231–240 of 280 posts
As in all art, the first step is to develop good taste. And you can only do that by consuming a wide variety of content.
Via some kind of disaster maybe. Or a long erosion. Maybe drugs.
If you didn't watch Kung Fu Panda then it is worth it to learn what the "secret" is all about.
TL; DR: yes and it works for everything else too. Just do the thing!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I often catch myself imitating the flow, style, Its a struggle trying to "imitate the style" in writing. In music, you could keep playing all the songs in the style of your favorite artist and possible develop a close stylistic proximity to what you're imitating but in writing do you just write prose with the same wordings? i get the keep reading to develop your style but feels like adapting a style you want to mas…
I think the issue here might be that you're familiar with what "style" is supposed to be in music, so you know how imitating it would look (rather, sound) like. On the contrary, you may have no idea what style means in the context of writing, so you can't fathom what imitating writing style looks like. I honestly don't know precisely either, but a couple of things to mull over: Clarke and Asimov are said to have a "d…
This used to be true because most published books were well written. I don't think that's true anymore. Too much noise and too little signal so to speak. I feel a growing trend where books read like the author's main inspiration is TV shows, down to villains surprising the main character by jumping out from "behind the camera" and dialogue that reads like the book has no ability to convey thoughts and emotions except…
There are more written books that a regular person can read in their entire life. Even if what you say is true, no need to only read modern books.
Could also be an unavoidable effect from reading many books I guess, the more you read the harder the competition is for the next book.
I feel that people today are already overwhelmed by walls of text. Books are a completely different cognitive load for the brain. A book is a gym workout. Social media and news feeds are lazy reading.I try to read more myself, but specifically books.
200 years of pro-reading propaganda may have bent our opinion. Once upon a time reading was considered a morbid activity. And it kinda is.
I have an even better golden rule: to become a better writer, actually write as much as you can. A real example. I read A TON, since I was a kid (I'm close to 50 years old now). I used to write a lot. I even wrote two semi-decent novels, among other things. I haven't written much in the last 10-12 years. Now I want to start a little side project, in which I will write a letter to about one hundred people, print it an…
> 80% of personal websites only have a single blog post from two years ago where the author mentions they want to write more
I laughed when I saw it because that describes my blog that I started this year after not blogging for 15 years. It has a single post about how I want to write again to counteract all the AI that I use day to day, so stay tuned. I have rough ideas for posts I've been wanting to write for a while.
But man do I have a hard time writing one of those posts. It's so open-ended. I'll start writing something and it doesn't feel right. I know I should blow through the feeling and at least get my thoughts down, but I've become more sensitive to not feeling early progress. Like a noob learning a guitar or not being able to ollie.
I didn't have that problem at all back when I wrote daily.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Both reading and writing are necessary, but writing alone is not sufficient.
Yes, but there's a significant asymmetry with the advice usually given. I hear "Read a lot" about 10x more than "Write a lot". I've been reading a lot for decades. I'm a crappy writer. There is a saturation point.
Cal Newport touches this in his books. The best solo violinists dont practice any longer or harder than the other violinists, they practice deliberately and that looks very different.
So in summary I think OP is pretty wrong. Asking people to just read more without adding this nuance is just going to create a bunch of zombies who read a novel a week and are none the better for it.
The only books that are required reading if youre planning to write are "on writing" by King and Strunk n White. Just memorize the latter. Then read your competition, carefully. Then just start writing.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I often catch myself imitating the flow, style, Its a struggle trying to "imitate the style" in writing. In music, you could keep playing all the songs in the style of your favorite artist and possible develop a close stylistic proximity to what you're imitating but in writing do you just write prose with the same wordings? i get the keep reading to develop your style but feels like adapting a style you want to mas…
"Style" is complicated to copy in both cases if you don't know what you're looking for. In music, you have voicing sparsity, changes in voice count, preferred pitch ranges, tension/release cadences, embellishments, richness, playfulness, and a host of other characteristics. Rachmaninoff, for example (among other things), favours active, moving octaves quite deep in the base, extremely rich chords in the middle treble…
The author seems to be branch off to a polymath path, consuming ideas from many different fields. A caution is that, the author needs to plan on what to learn and set scope and boundary on how much to learn in each field (unless you are Leonardo Da Vinci, who still struggled in some fields. He was damn smart but his ADHD stopped him from building something even better in some instances).
Anyways, fun writing.
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My anecdote: The more I read, the more I see the context of why authors write certain things based on events, and political affinity s/he had.
I started converse with books and see points that are not right per my understanding or mis-represented. Now we can use AIs, or Google, or search books to verify author's assumptions. The authors points might have had been true at the time but not at current point.
It's just fun to gather more insights on how to think as I read more.
I emphathize with the author's enthusiam.
I used to write blogs, but not any more as I stopped reading for awhile during covid time (bad instances even with 3 shots of vaccines).
I am starting again, surely but slowly, and I cannot make an excuse as the author mentioned as my daily phone screem daily time is 2+ hours.