3 tips to become a better writer from the Archer City Writers Workshop

🤠 Hello from Archer City, Texas, all of you.

We came for the Archer City Writers Workshop, in the high plains hometown of novelist Larry McMurtry, who died last year at 84.

• We studied writing Friday and Saturday with a group of Texas reporters, and McMurtry’s sister, Sue, joined us for public readings.
• We toured the old jail, visited a brewery in Wichita Falls, and met a horse whisperer named Jackie, whom McMurtry called America’s Last Cowgirl.

We wanted to share some of the tips we took away because most of us could become better writers.

• Be brief: You can probably say it with fewer words. Respect your reader’s time by cutting redundancy. Reading your work aloud can help identify fat. Here is an example of what you can do with 300 words.
• Integrate the information into the story: You’ll lose a reader’s attention with thick paragraphs loaded with statistics and data, and no action. Here’s one where the writer has weaved characters into the story.
• A story about a place is really a story about people: These profiles of idyllic Lipscomb, Texas, an objectively happy place, and El Paso after the 2019 mass shootings show us that a city’s story only comes into focus when readers meet its people.