Being a Better Writer: Practice Makes Perfect · 7:42pm Dec 3rd, 2018
A shorter post today, folks, as I’ve got a time-crunch today. Christmas season is hear, and that means I’ve got shifts at my part-time leading well past midnight pretty much every day this week. It’s a brutal holiday season, ho ho.
One small bit of news: November’s Patreon Supporter Reward will go up tomorrow. It was going to be Saturday, but I ended up getting some writing work done with what free time I had that day (and then the time I would have perhaps had slotted for it was eaten up by an unfortunate flat tire on my bike that left me walking a mile+ back from the store).
With that news out of the way, let’s dive right into today’s topic (like I said, time crunch here): Practice makes perfect.
I hang out in writing channels online. Not all of them, but a few, via Discord or Reddit, and lately I’ve seen a trend occurring once again that seems to rear its head. Young, new writers who hop in looking for advice or feedback on their writing … and then want things to change instantly.
Kudos.
How do new writers think they can improve without practice?
Any other creative pursuit requires hours and hours of practice for advancement.
Want to drah, um, draw stuff that wows people?
Have to put pen/pencil/wacom stylus to pad/paper for a while.
Practice is needed for advancement for any pursuit.
Even with chainsaw juggling, especially chainsaw juggling.
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I think it's a byproduct of our education system, personally. It makes writing seem easy and simple, and any time you get something wrong, you just make one change and things are "good" for the teacher.
That, and people think "Well, I write stuff all day. How hard could it be to write a story?"
No joke, I once had someone tell me to "stop bragging" about managing 3k words a day because it "wasn't that impressive," as they wrote 5000 a day copying office documents, and writing a book "wasn't any harder."
There's just a major disconnect in people's minds about literature.
I sooo want to see that person's book or even any of their stories!
See Jack collate.
See Jack fill out Form 64e-64.
See Jack fill out Form 65e.
Copy Jack copy.
Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.
Um, what was I talking about?
Yep, you're right.
I'm going to offer an alternate though probably still common concept:
Practice makes permanent.
I know it's not what you're trying to say, but I could see this post being taken as "the most important thing you can do is write a lot". It is important, yes, but without any other attempts to identify/fix what you're doing wrong... well, let's just say that one of the most prolific (# of stories published, not # of words) writers on this site is infamous for their unchanging writing for this reason. I think evaluation of your work and taking in new information (e.g. reading others' works) is equally as important.
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I have met plenty of people who, if we take the following path towards competence, want to skip the middle two steps for any number of skills:
Unconscious incompetence → Conscious incompetence → Conscious competence → Unconscious competence
Come to think of it, those two steps are where I think "experimentation" likely lives, along with the toughest "thinking" stuff.
"I type a lot so writing a story must be just as easy" seems to me to be something that only the inexperienced could believe. I know more people who would happily copy something 100 pages long word-for-word rather than write something 10 pages long from scratch. (And from my experience playing online multiplayer games and typing megabytes of plain text for work, I can vouch for the fact that the only thing they will do for your story writing abilities is give you familiarity with a keyboard.)
The education system... maybe. For all of the (public) higher education institutions that I have attended and many that I have heard much about, the communication/writing classes have more 'interesting' expectations of their students than, say, math or other sciences. It is my experience that 1) they are more likely to grade you on something that they have not taught you, 2) they are more likely to blame the student for not knowing something than the course for not presenting that information, 3) if you have difficulty writing anything, there seems to always be a dedicated writing center that you are supposed to go which is where you actually learn anything about creating written content – it is your fault if you did not choose to go to this writing center for help (and "you should have learned this in highschool"). 4), and you have touched on this, they are more likely to present facts and generalization with no/little explanation/evidence/qualification (and it seems hit-and-miss whether they're true in the end).
And then there's my own specific experience of taking a creative writing class some time ago. Sounds like a good plan, right? It was one of the least informative and worthwhile classes I have ever taken, and I might encourage you to append the necessity of evaluating your available sources of writing education (for quality of content, not just reputation) before you go taking classes from them to your recommendation for taking writing classes. The course was mostly built out of "meet the word count or you get no points" assignments where we hadn't been taught how to complete the homework until after we turned it in. I had prior experience, thank goodness, but others were not so fortunate. The class was basically the embodiment of the points I mentioned above. I'm not sure if it necessarily promoted the idea that writing is easy, though, so much as confusion regarding anything to do with writing.