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How to Become an Influential Writer

10 Writing Myths of Becoming an Influential Writer

We are in a world where everyone needs influence. To become an influential writer you need to be serious with the business of writing. Myths about writing are many. People keep asking questions every day about writing, how to write a book, how to tell good stories and more other stuff.

You have a job to carry out. You will either succeed or fail at accomplishing it. Writing is accomplishing as much as possible with the talents, skills, and resources God has given you. Below are the writing myths for upcoming writers and pro writers to remain relevant in this information revolution era.

1. Great Writers Only Care About Is Money

My greatest source of learning, however, has been watching the effect of my writing in the life of my readers. It gives me an education that no book, no seminar, no life coach, no professor, no thought leader could have ever given to me.

I’ve spent some years testing, applying, amplifying and refining the processes, practices, and principles in this post. The first 365 days of being a writer I never earned one naira, a cent or even a dollar.

Money is good but if the primary and core purpose why you choose to become a writer is to make money and money alone, you have to rethink. Choose to make impacts, when you do, the money will flow in, consistently.

Writing is not a fast making money scheme. Ultimately, it can be a lucrative business if you can break into the prison gate of frustration discovering the unbreakable realities of writing.

2. Writing Is Multidimensional

Choosing between quality and quantity is like choosing between being married to a stranger and someone you don’t love. Healthy, lasting writers’ growth is not dimensional, it is multidimensional. It is your duty as a writer to feed the minds of your readers’ something they cannot get somewhere else.

Part of the problem people face with their writing is their own definition in terms of quality and quantity. How do you tend to know the difference between quality and quantity?

Read closely my own definition of quality and quantity.

Quality defines the kind of readers a writer is producing.

Are your readers being genuinely transformed into being who they should be? Do your readers get matured daily while they discover the superstructures in your writing? Are they achieving their purpose, fulfilling their assignment on earth? Are they sharing your writing regularly with others?

These are just a few ways to measure the quality of a writer.

Quantity refers to the number of readers a writer is producing.

I don’t intend d   to transfer people from one career to the other. I use the conversational and conversion approach to win the heart of my readers. Many a time people tend to leave their jobs to pursue a writing career. I doubt discourage that but before you get into it fully I encourage you to start writing, first, as a side gig business.

A “side gig” is a bit of work “on the side”, meaning “outside your normal employment”.

How many lives are changed through your writing? How many minds have moved in less time from the stage of suffering to enjoying by having direct or indirect contact with your writing?

Answering the questions above will help you measure the quantity of your writing. But, once you are able to define these terms, it is obvious that quality and quantity are not in opposition to each other. They work hand-in-hand. Meaning, they are not mutually exclusive.

Every writer should want both. You don’t have to choose between the two. Exclusively or not you don’t have to ponder on the one to capture either quality or quality. Doing this helps to breed an unhealthy writer and readers too. Don’t be fooled again from today.

3. You Must Compromise Your Message to Grow

Do you have a fisherman or woman as a sibling, relative or friend? You can ask them this: when you go fishing do you want quality or quantity? I guess you are thinking what I think too. Of course, they want both. Their target is to catch the biggest fish as they can and as many as they can.

Every writer’s desire should be to reach as many people as they can as well as helping those who choose the right path get more mature as possible. The fact that many writers choose to ignore is that: quality produces quantity. You must not compromise your message to grow your readership base.

So, you have a health blog and it is not growing speedily as the blog of your friend who’s maintaining the stand of running an entertainment blog. Because someone engages in something and you see the person succeeding at it doesn’t mean you should follow the same path.

Stick to your message as a health blogger and work the super intensive capacity building techniques you can use to growth hack your readership base. Do you know that one of the tactics your friend is using to quadruple his readership base to yours could be that he involved in an intensive marketing and advertising campaign which you are not doing and haven’t discovered yet?

It is your duty to discover the disruptive patterns, processes, and principles he is using and apply them in your chosen field with practice and patience instead of compromising your message. Drifting away from your core message will cause more harm than good as a writer.

4. If you Persist Enough, your Writing Will Grow

It is true that quantity creates quality in some areas of your writing career. For example, the larger and wider audience your writing gets, the more your visibility and values enrich the lives of others. Would you like to have one hundred faithful readers every day or one thousand people who invite two other persons to join in the reading and engaging every day?

The growth of any community is not primarily determined by the quantity or quality of lives living therein. If there are a King and nobody to rule over of what value is that King? If there are many people living in a village, choosing a King to rule over them can be done without much stress.

Let’s be practical here: what if your dad and mom had used the quality and quantity myth of having children? What if, after your mom had put to bed the first child, she said: “One child is enough?” We should focus on making this child become of great quality.

Seriously, most of us wouldn’t have been here if our parent had and worked toward such a thought. Instead, for some, their thought was to bear more children at least two or more three to ease the growth of the family.

5. Great Writers Hype the Knowledge of Others

There is money in people. The knowledge of others, in essence, is the experience. This is one of the unbreakable writing techniques that some writers do not know. If you neglect the power of people you can suffer the idea loss syndrome.

People want to consume more information. Writers need to write more for them to consume. People need their problems solved; writers need to wear their armour of responsibility to work hard to succeed getting relevant results to win over the troubles.

What is the problem of your friend? Find it out, discover the solution and turn it into a book. What is that terrifying situation that has been troubling your community, take it as your own problem. Embark on a personal problem resolve retreat; seek definite answers until you find one or more. It takes more than dedication to move into the realities of others; it takes a skill or certain chains of skills.

Take the time to learn the skills you need in writing. You will save time in the long run and become more successful. Sharpen your writing ax by reading books, attending seminars, listening to podcasts, and by observing working models. Utilizing the right skill or set of skills at the right times gives birth to success. You are never wasting time when you are sharpening your ax.

6. There Is One Secret To Writing Growth

Writing is the ministry of farming. You don’t plant and expect to harvest the same day. A farmer can be dedicated and hardworking but he must also be skilled in using the right equipment. Successful writers are farmers, they love farming.

There is a time to write, and there is a time to act responsibly.  A formless writer is a powerless writer. But it takes far more than farming to living a better writing career. It takes on acquiring the right skills.

As a farmer with poor training, if you try to harvest tomatoes with a cotton picker, you will end up with a mess. Farming alone will not help you grow as a writer. Some of the writing farmers I know that lack quality training is volunteers of dying writing careers.

You must stay far from the error that there is nothing you can do to grow.  While you wait for your readers to engage with your writing, they are waiting for you to engage with their problems. Writing growth is a complex issue. It is been engineered by one factor.

Anytime you hear the called great writers attribute the growth of their writing career to a single factor, realize that he is only oversimplifying the distance he had traveled or he was not able to identify the real growth he experienced. There is more than one way of writing growth. I could show you writers who are using strategies opposite of each other, yet both are growing.

Some writers grew their writing by following the activities of a great writer in the social media communities; another grew him by attending seminars. Some grew theirs by watching online videos; others by reading trust books that are relevant to their brand.

7. Readers Only Want their Problems Solved

Some people love long writing; others prefer short messages. We have people with spiritual issues, mental issues, psychological issues, marital issues, financial issues, and the list continues. It takes all kind of writers to reach all kinds of people. In just the area of doctors alone, imagine the number of different professional doctors needed to resolve all the different kind of sickness of our world.

Your messages as a writer should not change; instead, learn the different ways to handle people’s different problems.  If you don’t handle people’s problem the way they want it they may never come back to read your stuff anymore or even buy a product from you.

The math is as simple as you read it. You must bear more good fruits if you want to remain relevant in the marketplace. If you are not yielding good fruits, people won’t come to harvest the solution of their problems from you.

So, I’ve adopted this mindset which you can too: If people are being changed by the overflow of power and grace upon my writing – then I like the way I’m doing it. When God gives you a skill or sets of skills, he adds the grace to command people and multiplies your opportunities.

Comparing writers is an illegitimate way to measure success. Success as a writer is bearing as many fruits as possible given your gifts, opportunities, and potentials. Success is not having more money or living in a big house than other writers; it is bearing as many fruits more possible than others do.

8. You Can’t Learn From Pro Writers

You can’t learn from pro writers; they never tell us the real secret to their success. They want us to remain their slaves forever, serving them until we die. This is the musings of a disturbed individual, probably a writer. Every writer should not have to reinvent the wheel.

Anytime I see the ranting or published works of any writer that has something I haven’t explored yet, I try to extract the principle in that thing, and apply it in my writing. Doing this has leaped me off the stress of life. Living life as a writer can be easy if you cannot debunk the superstructures of this post.

Writers who have succeeded most in this life are those who are not afraid of failure. You are not called as a writer to gain everything. You are called as a writer to first of all lose everything, then gain the things that matters. Writing begins by submission, continues in submission and ends in submission. It is number one a command and then a demand.

One of the secrets I learn quite for some years from today is that I don’t have to originate anything for it to work for me. It is not a must for you to be the inventor of everything that stays around you. You only need to be effective maintaining your core competence, direction and character using those things.

Respect those who discovered their writing talent earlier than you did and has worked on their ability to express themselves over time with certain proven strategies which you can replicate. To reduce the risk of plagiarism and copying the wrong things I want to share what you can and cannot transfer from ministries of great writers to yours.

Don’t Think of Copying This

First, every writer has their own unique styles and blends of talents. Don’t bother about being a clone of any great writer. Don’t strive to transfer their context to you. You will fail. One of the easiest ways to discover your own voice and writing styles is by following consistently, reading consciously the works of those who have a voice and writing styles.

If you can get addicted to their stuff, you can discover yours at a spot. The spur you discover at a spot will move you into a realm of super productivity allowing you to rise into significance being the chief of your own army. It is possible to do.

Second, the ministry of great writers is always more crucial than the writer himself. You won’t be able to replicate their readers. You must find your own vehicle and travel with it. Building a team of quality and quantity readers require proper effective service, sacrifice, and sage. It is your ministry, not their ministry.

If you are not eating the kind of food great writers eat, you cannot produce the same kind of waste solid material from their anus. Only if you choose to consume the kind of meal they do, don’t think of discovering your own readers from theirs. Writing is a ministry; the ministry of cooking and serving both to the poor and the rich.

Third, you can’t be like the great writers. Even the son of the American president cannot be him. The dad has his own role to play while the son bears his own burdens too. The son, trying to be his father will only move him out of God’s plan for his life.

God has intended it that only I can be me and only you can be you. So, trying to be otherwise won’t just work out. No one in his right sense will want my weaknesses. God is not interested in you being the richest man in the world by human assessment.

God made you the way you are and he gave you the creative ability to allow the creative juice of writing flow through your passion, talents, skills, gifts, and experiences to impact the world. The hard truth to believe is that we all started out as originals whereas some people end up as carbon copies of someone else. You cannot become successful by trying to become someone else, living their dreams, and following their path.

Think of Learning This Instead

First, you can learn and apply their discipline and principle. I believe that those who can’t learn from models have an ego problem. The reason is this: when people are full of pride, they are unteachable. They think they have all the answers at their fingertips.

However, I’ve come to discover that when people think that they have all the answers it usually means that they don’t even have all the questions. You can learn from other writers without becoming a clone.

As the old cliché says, “methods are many, principles are few; methods change often, principles never do”.

It is wise to learn and apply principles from how great writers around the world are doing it.

Second, you can learn about the writing process. People easily forget that you once started small. Some people even say: he is very lucky, born with a silver spoon. Forget about what they are saying, you only know the hot tracks and experiences behind the story that is bringing the glory.

Even when you say the truth some individuals may never believe you. Writing is processing, not programming. It is a process of programmed ideas to yield quantum and relevant results. This post is a process of ideas. It unveils the smart proper ways to develop your writing mind-set, skill-set and tool-set.

 

Third, you can learn and adopt some methods. You need the purpose-driven process to become a purpose-driven writer. There are existing purpose-driven processes discovered by purpose-driven writers that can help you become a purpose-driven writer. Every writer uses some type of methodology, intentionally or unintentionally.

Methods are just expression of principles. You can study the methods they use and apply the ones that suit into your own niche. You must not do it the way they do it. Endeavour to fine-tune the methods to allow it have great value and influence in the marketplace. If your writing carries influence, it can be sold.

Conclusion

The sweet thing about writing is that you cannot get worse at it by doing it. To master the art of writing, you must be prepared to read, re-read, listen, re-listen, watch, re-watch, learn, unlearn, re-learn and practice over and over again, for months and even years. There are strictly no shortcuts to achieve this if you want it.

Your writing must be both faithful and fruitful. Meaning, it shouldn’t be full of lies, deceits and bad fruits. Readers expect that from you. Give the best you have now. It is also important to remember that preparation is what separates a purpose-driven writer and the one full of mediocrity.

Always see the big picture while working on your writing goals. And practice. Write, observe and critique your writing till you increase your ability to become an excellent writer yourself. If you want to be a writer of great prodigy it will become a reality if you take proper actions.

I don’t want you to believe you can cut through the paths with obstacles and relax. You need to work hard than you have ever done. Don’t get too worried about the late nights – it will pay off at the right season. In the meantime, you need to keep growing. Forward ever, backward never.

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Prince Akwarandu

Prince Akwarandu

Badass Writer, Brand Storyteller, and Blogger. I help people become prolific writers and published authors teaching them with the right tools on how to grow their writing style, influence, and earnings without compromising their price, purpose, and promise.

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