Intangibles · 3:37am Mar 19th, 2015

The fastest way to better writing is to write, but there comes a time when we go over our stories again and again and, though they are worlds better than what we were writing before, we cannot see much improvement between what we wrote today and what we wrote yesterday. It feels like we are treading water.

When this happens, it is good to remember that there is more to writing than writing. Writing draws on a whole host of less obvious skills that support the storymaking process in their own quiet ways. If you are facing a dead end in your writing growth, the problem may actually lie in some other area.

Planning

Have you ever started a story and found out halfway through that you have no idea where it is going? Have you lost a month to worldbuilding without getting a story out of it? If so, then you have room to grow as a planner.

Take a good look at the author's notes from your latest story. What type of details did you focus on? Did you spend the most time on your characters? Stringing up a detailed plot? Constructing an intricate etiquette system for flavor? Now think back to when you were writing -- did you run into any difficulties that could have been solved if you had just thought things through beforehand? If so, what areas did you overlook? Knowing what you like to plan vs what you need to plan can help you make your pre-writing more productive.

Also consider how much of what you planed actually ended up making it through to the reader. If you plan quite a bit, you could challenge yourself to cut back on your planning and see if you can get away with it. This will help you get your ideas out faster. Conversely, if you like writing by the seat of your pants, have you tried planning before? If not, it may be worth your time to experiment with an outline or two just to say you have tried it.

Consider also that though you may never actually sit down and lay out an outline, you probably have to sit a few minutes and get your head together before you write. This undocumented planning is harder to get at, but examining how you approach each writing session can help you get your head together faster and make better use of your time. Try jotting your rough ideas down before each writing session. When you are done for the day, journal about what worked, what did not work, what problems you had, and so forth. Then every so often look back through your story journal. What are you focusing on before you write? What do you end up wishing you had thought about earlier? Refining how you think about writing is just as important as editing the words themselves.

Discipline

Writing "better" is good, but there is nothing like writing in a consistent and focused manner to keep your eye on the prize. Do you have a set time set aside for writing? If not, try scheduling some time every week to write. This could be every day or just the Tuesdays and Thursdays when you do not have practice or whatever fits into your schedule. Just block off some time (I would suggest an hour or more per block so you have time to get into the grove) and commit to spending that time writing every week. It is only when writing becomes something you do rather than something that happens to you that you truly get control of your own authorship.

If you can write faster for the same level of quality, you end up with more stories and ultimately more practice. If you already have some time scheduled, do you hold yourself to a wordcount goal? Even doing something as little as writing down your wordcount per day helps put productivity on your radar and gets you thinking about how productive you are, how productive you could be, and how you might get from point A to B.

Articulation

What makes a story good? Well, good characters, a good plot, a good message, and so on. A bad story likewise has bad stuff in it. But that is not very useful. We might have some intuitive sense of what "feels off" from self-pre-reading, but that is a murky, ad-hoc, understanding. If you cannot turn to your friend and explain what is wrong and how to fix it, can you actually say you understand the problem?

Your ability to improve is tied directly to your ability to articulate specifically what you are trying to do and why. It is only when "that part felt off" becomes "the action happened too fast for the emotion to sink in" that we start to wrap our heads around specific things we can do to bring our story more in line with our expectations. If you are hitting a roadblock, it could very well be that you have not yet figured out how to put into words what the next level of "better" looks like.

This is increasingly important as you improve. The leap from grammar-mangled cardboard to something resembling a presentable story is night and day. The difference between presentable and polished not so much. Polished to more polished needs a trained eye to tell the difference. It can get to the point where it is easier to dismiss what we write on faith in our mediocrity rather than take the time to sit down and articulate what is actually wrong. Do not fall into that trap. No one ever got better by skipping to calling themselves bad. You get better when you know where you need to go, and you go there. You cannot have one without the other.

If you want to get more articulate, reading about writing is a good start. If someone else is talking about writing, then they must already have some words you can use. When it feels like you have read everything you can, consider editing for other people and challenging yourself to clearly explain as many suggestions as you can. Make those words your own. Find patterns of badness you never knew existed and crush them. Then write down a name for each one and what to do when they pop up again. Then when you come back to your own writing, you will have another list to check yourself against.

Genre Exposure

Every adventure author should read a quality romance novel or five. Why? Because at some point you are going to want to add a romantic sub plot, and you need examples of how to do it right. Likewise, the romance novelist would do well to read some globe-trotting thrillers, historical novels, and plain old slice of life fiction. Every genre contains pieces of all the others, and seeing those pieces in their purest form helps you understand how to get the gist right when you want to mix in that romantic sub-plot or strand your secret agent in a sleepy mid-west town as the doomsday clock ticks down.

Reading more is good. Reading broadly is the hard part. Keep a tally of the tags you read. How do the percentages stack up? When you read non-pony, what are your go-to genres? Again, it is easy to tell yourself you "read a bit of everything" but it is only when we sit down and math out what is on our bookshelves that we get the whole, concrete, picture. Next time you look for a read, consider looking for something from the bottom of your list for a change. You might even make a goal to keep every category above a certain percentage just so you know you are keeping yourself exposed. If you do not keep yourself widely read, that broad experience is going to end up dusty.

Resources

It is hard to write convincingly about things you do not know about. I would hope that doing research is second nature by now, but how do you research? It is clear that we should research undercover work if we want to write about spies or jousting if we want to write about knights, but how much plain general knowledge do you have? The first rule of research is that before we can ask questions, we must have some idea of what we need to know. Otherwise we write what we researched and fill in the blanks from memory with all the anachronisms and gaffes that have worked their way into the popular culture.

For instance, we may give a convincing portrayal of a joust, but after our knights leave the lists, they fall back into generic "honorspeak," bow to the king, and do all the hollow protocol proper to the Knight of the Theme Park. If all you have read is sword and sorcery, this feels normal. If all we want is a story with well executed jousts, we can go ahead and write it. But if we know a little history, we might know that a knight does not exist in a vacuum. We would know a knight makes his living from the serfs that he taxes and would likely oversee his own lands, so perhaps we might think to look into farming for non-honor smalltalk material. If we have a working knowledge of government, it could get us thinking about how the king makes decisions and where the balance of power is, which could have us asking what the context for these jousts is.

Point being, we only research what we think is important. In order to find the potential in every part of our story, we need knowledge coming in to help us look for it. Chicken, meet egg. Taking the time to read non-fiction is just as important as hitting the books hard when you want to write something specific.

And then there is the matter of organizing all that information. Do you have a link-bin of references that you turn to when you need background knowledge? How many of those sources are you actually familiar with? It is one thing to have four links to different medieval websites. It is quite another to know which site is most likely to have the information you want and how to go about finding it quickly. If you clean out your link-bin only to find you do not remember half of the sites, it might be worthwhile to take a day and click through them to see what all you have to work with. And while you are at it, give them some organization so it will be easier to remember where to look next time.

Friends

Last but not least, a second pair of eyes is one of the most valuable things an author can have. But just having a second opinion may not be enough. If you are in a rut improvement-wise, maybe it is time to seek out fresh advice. If you use gdocs, go back over your old drafts and look at the comments. What does your editor point out the most? It may be that you have struggled with plot in the past, but if all they do is comment on plot, perhaps it is because their strength is plot consistency. You may want to look for someone known for being picky about character or mechanics to get sharper eyes on those areas.

How connected are you to the writing community? Are you in any skype chats or other groups that interact on a regular basis? Taking the time to pop in and say hello can help you find more people to show your stuff to, more places to ask for help, and help you get exposure to new parts of life you never knew were there. Sometimes all it takes to break down that wall is getting your nose out of those dusty old gdocs and making some new friends.

Writing practice alone does not perfect writing make. Writing needs content, feedback, and most importantly it must be entirely written down in the first place. When you run out of ideas for polishing your execution, consider making supporting skills your next priority.

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