How to Write When You're Not a "Writer"
Last month, a product manager named David emailed me. "I have to write a blog post for our company," he said. "But I'm not a writer. I'm a product person. I think in spreadsheets, not sentences."
I liked David immediately, because he was being honest about a fear that roughly ninety percent of professionals share and almost nobody admits to: the terror of the blank page. Not the "I'm a tortured artist staring at my typewriter" kind of terror. The "I have a deadline and a blinking cursor and I would rather reorganize my desk drawers than write this thing" kind of terror.
I told David what I'm about to tell you, and I want you to hear it the way I meant it: with warmth, without condescension, and with the full authority of someone who has an MFA in creative writing and still sometimes stares at a blank document for twenty minutes before writing a single word.
You can write. You already do.
You write more than you think
Here's something that amuses me every time I encounter it. Someone will tell me, firmly and sincerely, that they "can't write." Then they'll send me a Slack message that's clear, funny, and perfectly structured. Or they'll write an email to a colleague that explains a complex idea in three crisp paragraphs. Or they'll text me a story about something that happened at work that's so vivid I can picture the conference room.
You're not bad at writing. You're bad at performing writing. There's a difference.
When you write a Slack message, you don't think about it. You just say the thing. When you sit down to write a "real" piece of content, suddenly you're not you anymore. You're Writer You. And Writer You is stiff, formal, and terrified of sounding stupid. Writer You uses words like "leverage" and "utilize" and "in order to" because they sound more professional than "use."
Writer You is the problem. Regular You is the solution.
The best business writing doesn't sound like writing. It sounds like a smart person explaining something clearly. You already do that every day. You just don't do it in Google Docs.
The Slack message trick
Here's the technique I gave David, and it's the same one I give every non-writer who has to write something:
Don't write the blog post. Write a Slack message to a colleague explaining the thing you want to say. That's it. Open Slack (or pretend to), think of a specific coworker you like, and explain the idea to them the way you would if they stopped by your desk.
"Hey, so I've been thinking about this thing with our onboarding flow. You know how we lose like 30% of new users in the first three days? I think the problem isn't the product. I think it's that we're asking them to do too much before they've had a single win. What if we stripped the first session down to just one task?"
That? That's a blog post. That's a perfectly good opening paragraph that just needs a little polishing and a second act. The structure is there. The voice is there. The insight is there. All it needs is for you to keep talking.
David tried this. He wrote a Slack message to his favorite engineer explaining why he thought their onboarding was broken. It was 400 words long and it was excellent. We cleaned it up, added some context and a conclusion, and it became the best-performing post on their company blog that quarter.
"That doesn't count as writing," David said.
"It absolutely does," I said.
Permission to be imperfect
I have an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. I mention this not to brag (okay, a little to brag) but to make a point: even after two years of intensive writing education, surrounded by some of the most talented writers in the country, I still write terrible first drafts. Genuinely bad ones. Sentences that go nowhere. Paragraphs that contradict themselves. Metaphors that start as cooking analogies and somehow end up being about submarine warfare.
The first draft is supposed to be bad. That's its job. Its job is to exist, so that you have something to fix.
Non-writers get stuck because they're trying to write the final version on the first pass. They type a sentence, hate it, delete it, type another sentence, hate it, delete it, and after an hour they have nothing and a deep sense of personal failure.
Professional writers get stuck too. We just know that being stuck is part of the process, not evidence that we're frauds. The difference isn't talent. It's permission. Permission to write badly on the way to writing well. (The first sentence is a promise, but it doesn't have to be perfect on the first try.)
So here's your permission, from someone with a fancy degree and everything: your first draft is allowed to be garbage. Write it fast. Write it messy. Write it like nobody will ever read it, because nobody will. The first draft is just you figuring out what you think. The second draft is where you figure out how to say it. The third draft is where you cut everything that's not necessary. And that's your post.
You don't need to be a great writer to publish something worth reading. You need to be a clear thinker who's willing to revise. (Editing is an underrated skill, and it's where good writing actually happens.)
Three things you can stop worrying about
Stop worrying about sounding smart. Smart writing isn't writing that uses big words. It's writing that explains complex things simply. If your eight-year-old niece couldn't understand your sentence, it's not sophisticated. It's unclear.
Stop worrying about length. Nobody ever finished reading a 2,000-word blog post and thought, "I wish that had been longer." Say what you need to say. Stop when you're done. If that's 500 words, wonderful. Some of the best things ever written are short. The Gettysburg Address is 272 words. Your blog post about quarterly planning does not need to be longer than the Gettysburg Address.
Stop worrying about being original. You don't need a revolutionary insight. You need a genuine one. Something you've noticed, experienced, or figured out through doing your job. The fact that it's obvious to you doesn't mean it's obvious to everyone. Some of the most useful writing in the world is someone saying a simple thing clearly.
The cooking analogy you knew was coming
My partner doesn't cook. He says this with the same resigned certainty that David used when he said he wasn't a writer. "I'm not a cook." But every Saturday morning, he makes scrambled eggs for our kids that are somehow better than mine. Soft, buttery, exactly right.
"You're cooking right now," I told him once.
"This doesn't count," he said. "This is just eggs."
It counts. Eggs count. Slack messages count. Clear emails count. The product manager who explains a complex feature in plain language is writing. The engineer who documents a process so the next person can follow it is writing. The founder who sends a company update that makes people feel connected to the mission is writing.
You don't need to be a writer. You need to be someone with something to say and the willingness to say it in your own voice, imperfectly, without hiding behind jargon or formality or the idea that writing is a talent you either have or don't.
You have it. You just call it "emails" and "Slack messages" and "that doc I threw together." Start calling it writing. Because it is. And it's probably better than you think.