By Ryan G. Murphy, RTNDA Digital Media Editor

Writing is easy. You just log in to your Twitter account and bleed.

Those words don’t exactly carry the same weight as sportswriter Red Smith’s, who put it: “Writing is easy. You just sit down at a typewriter, open up a vein and bleed it out drop by drop.”

Smith died in 1982. The canvas he bled on has evolved countless times since then. Regardless of whether the words are dripped onto typewriter paper, computer screens or TweetDecks, the principle behind Smith’s quote will remain a part of journalism for as long as there’s a need to inform - good writing and good storytelling is hard. It hurts. It makes us sweat. And without nurturing, good writing dies.

As RTNDA’s digital media editor, the bulk of my day is spent updating our Web site, uploading and managing videos and working with our staff to develop ways to help our members become better, more progressive journalists. On a weekly basis, I speak with people who’ve written for a living – for print, TV, radio, corporate – at some point in their lives and are now taking those skills to the digital realm. Some enjoy the digital terrain more than others but the common thread among many of the people I speak with is that there is a writer inside.

We’re blessed with 24/7 connectivity, enabling us to be in touch with a seemingly infinite number of news resources and people. Ironically, though, I think we’re finding that it’s sometimes difficult to keep in touch with ourselves. Specifically, we’re falling out of touch with that writer inside – the core of what made us digital journalists to begin with.

Since it’s one of my goals to help you become the best digital journalist you can, and that involves crafting and mastering your writing, I’m going to suggest two simple exercises that involve no digital tools at all. Simple pen and paper. Perhaps they’ll awaken the slumbering writer within and make your editing, storytelling, or designing at the digital level more effective.

Write a best selling book or a Pulitzer-winning piece: Every person in your newsroom can write a best seller, I guarantee it. Go get your favorite book of all time or your favorite journalism piece. Spread it out on your kitchen table and with a pen and paper, start to write. For an hour, copy word for word the text as you read it. Take in the writer’s word choice, setting, and story development. How do particular sentences make you feel? In news we spend so much time reading simply for the information, we hardly have time to embrace where the writer is taking us and how they are doing it. We’re all involved with storytelling – whether we edit video, design Web sites, report, or manage a newsroom. It’s worth taking a step back and understanding what fundamentally makes a story good.

Write a letter to a friend:  Not an email. Not a text. An actual letter – one that takes five to seven days to arrive and costs 44-cents to send. Use the finest penmanship you can muster and script each word as though it were the most important on the page. In story telling and in writing, attention to detail is engaging and word choice is a big part of that. Sitting down and taking 90 seconds to write a sentence with a pen, as opposed to banging it out in 5 on a keyboard will offer an entirely new perspective on your thought process as you script your narrative, even if it’s just catching up with an old friend. The next time you’re on digital deadline, perhaps you’ll remember a tool you used in your letter – or your best seller – that will make your finished product that much better. Sometimes it’s necessary to look back before going forward.