'd all love to live in a world where all our ideas are accepted and acknowledged. We want to write from our hearts and just have people gush over our 3 am thoughts.

But in reality, every reading experience is a transaction. Your readers are spending their time and energy to read/experience your work, and whenever a writer breaks the social contract by believing in their own brilliance, their work suffers.

Fundamentally, the entire craft of writing should serve one thing: to communicate something life-changing to another person from another corner of the world. This can be done through a story, a piece of journalism, a poem, a Substack post, a newsletter, a video script, you name it.

Yet, most people start writing from the opposite end. They start from a place of alarming the world of their brilliance without ever considering if their work is valuable to a potential reader. They obsess over how to say something in their voice before even knowing what to say.

Nothing can be further from the truth, and this is a truth I wish someone had told me 10 years ago: your voice isn't something you discover but a reward you'll reap when you deliver enough value.

Once you write something valuable, you'll feel it. It feels like you've broken through your cocoon and touched the world with your idea. Your readers will sense it too, and they can't help but let you know how much you've changed their lives through emails and comments.

But this isn't a time to celebrate our genius. No. It's time to simply realise that you've stumbled upon a topic many people find valuable. Moreover, it's a unique problem you get to solve with your experience, and you owe it to your readers to find the best way to communicate your most valuable insights.

And once you shift gears from being a solitary writer to being a public servant, you'll never run out of motivation and ideas. Whenever you write, you'll remember the joy on your readers' faces and how much their lives have changed since reading your work. Then, you'll obsess over the right things:

• Is this worth my readers' time?
• Have I communicated my ideas with conviction and clarity?
• What's the best way to write about this idea so that my readers can enjoy it?

And when you spend years obsessing over these questions, your natural voice will emerge because you'll figure out the best way to break down the barrier between your mind and your reader's mind. This is the ultimate goal of writing and also where its sweetest rewards lie.

This is the advice I wish I'd heard 10 years ago: don't try to discover your voice, focus on the best way to communicate value, and the rest (including your writing voice) will all fall into place.

Until next week

Robin