If You Want To Be A Successful Writer, Don’t Make These Mistakes

When I started writing, I had a ton of ego and thought everything I published was pretty damn good. Probably better than most of the blog posts I was reading, if I’m being honest. So when publications rejected me without explaining why, I’d stare at the email and think, “Pfft…. what’s wrong with these people?”

At the time, of course, I was incredibly overconfident. But looking back, I was mostly just a guy with a laptop and an unhealthy amount of faith in his own opinions. And gosh, it took me a long time to realize that I was making things much harder for myself than they needed to be.

Let me tell you why…

These days, I’m the editor of a publication called The Daily Draft with more than 10,000 followers, and I constantly see writers making the same mistakes I did back then. All the damn time. So, if I’d known then what I know now, I probably would’ve got rejected less, and made much faster progress in my writing career.

One of the biggest mistakes I see aspiring writers make is not including enough personal experience in what they write. I’ll get an article in my inbox about writing, and sometimes it might as well have been a Wikipedia entry about the subject. It’ll…