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To write better, develop a habit of writing

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Re: To write better, develop a habit of writing

#61

Post by NewOrderNow »

bambax wrote: post #54
NewOrderNow wrote: post #8

I have been doing morning pages for 10 years and have been attempting to to force the habit of writing for longer. I don't like writing. You definitely get better at writing, but some things just don't get easier. Same for running. Daily runner. It is the best thing I have ever done. But it sucks and never gets easier. Is there anything to get rid of this feeling of suck?

There's this site that publishes "inspiring" quotes about writing, from writers; some are good, some less so. I really like this one: > Writing is painful—it’s “fun” only for novices, the very young, and hacks — Mary Karr https://advicetowriters.com/advice/three-writing-truths-1

One of the few times when the phrase "the struggle is real" is warranted.

Re: To write better, develop a habit of writing

#62

Post by ghaff »

ApolloVonZ wrote: post #16
tyre wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Scrivener is great. Also probably overkill for people just getting started. It's easy to lose yourself in setting up and optimizing the tools, and thinking of that as "writing work".

True there are some simpler - no distraction - tools out there, some of them are pretty great and for some this might be much better. And of course nothing beats a hand written text. It's just a pain in the a to type the whole thing after. But for me it wasn't until using Scrivener that I managed to write more than a dozen pages before giving up. Scrivener just makes it easy for me to write piece by piece. While a lo…

I like Scrivener for longer-form writing because it helps me to keep a project-level view while working on the details. Unfortunately, most things I write have to sooner or later get dumped into a different format for collaboration/editing.

Re: To write better, develop a habit of writing

#63

Post by SiVal »

jasonv wrote: post #49
throwawaytX3uIQ wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't suppose you have more specific links to the places where he's talked about this? I'd be interested in reading more. The suggestion: > 3) Don’t quit your day job. Is interested advice. Does he actually have advice for how to do this, and maintain any sort of reasonable writing schedule? I can see the practicality, but the obvious downside is having your time squeezed into smaller and smaller pieces (especially…

Get up at 430am. It's possible, even with a baby/toddler. Having read about the habits of writers, a lot of writers limit their "writing" to a few hours/day and spend the rest of their time in the business of being a writer. If you're just starting, you mostly need to do the writing part.

Getting up at 4:30am is possible if you have a baby? Not only is it possible, in my experience it's inevitable.

Re: To write better, develop a habit of writing

#64

Post by iainctduncan »

Personally, I find this overly simplistic and I believe it's misleading. I write, review, and edit professionally as about 1/2 of my current job, and I see tons of awful writing by people who write every week. Believing you just need to write regularly to improve is like believing that if you play tons of gigs on your instrument you'll get better. How many really bad musicians have you seen who have been stuck at basically the same level for many years, but play all the time? So, so many. It's just not true.

To really improve, in addition to writing you need to:

- Read really good writing. A lot. Every good writer I've met is a voracious reader and has been for a long time.

- Read about writing, as in, actually study writing

- Edit and review your writing, and get your writing reviewed and critiqued by people actually qualified to comment on quality writing

If you aren't doing this, a daily habit might get a lot written, but it could stay crappy for your whole life. I would argue that real study and less production writing is actually a better use of your time.

Some of my favourite books to start on serious study:

"A Sense of Style" - Steven Pinker

"The Making of A Story" Alice LaPlante

"Steering the Craft" - Ursula Le Guin

"On Writing Well" - William Zinsser

"Dreyer's English" - Benjamin Dreyer

The problem is that everyone thinks their writing is great. You need to be willing to think it could be better. :-)

Re: To write better, develop a habit of writing

#65

Post by iainctduncan »

thotsBgone wrote: post #29
chrismeller wrote: post #5

For anyone interested in writing “for real” (professionally or as a hobby) I highly recommend John Scalzi’s blog [1]. He’s cynical, he’s funny, and above all he’s practical. Among his advice over the years a few things have really stuck with me: 1) Don’t get an MFA, it’s a waste of money. If you need a grammar class, take one. If you need more of a basis in x literary genre because that’s what you want to write in, t…

Note to self: don't get a Multi-Factor Authentication By checking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MFA , I presume you meant Master of Fine Arts.

So true, who wants to look for their phone every time they sit down to write? ;-)

Re: To write better, develop a habit of writing

#66

Post by iainctduncan »

m52go wrote: post #3

I see this perspective posted a lot, and while I think it's generally true, it's a bit vague. What do we mean by writing better? If we're referring to an improved ability to articulate thoughts and produce more text, then sure, writing more will help with that. Maybe quality will improve marginally over time. But if we're talking about actually producing writing of a higher quality, I'm afraid simply writing more can…

Looks like you beat me to my exact points. +100! :-)

Re: To write better, develop a habit of writing

#67

Post by iainctduncan »

jodrellblank wrote: post #43

In the recent pianojacq discussion there were tons of people commenting "don't try to learn an instrument on your own just by doing, all you'll learn is bad habits and limit your progress". How come there's never much comment like that in writing threads?

Serious answer? Because if you sit down at the piano, you know you can't play right away. And thus starts a culture of practice. But with writing... most everyone thinks they can already write well and just need to do it. Sigh. Just like the 80% or whatever of the public who think they are the great drivers.

Re: To write better, develop a habit of writing

#68

Post by wholien »

dang wrote: post #53
wholien wrote: post #15

Practice makes perfect! As William Faulkner says: “I only write when inspiration strikes. Fortunately it strikes at nine every morning.” With writing (as with many things), there is this myth that you should only do it when inspiration compels you to write. But that is total rubbish. You need to create conditions so that inspiration will strike, and creating a habit of writing frequently will lay the groundwork for i…

Probably not Faulkner, unless he said it to Herman Wouk: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/10/30/inspire-nine/

oh TIL!

Re: To write better, develop a habit of writing

#69

Post by pxtail »

In the wake of recent GPT-3 related news I'm wondering how writing and written content perception is going to change. For me perspective of reading through a novel partially or completely generated by software makes it completely unappealing. I noticed that even knowledge that GPT3 exists and is being actively used experimentally right now for co-authoring written content reduces my eagerness to search for new fiction books. I think that I'll have higher than usual dose of distrust and skepticism towards previously unknown, non established authors.

Re: To write better, develop a habit of writing

#70

Post by ApolloVonZ »

ghaff wrote: post #62
ApolloVonZ wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True there are some simpler - no distraction - tools out there, some of them are pretty great and for some this might be much better. And of course nothing beats a hand written text. It's just a pain in the a to type the whole thing after. But for me it wasn't until using Scrivener that I managed to write more than a dozen pages before giving up. Scrivener just makes it easy for me to write piece by piece. While a lo…

I like Scrivener for longer-form writing because it helps me to keep a project-level view while working on the details. Unfortunately, most things I write have to sooner or later get dumped into a different format for collaboration/editing.

Yes, that's unfortunately true. Once you need to collaborate you need to export. Earlier versions of Scrivener still had the option to work on individual files with external editors. But I'm not even sure if this is still possible, it might be, but the files are all randomly numbered now and not named, so it kind of makes it impossible to use an external collaborative editor.
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