I think people learning to write and people learning to sell fall into the same trap. They treat writing like “Writing” and selling like “Sales.”

Imagine you’re hanging out with a friend and you said to them “sell me this pen.” I’d bet most of them would put on their best Wolf of Wall Street impression and start acting how they think salesmen act. They’d tighten up, get very serious, maybe clear their throat, and start giving you the hard sell on why this particular pen is absolutely going to change. your. life. Your guard would go up - and for good reason - they’re trying to sell you something! They’re thinking of it as selling: an intimidating, overloaded term that has them playing a part instead of just being themselves.

I think beginner writers do a similar thing. Hell, I do it all the time. I’ll have an idea fleshed out in my head but when I sit down and write about it, it comes out choppy and sounds nothing like me. I realized what I was doing wrong when I heard a one-off sentence from Jason Fried on the How I Write podcast. He said “Don’t write to write, write to communicate.” Such a simple sentence and yet it freaking blew my mind. I was writing to write!

Now, the concept wasn’t new to me. I’ve heard this writing tip a thousand times, just in slightly different ways. Write like you talk. Use simple language. Write to one person. All of this is getting at the same point. But “don’t write to write, write to communicate” made me see the whole act of writing in a different light. Before, I’d sit down and try to be a writer. I’d focus on the style and not the substance. Jason’s words were a reminder that great writing isn’t about the writing at all - it’s about the message.

And consequently, it’s caused me to radically change how I think about getting better at writing. Before, writing was one big tangled ball of yarn with seemingly endless threads to pull on. There was sentence construction, rhythm, tone, style, storytelling, and the list went on and on. And don’t get me wrong, those are all important aspects of good writing but it’s been helpful to me to start splitting these concepts into one of two buckets. There’s “writing” and there’s “communication.”

Writing and communication are so oftentimes thought of as one and the same but the distinction I make is pretty simple. If a skill translates to the other ways you connect with a person, whether it be talking, writing, cinema, etc., then it goes into the communication bucket. This is the foundational stuff that you’ll then tweak slightly based on the mode of transmission. Storytelling is a great example. If you have a great story, chances are it’ll translate pretty well regardless if it was said at a party, written on your blog, or made into a YouTube video.

Taking those foundations and turning them into a collection of words that are a joy to read is what I categorize as writing skills. I just said that if you have a great story, more often than not it’ll turn into something that’s at least pretty good to read. Improving at the craft of writing is how you turn that fantastic story in your head into a piece of writing that’s not only okay, it’ll be something your readers can get lost in.

This has been a helpful reframe for me because it helps me get unstuck. If, in the middle of writing a piece, I find myself struggling to make even myself care about what I’m writing, then I ask myself “Is it that I’m having trouble making what I need to say interesting?” then it’s a communication issue, if instead the problem is that I have a compelling idea but I can’t make the page match my brain, then it’s a writing skill issue.

Now, If we think back to asking our friend to “sell us this pen,” their main problem was that it was obvious that they were trying to sell us something. And that’s the problem when we try to approach writing as “writing,” the reader can feel that we’re trying too hard, that we’re not being authentic. So next time you sit down to get those ideas out of your head - don’t write, communicate.