There are no shortcuts.
None. Zero. Zip. Nada.
The tactics over principles mindset is a festering, pustulent lie that needs to be lanced and drained before it infects your entire writing practice.
Tactics are the junk food of the writing world. Quick, satisfying in the moment, and ultimately hollow as a politician’s promise.
Principles are the slow cooked meal that actually nourishes you.
It’s seductive, this tactical circle jerk we see online. It promises results without the sweaty, unglamorous work. It’s the literary equivalent of those ab machines promising washboard stomachs in just five minutes a day…
It’s basically absolute horseshit wrapped in shiny packaging.
And why do we fall for it? Because real writing. The principle driven kind, is hard. It’s messy.
It requires patience and persistence and pain.
Principles aren’t sexy. They don’t fit in a TikTok. They don’t promise overnight transformation.
What principles offer instead is something so much more valuable, which is sustainability, longevity and depth.
Think about the writers who endure and who produce work that outlives them, that stands against time’s relentless erosion.
Were they tactic chasers? Hell no.
They were principle embracers. They understood the fundamental truths of storytelling that transcend genre, medium, and era.
Whether they were writing advertising copy or cut to the bone storytelling from the pulp era…
They stuck to what worked.
Principles like:
Character drives story. (not the other way around)
Emotional truth trumps literal truth.
Specificity creates universality. (paradoxical but true)
Voice matters more than vocabulary.
Curiosity beats cleverness every bloody time.
The thing that makes your writing worth reading isn’t some tactical sleight of hand or formulaic approach.
It’s YOU.
Your unique perspective, your lived experience, your weird brain with its particular arrangement of influences and obsessions.
The tactics obsessed writer is like someone trying to build a relationship based solely on pickup lines.
Might get you through the door. Hell it might even get you lucky once or twice. But it creates nothing lasting, nothing meaningful, nothing that withstands the test of time.
And isn’t that what we’re after? Work that matters? Work that remains? Work that leaves a handprint on the reader’s soul?
You don’t get there with tactics. You get there with principles, applied consistently over time, with monastic devotion to the craft.
So what’s a writer to do in this tactics saturated social media hellscape?
Recognise the difference. Tactics tell you what to do. Principles tell you why.
Read like your writing life depends on it. Because it fucking does. Not just in your genre. Not just contemporary stuff. Read the classics. Read poetry. Read essays. Read weird experimental shit that makes you uncomfortable. WATCH THIS BUT BE WARNED
Write with your gut, revise with your brain. First drafts need primal energy and revisions need intellectual rigor.
Get feedback from readers who prioritise principles over tactics. The “this worked for me/this didn’t” crowd rather than the “you should do X” prescriptivists. (plus prescriptivists are lame)
Be patient, goddammit. (This one’s hard for me too) The principles based approach doesn’t give you overnight results. It’s slow. Painfully slow. But it builds something that lasts.
I get it. We all want the shortcut. We all want the magic bullet. We all want to bypass the decade of shitty first drafts and rejection letters and crushing self doubt.
But that’s not how this works. That’s not how any of this works.
So choose principles over tactics. Choose the long game over the quick win. Choose the fundamental over the fashionable.
Stephen Walker
P.S. It’s warming up around here again, so the I can guarantee the squirrels are gonna get up to no good…
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Stephen Walker
Unit 146317
PO Box 7169
Poole
BH15 9EL
United Kingdom