I ended a recent essay with advice to budding wine writers. I said, in essence, that it’s fine but not essential to earn formal wine credentials, because if your primary motive is to share your insights with others, the most important thing is to learn to write, and to practice that every day.
Fine, one reader said, in a comment about the piece. But how do I go about that? How can I learn to write persuasively and professionally? Where should I start?
It starts with writing, I replied. A short piece, just a page or two. Choose a topic that’s been on your mind, an opinion, a point of view, a take, maybe a hot one. Write longhand if it’s easy for you, since it frees you from the freight of technology. Let your idea flow out, then re-read to see what you have. Edit to sharpen its edges, but don’t fuss too much.
Then, find a trusted person, someone who won’t break your heart, and ask them to read it. Don’t offer a preamble or back story. Don’t explain it. Just let them read it. Once they’ve finished, ask them to answer three questions:
What is this piece of writing trying to do?
What’s working best to achieve that?
What might change to make it stronger?
Your job, while they’re answering these three questions, is to sit quietly and absorb what they’re saying. It’s not a discussion. You’re not trying to clarify your position. It’s not a test although it may feel that way to both of you. Your friend’s feedback is a disclosure to you about what your piece says, what parts say it, and what might shift for the piece to be even more fully itself.
The foundation of this exercise is a truth about storytelling: that every piece of writing is trying to do something. It’s trying to say something, to mean and be something true. Even a short wine review, of fifty words or a hundred, is trying to say something true. The writer bakes that something into the piece, into both its larger armature and its fine details.
Meanwhile all the reader has is the text. It’s literally all they have to go on. All they know—all they can know—about what you’re trying to say is encoded in the words on the page. The text is the piece’s face value. Sure, every reader brings their own ideas and prejudices to the exercise, their chemistry and biases, a kaleidoscopic cocktail of influences ranging from everything they’ve ever read to what they had for lunch.
If they are faithful readers, they will set aside what they themselves would do with this material and look instead at what you are doing with this material. They’ll try to tease apart what you’ve said and why, finding those places in the text that best advance your goal. Your goal, not theirs. And then they will think creatively, on your behalf and for your benefit, about what might shift to make your piece stronger, or, rather, more strongly about what it’s about.
It sounds complicated, but everyone gets the hang of it eventually. I know this because I used this approach over and over in my graduate writing program, and then ever since. It’s a workshopping technique, which works a little differently in a group but also works just fine one on one. It’s applicable to any piece of writing, and it’s also a helpful strategy when you’re stuck.
I concluded my advice with a suggestion: Repeat this exercise daily until you feel ready to start sharing your work more broadly. At which point your readers, now anonymous, may reply with questions of their own.
A version of this essay also appeared in The Circular.