We are having a relaxacon here in Tiny Town Texas, and over the course of the last day or so I’ve had multiple conversations that boil down to me saying: just write. This is, of course, perhaps too reduced, so I’ll expand on it here where I have a little more time, and then I’ll go hang out with a few dozen friends and colleagues and have this conversation again, I’m certain.
What do I mean by ‘just write’? Well, mainly I mean that you can’t get better at writing if you do not write, and you don’t need a degree (I will continue to argue that a degree in creative writing will categorically make you worse at writing than when you started down that path). You don’t need expensive writer’s workshops, you don’t need writing retreats, you don’t need special software. You don’t need to pay thousands to a structural editor. You don’t need to have existential angst and cut off an ear. If you want to be a writer, begin writing.
Write, and for a change, read. Read a lot, in the genre you’re writing in (if like me, that’s a very plural genres), make notes about what you like in books and interesting plot structures you see emerge in the stories, like bones under the flesh. Read outside of genre, read for research, read voluminously. Make notes by hand, on paper, as this will secure them into your memory. Keep a commonplace book. Absorb story until it oozes from your pores. Then, sit down and begin to write.
If you find yourself worrying about whether your writing is ‘good enough’ create a little ritual to banish that from your head, and write on. Later, when you have finished up what you are writing, and you’ve taken some time away from it to regain perspective, you can examine it with a critical eye. Not, and I cannot emphasize this enough, while you are currently writing. If you get stuck on the story, back up, read it from the beginning, and realize that likely you’ve betrayed something somewhere, whether the character in forcing them to do something outside the persona you developed, or the reader in not fulfilling a promise you made in the earlier part of the story. Cut – not delete! – the section, and paste it into a document. Start writing. It may well be that you leapt ahead of yourself and need to fill in more, and that scene was out of sequence. It may not even belong to this story – you contain universes.
Do seek feedback. Do not respond to a single point of feedback, that is insufficient data and will warp your voice towards theirs. If you publish a book, pay attention to the reviews, not as personal attacks, but to identify trends in the reader’s comments. If you share a work with a writing group, bear in mind that they are not solely readers, and their feedback reflects their own insecurities and biases. Just as yours will to them. Writing groups can be fantastic, or dreadful. Keep writing. Can’t find a writing group? Read your work aloud to yourself. This is a good way to find and repair stilted dialogue. Record yourself and play it back at more than 1.0 speed – 1.25 or even 1.5 – to make it sound less like your own voice and you’ll discover flaws your brain auto-corrects because you know the story so well. Many programs will read text to you, but this may be too dry and robotic. You reading will get excited and add intonations a computer can’t, and you should note when this happens and work it into the story with word choice and sentence structure.
Find readers. Readers will give it to you straight. Which includes, by the way, if you cannot persuade anyone to read your work. If this happens, back up, and ponder: is your elevator pitch for your work short and catchy? No one wants a thirty-minute lecture on your world building. Learn to hook them in twenty seconds, and let them read. If you feel there is still something wrong, go back to the beginning and read books and stories that are not your own. Make notes. Start writing again. Rinse, repeat, and eventually you’ll find out what’s wrong, and how to fix it.
There are no shortcuts in life. You need talent far less than you need persistence. Sit down, and just write.
Mad Genius Club 
7 responses to “Just Write”
I wrote a lot when I was a teen, almost all of which I later burned in a burn barrel. Then I wrote to vent and because some stories needed to be told. Then I showed my work to buddies, who liked it, flaws and all. (Lampooning faculty, among other things). But I wrote a lot of not-so-great stuff before the “people might buy this?” stuff emerged. And I had a lot of fun and let go of a lot of frustration with the not-so-great stuff on the way.
Read everything – oh yes. Fiction, non-fiction, “good” stuff, “bad” stuff, older, newer, try a little of everything and you’ll start to see what works and what goes ”thud,” even if only for you.
[And new-and-improved browser? Quit putting words on the screen for me, thou thrice-cursed paragon of illigitimacy, thou who art lower than whale scat in the Marianas Trench. May thy inventors develop piles, and their keyboards attract sticky suspensions the way black velvet attracts white fur!]
“Quit putting words on the screen for me,”
That could be Winblows; Go to Settings –> Time & Language –> Typing –> Show text suggestions when typing on physical keyboard. Winblows turned it on without asking.
World’s biggest virus strikes again.
I’ll have to dig into the OS and see if Mac has done anything screwy. I don’t see it in DuckDuck or Finder, at least not in the main sections, and there’s nothing obvious in the System Settings.
Oh, ok, I didn’t realize it was Mac.
I can endorse the not editing while writing but will add that it grows less as time goes on. If you write enough and edit enough, the skills will merge more than you thought possible.
“If you find yourself worrying about whether your writing is ‘good enough’ create a little ritual to banish that from your head, and write on.”
I do wonder, from time to time, it it is ‘good enough.’
But then I remember that I liked it enough to write it down. And I didn’t erase it later, because I still liked it. So it was good enough for me, at least. If I’d thought it was dumb or too rude or whatever, I’d have changed it.
I have to please me first. ~:D
“It’s a rough draft. You can’t edit what you haven’t written.”
“It’s not time to edit.”
“Shut the &#$(@ up!”
(Don’t mind me, I’m on a sugar and caffeine high plus Road Daze)