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Hi, I'm quite interested to hear your personal journeys on writing, and in particular, the most effective ways to practice writing.
How does one train oneself? Are there any guaranteed methodologies that will improve one's writing?
Thanks! Looking forward to hearing your thoughts :)
Everyone learns to write at school, but aside from that some people keep a diary, others write letters or emails, correspondence, others like to write poems and shorter rhymes. It really depends on what you want to write: political tracts? religious pieces? academic? and if so what under these broad categories: which religions, what politics, which academic disciplines? I think only you can decide what you want to write and follow the tradition in whatever that might be.
When you want to improve writing skills, you must practice writing in short and you need to spend more time in writing.
Reading works of other writers is the most important step, in my opinion.
This is the best way to start, j10234.Quote:
Originally Posted by Scheherazade
Writing is rewriting.
Do not have too many expectations of the first draft. There will be holes, spelling mistakes and stupid errors - but these errors are part of the writing process. The "crappy" first draft is the foundation - without it you cannot move forward. The final piece may not even resemble the first draft - but the 1st draft is the crucial 1st step. It does not have to be perfect - and problems may resolve themselves after the 1st draft has been produced.
The first draft is the first step. The second step is revising it.
Simply reading, writing, and re-writing are the big three, with particular emphasis on the first and last.
I do have three exercises I enjoy apart from that. The first is coming up with sentences that I'm confident nobody has ever said before, sometimes about a particular subject or sometimes about nothing in particular, just to see what comes out of it. The second exercise consists of taking particularly bad work, such as the opening of The Da Vinci Code, and reworking it to something more palatable, while taking notes on each alteration.
My third procedure merely takes snatches from different poems or a particularly good bit of prose and combines them as part of a stanza. Usually, if I'm writing something designed to hold Tennyson and Browning together, the quality of the writing immediately improves overall.
These are good ideas, Trevor Gower. The last three exercises are particularly innovative.
Use lots of drugs. Lots of alcohol. Lots of sex. Listen to free jazz saxophone players doing their wild crazy thing and try to write like they play.
Try to write to the rhythms of the bed springs of whorehouses.
Try to write with pain of a soldier dying on the battlefield.
Right with all the noise & crash of American bombs falling on other countries.
Right with the pump & thawed of police Billy clubs hitting on somebody's head.
Rights with the energy of riots on the streets.
You probably won't learn much from other writers. The literary world is too backward & conservative & reactionary & filled with censorship. Most of all, the literary world is filled with a bunch of arrogant so-and-so's uptight about sex, who masturbate 10 times a day dreaming of their novel hitting it big.
You might find the painters to be much more inspirational than actual writers. I find the romantic & modern & postmodern painters to be the most inspirational!
Whatever you do don't write like everybody else! How boring!
I have carpal tunnel, and use voice recognition software, and I don't feel like going back in correcting the mistakes of the voice recognition software. I don't apologize for any errors.
I invite the literary world to kiss my ***. The literary world is just a big blob of diarrhea, if you want to be a great writer, ignore the literary world,, it's not like it's producing much in the way of great literature.
Actually writing, over and over again, is the best way to train your writing skills. You can participate in as must substance abuse and illegal prostitution you want, but if you never actualy practice writing, then you're never going to get any better at writing.Quote:
Originally Posted by WolfLarsen
Wolf, do your suggestions include children's writers, and people wo generally arent interested in writing about masrurbation habits as thier main topic?
Just FYI, Lolita isn't praised because of its depiction of illegal sex acts.
Simply be willing to pay attention to what is suggested you by your inner voice, to honor it and follow it. What can be made of this and whether something can be made is a separate issue and highly individual. A writer is someone who writes.
There are things you can do to improve your writing such as reading deeply and using great and imaginative exercises, but a writer does something unique in that he or she enters and begins and against all odds, continues.
Be willing to stack up a lot of work that does not work for various reasons. Be a writer who generates as well as someone who refines. Be generous with yourself. Go all out. Some people are polishing the diamond types but just as many may well be those casting a line out there, time and time again, trying various locations, various voices, various subjects, point of views, etc.
This is harder to follow as one gets older and remembers rejections. But then again the rejections can inform certain aspects of the work, such as where the energy is.
Reading sounds like the general consensus here, so reading has been duly noted moving forward into the new year.
Besides reading, finding your voice, and the like, I'd suggest working out the little things.
Pick up a copy of Strunk and White's Elements of Style. You'll find some basic grammar and usage rules in the first section. Although some are outmoded, the rest are critical. Above all, master punctuation.
Once you've learned the basics, weed out every unneeded word, phrase, or sentence. Understand that you, as a writer, are working on borrowed time. William Zinsser, in On Writing Well, wrote:
"[The reader] is a person with an attention span of about twenty seconds. He is assailed on every side by forces competing for his time: by newspapers and magazines, by television and radio, by his stereo and videocassettes, by his wife and children and pets, by his house and his yard and all the gadgets that he has bought to keep them spruce, and by that most potent of competitors, sleep. The man snoozing in his chair with an unfinished magazine on his lap is a man who was being given too much unnecessary trouble by the writer."
Readers don't have time for excess. Learn to eliminate yours.
Read good books by great writers and show-up every day at your desk. I learned from Hemingway to write every morning for a few hours, or at least to be there and practice or edit or read. Consistency helps me a lot. He also suggests to stop when you still know what to say, so you could pick-up and continue the next morning from where you left.
"There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed," said Hem :)
Anna
I would say read a lot, get a feel for different styles. Write a few things, try and develop your own sense of style. Read what you've written aloud, make sure it reads naturally and easily. And just keep reading and writing as much as you can
Some writing suggestions from someone who has not written a book. However, this is what I would do.
1) Go to the library or bookstore and find where you expect your book will be placed when it is finished. Read some of the books that are there already.
2) Write a first draft without trying to revise it. Just get something finished. Continue reading similar books to the one you are writing.
3) Revise your draft so another human being will find it worth reading it. By this time you should not need to read any other books if you have done steps 1 and 2.
Improving writing is a topic I've been longing to discuss at length, though I lacked a place to do so until now.
These are things I wish I'd known when I started so many years ago, because they would have saved a bunch of time and wasted drafts.
1.) The first draft masterpiece doesn't exist. This is the first thing a new writer needs to learn. You're never going to sit down, write 180,000 words in a week and then possess your very own War & Peace. So where does this idea come from? I believe this farce came from non-writers romanticizing the greats, or perhaps writers romanticizing themselves for business purposes. I have long considered saying I wrote my next book in a week without sleep but that would be disingenuous to all the kids trying to make their dreams into stories.
2.) Read - Read everything. You don't like Russian novels? Too bad kid, you're reading one. Don't enjoy horror? That's nice, here's Hell House by Richard Matheson, enjoy the lesson on tension. You can't just read in a vacuum, only selecting stuff you like or you won't develop as well as a writer. Read everything under the sun, and you'll develop range and a wider scope of ability. The story I feel most inspired my horror is a literary short story by Joyce Carol Oates Where are you Going, Where have you Been?. You never know where inspiration will appear. Stephen King advocates this same strategy and it actually makes total sense.
When you're writing, you're drawing on experiences for ideas, as much as we love the 'muses' they're really just the result of our culminated experiences. Getting a bunch of life experience is hard, especially for the bookish folk (sup) so reading can fill your mind with experiences you draw on in your own work, often unconsciously. I like to think of the ideas we can draw on as a pool in our mind, and reading more books adds liquid to that pool of water until it's a lake, and maybe one day, a roiling ocean.
Read if you're waiting in line, read on transit, listen to audiobooks if you drive. Think of books as items that add points to your mana pool.
3.) Read non-fiction. If you haven't read Elements of Style, you're missing out, that book will grant readability and clarity to your work and let your ideas shine. Story by Robert Mckee is about screenwriting but also invaluable. Elements of Eloquence will teach you how to turn a phrase.
4.) Learn to love editing. I don't mean love in the sense that you love pizza, I mean truly, deeply appreciate and care for editing. Editing is the writer's best friend, though when I started I thought editing served as trash time, I hated it. The more you edit your work, the better it becomes, and I believe the editing process is when a writer will see the greatest growth. You carry all the corrections and fine-tuning you make into your next draft.
5.) Your first draft of your first novel is going to suck. You will love it and think it's a gift from god while you're writing it, but hopefully you have people in your life who can tell you the truth. It sucks. Editing can fix that (editing can fix anything, it's basically magic).
6.) Take the advice of writing teachers and gurus with a grain of salt. My first college writing professor shared in my cigarillos on break and didn't teach me much but allowed me to write for school. My second writing professor tried to convince us to give up on writing in the first lecture. He was bitter, angry and disenchanted with writing, in other words, he had it all wrong. Writing is ****ing magic too.
The writing expert teacher/guru always struck me as a paradox. If they're so good, why don't they write for a living? Why do they work for a college making minimal dollars? If they really knew how to be successful at writing, wouldn't they be? The answer is yes, and most often writing professors and teachers are failed writers. This is a hard truth and not to say these folks don't have anything helpful to say; just don't take their word as gospel.
7.) Brandon Sanderson is a best-selling author and I learned more from a semester of his youtube lectures than I did in physical college. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s9X4eSi42vQ
These are just a few of my thoughts.
I usually go to YouTube for everything including how to open the gas tank of an unfamiliar auto or how to get a toilet unstuck.
Sanderson's class looks like it would be interesting.
As you say, Grit, writing a book is a hard slog. First, just choosing the subject isn't easy, then reading around it, and making sure what you want to say has not been covered by someone else. Just the length of a book is daunting. I've published several books and it is always a big job, not to mention then trying to get it published...Trying out your idea in a blog is one way to start. I've always wanted to write a book about neoliberalism but never got round to it. Thus is a subject that deserves a lot more consideration.