Writing Tips

The Universal Truth of Learning

This one is for all you eager ones wanting that little piece of advice that will turn you into a rising star and improve your writing dramatically!

Or well, it's just filled with truths no one really wants to hear.

This is probably the least fun chapter, so lets mix it up with some personal history for the giggles... or something.

1: Repeat the cycle of learning

In the first place, if you're reading this, then you have some confidence that I'm relatively skilled, but it's not like I became that way overnight. Up until the age of 13, the best grade I'd ever gotten on my writing was... ⓕ Despite having a very active imagination, I had no interest in school or writing in general. My English was at what americans would think of as a c. Passable, but not anything more than that.

Then, finally, I took my mother seriously and began to write down the daydream I had going on in my mind. It wasn't in English, because... no surprise, my English skills weren't that good. So I took my finished chapters and translated them to English with google translate, and then fixed anything that looked weird or out of place. This was back in the start years of google translate, so a lot had to be fixed.

Within a year my English grades went from Cs to As. It actually went so fast that my teacher ended up blaming me for plagarizing or getting someone else to write it for me, because I started using phrases in English we hadn't learned yet.

But note, this was due to consistent effort over an entire year, giving me an inch thick stack of A5 papers when I printed it out. Honestly, I believe this period was the greatest change in my skill level.

And it all comes down to consistent effort.

I didn't take the shortest path there, by using advice from others and taking lessons seriously, but I put in the effort. Just as everything else in life, if you want to be good at something, then put effort into it, and experiment.

With that said, here are some things you can put this into perspective:

Most skills can be acquired at a basic level of proficiency within 20 hours.

But writing stories is not a skill, as they're considered here. It's a set of skills. A very large set of skills. Consider painting as a similar example. You can spend 20 hours on painting a tree, and still not at all having touched humans or animals. But on those 20 hours, you've become very good at drawing leaves, possibly flowers and found out how to draw a well formed tree with branches looking natural.

Writing is the same.

Even after you get down the grammar, you still have how to make a good character, making a setting, making legends, scene descriptions, pacing, plot and so on. And even each of these subjects might have subcategories. Are you good at writing teenagers? Women? Men? Are the men how men see them or how women see them, because there's a difference.

But that's not all. Learning is all about doing, reviewing your effort and then doing again while paying attention to what you've noticed.

But this cycle is often very long for writing.

A drawing can easily be reviewed during painting, and almost naturally you'll look at the finished product and judge it. But what about writing? The plot of a book or story, can often not be judged until later. This means many writers start out, write a whole bunch and then take a step back on their story 12 chapters in, and then realize that they hate what they've made. This is where they finally reach their first cycle. They've become good enough from writing, that they now realize that their start product wasn't very good... but the amount of effort to rewrite or fix it becomes too immense, and they quit.

To become a writer, for hobby or for profession, you must be able to continue past this point.

Either you start from scratch, or you just power through it, continuing until you reach the end.

Because once you've reached the end, you have a somewhat finished product for the first time. This is your first draft. A first draft filled with ideas and mistakes here and there.

But you have completed a massive task, that very few actually manage in life, and that's something to be proud of.

Your story doesn't have to be perfect from the get go, nor do you need to edit it all over and over. Just get to the end, and worry about editing later, is what I'll advise.

After all, think of it like this:

If you 'level up' every 10 chapters and your story ends up being 50 chapters, and you go back to edit every chapter you already made when you level up, then you'll edit those first chapters five times each. Making you edit a total of 150 chapters instead of just 50 once you reached the end.

Somewhere along the journey of editing those 150 times, you might end up so frustrated you give up, instead of finishing the story.

What makes the difference between writing for a hobby and professionally at this point, is where you go once you have that first draft done.

A hobbyist might just leave it like that, and continue to the next story, but to a professional writer, the first draft is but the first step, in a long journey of dedication to that story. And even during that journey, they will continue to learn and improve, and just like artists that paint, one day you will look back on your early works, and grimace a bit, but also smile, as you see how far you have gotten.