How To Become A Better Writer In 24 Hours Or Less

Use This 4-Time New York Times Bestselling Author’s Step-By-Step Process To Write Your Next Book, Blog Post, Or Status Update.

The ability to write well is important, whether you are an entrepreneur, author, or anyone who wants to positively influence others.

Matt Mullenweg, the founder of WordPress, has stated in the past that, “when you can write well, you can think well.”

What are some applications of writing, and how such a skill set could benefit you?

Do you want to:

Write a book and increase your authority, credibility or expertise in a particular industry?

Write sales copy for your website (whether you run a full-blown startup or an up-and-coming side hustle) so you can sell more of your products or services?

Communicate clearly with coworkers, contractors, and customers in email and other text-based correspondence?

Build your social media following through to-the-point, value-adding content, whether it is quotes, short commentary in addition to an image or video, or blog posts that are posted regularly?

Develop catchy press pitches so your hard work will get the recognition and exposure it deserves?

Create compelling ads or marketing materials to grow your business?

There are many ways you can benefit from improving as a writer, but it can be hard to devote your time to exploring this creative muscle if you’re busy with other day-to-day responsibilities.

For me, writing is part of my job. I just released my second book 3 Billion Under 30: How Millennials Continue Redefining Success, Breaking Down Barriers, and Changing The World.

The book features original content from 75 top-performing entrepreneurs, New York Times bestselling authors, professional athletes, philanthropists, social media superstars, and others. Each person shares 3–5 pages of “tell all” material to serve as a guidebook of practical advice for quickly accelerating your career and life using the distilled knowledge of these individuals who’ve collectively started companies worth billions of dollars and influence hundreds of millions of people every month.

However, unlike my first book (an award-winner and bestseller in its own right), this book turned out even better because we implemented the advice of #1 NYT bestselling author Tucker Max and his company Book In A Box.

The Book In A Box Process:

While Book In A Box has already published all the details of their content creation process online and in a highly-rated book of their own, I’ll briefly describe it below and share how you can use it to create any type of content (and in many cases, multiple types of content!).

So, how do you become a better writer overnight and develop higher quality content more quickly?

Step 1: Outline what “writing” or content you would like to produce. For 3 Billion Under 30, we had about one-third of our book contributors choose to use the Book In A Box Process to create their stories for the book instead of writing by themselves entirely. We gave them very simple prompts to spark a basic outline of what they wanted to share.

In our case, 3 Billion Under 30 has five parts (i.e. Start, Risk, Journey, Learn, and Succeed) and we asked each contributor to go into detail in 10–15 minutes of verbal communication focusing on just one part of the book and a formative life experience that matched the theme they chose. So, someone who chose “Succeed” may share an anecdote, in detail, about how they survived the civil war in Syria, or sold a company for $50M, or developed a lifestyle where they are able to travel around the world for eight months each year and still operate a seven-figure business.

The importance of the outline is that it forces you to think clearly beforehand, so that your writing time can be focused on writing, not thinking. It ensure your ideas end up on the page in a structure that makes sense and flows logically, not the order they happened to pour out of your head. This clarity is the biggest boost of the process for most writers.

How detailed the outline needs to be depends on the length of the content. For short, 3–5 page pieces, we were able to keep the outline loose and clean things up later. When Book In A Box clients are using this process to write entire books, the outlining process involves working with an incredible Book Developer (like Mark Chait, former Executive Editor of Harper Collins) to dive deep into how to position, structure a narrative arc, and flesh out chapter content.

Simply put: outline first, and save yourself time and effort later on.

Step 2: Don’t Write Your Content. Talk It through. Typically, this is done in interview form using the outline as your questionnaire or agenda. As we created 3 Billion Under 30, I got on Skype or Zoom and “interviewed” the book contributors who wanted to use the Book In A Box Process.

We aimed for detail and completion of storylines instead of perfection with each word and full eloquence. For us, we had a short, yet open-ended prompt, so it was easy for me to shut up and simply listen as each person talked for about 15 minutes to fully detail a preselected experience they wished to share, as well as “lessons learned” and practical advice for others.

For your own content creation, your interviews may be shorter or longer. If you are making a book, you may do 10–20 hours of talking in order to “draft” enough content for the next step in the Book In A Box Process. For social media tiles, or shorter blog posts, perhaps it will only take you 10 minutes or a couple hours to sketch out a month’s worth of content.

(Quick rule of thumb: Each 12 minutes of spoken content translates to roughly 1,000 words of final, written text, depending on your speaking speed and tendency to ramble.)

This saves time and keeps the content conversational, something that most writers struggle with as they aim to showcase their intellect instead of working to connect with their reader. Better content, less time.

For comparison, my first book 2 Billion Under 20 took over two years to make and became the “#1 Entrepreneurship Book of 2015” according to the Axiom Business Book Awards, and yet I think 3 Billion Under 30 is even better, and it only took about 6 months to create the book itself using the Book In A Box Process to supplement part of our content creation efforts.

Step 3: Edit And Delegate. After we got the 25 or so “interviews” that were used to create a third of 3 Billion Under 30, a few things happened.

First, I handed off the recordings to a virtual assistant, who transcribed the words as they were spoken. She also took out “ums”, “ahs”, and other unnecessary words or phrases that came as a result of most people’s natural speaking language.

Then, she sent me what remained, and I did an initial edit to turn those transcripts into readable stories that flowed throughout each page. I didn’t change anyone’s story, or add details that we weren’t given. We simply put the words in the form of the content we wanted to create.

After that, I gave this version back to our book contributors, who added in details and took a final pass on things they wanted to include or take out.

When they approved the edited transcripts, I hired two professional editors, one of which worked with Tucker on previous books (Command+Z Content) and Talia Koren (who used to manage the Contributor Network at Elite Daily and edit all the writing submitted to the platform for review), to go through the entire manuscript of 3 Billion Under 30. This was time I didn’t have to spend finalizing the book (and if I had to do it over again, I would consider including pros from the beginning and saved even more of my time rather than doing a first pass of editing on each story myself).

Again, even if you aren’t doing a book, and are instead creating other written content, the same process can be applied. The output will be even better content then you could do alone, as you’ll benefit from multiple viewpoints and editors poking holes in your work, and you’ll save time to make even more content in this fashion, or do something else meaningful.

For my book, I finished the process by hiring two more high-quality freelancers on Upwork to copyedit the book for any grammar problems (with 75 different contributors and writing styles, there were bound to be more mistakes at the end then most books or projects who keep a singular voice and content originator). I went through it myself one last time, and we had our book!

Not Only Will You Become A Better Writer Instantly…

Using this process, you’ll also position yourself to create multiple types of content from one source. A book can be broken down into excerpts and blog posts, as well as social media soundbites, short videos on key concepts, and more. Videos can be created as you go through this unique content creation process documenting exactly how you are working, or articles like this one can be written to explain your methods as an afterthought.

For 3 Billion Under 30, everyone who buys our book will be redirected to this “Thank You” page where we are able to give away the unedited interview clips in exchange for a “share” on social media about the book. Notice how content can be repurposed to improve your marketing efforts and further share the end product you’ve worked hard to create!

Suddenly, you are not only a better content creator in a shorter amount of time, but you are also a content creator who can…make more content!

Try This Process For Yourself And See How It Works

You don’t need to hire Book In A Box necessarily to make this work. In fact, they aren’t cheap, and only work with serious authors and thought leaders.

However, their ideas are open-sourced through their website and resources I’ve linked you to above. The key to this process, like most others you’ll read about online, is in the execution. Are you going to take these ideas and use them to make better content in shorter amounts of time? Or, are you going to nod your head, but ultimately close the tab when you are done reading and continue creating less-than-optimal writing and spending time on documenting your ideas rather than sharing them?

If it works for one of the most prolific nonfiction authors of all-time, as well as his clients, and top-performers that I’ve included in my book, then it will work for you.

Try it, and tell us how it goes.