Writing snippets of things and short stories and poems here and there has always been a hobby of mine. I always thought that, even though I’d never really learned the “right” way to craft a good story or poem, I was pretty gifted at it.
Once I hit 18, though, I slowly came to the realization that pretty much everything I had written was…awful. Uninteresting, childish trash. So I resolved to write a story that would resonate with anyone who read it. At 18 years old, I wrote a story about a young man with an overbearing, emotionally abusive mother, and how he finally finds freedom after her death.
It took me six months to finish it up, and I was so proud of what I had done. It was the best thing I had ever written. I sent it out to a few writing magazines for publishing, but no one took the bait. Oh well, said I, I’m sure if I keep trying I’ll get it published. It sat on the shelf for a year, and I picked it up to read it once more. It was really, really terrible. Plotless, pointless, melodramatic pap. I couldn’t believe I had been so proud of it. This was the best thing I could churn out? Really?
I haven’t written anything in a while now, because every time I start a story, a little voice pops into my head. “This is going to be terrible. You are a bad, bad writer. You’re going to end up being disgusted with your work and throwing it away.” The thing is, I really do enjoy writing. I love seeing my ideas develop and end up on paper. I can’t enjoy writing, though, if everything I turn out is awful and embarrassing.
What can I do to improve my skills? Take a creative writing class? Try to emulate other writers’ styles? Are there books that will help me become at least mediocre? I know at least a few of you are writers, so any help you could give would be immensely appreciated.
I had an old rhetoric professor who told us that one exercise back in the day was to take a well-regarded piece of writing and just copy it word-for-word several times in longhand. The idea was to get the flow of the rhetoric engraved into your psyche.
This.
But also, write more. Every day, just write. Allow yourself to write complete and total crap.
I think taking a class is a good idea. You might also find some books on writing exercises helpful. There are lots of websites full of aspiring authors out there and those are bursting with inspiration, encouragement, and tips.
And while this is definitely not for everyone, if you haven’t already I would suggest you look into The Artist’s Way. Its purpose is to help you overcome whatever is blocking your creativity, such as in your case your (probably unfounded) conviction that you’re no good.
Yep. Every instructor I ever had who was also a decent writer said that the key to writing better was to read as much as possible. Not only do you start to pick up on the tendencies of good writers, but you can more easily recognize bad writing and apply those observations to things you have written.
I would add that it is important not to fall in love with your own work too much; it can be difficult for any creative person to give themselves a truly objective self-critique, but it’s a valuable skill to attain. All too often writers and artists become a little too pleased with some particular passage or rendering and fail to see the big picture. This is why it’s important also to get feedback from people who are not intimately connected with the piece.
Agreed. This is where you might find a class helpful, too. Forcing yourself to put your stuff out there for feedback, good or bad, will probably be incredibly hard, but if you allow yourself to really absorb the advice you get, you’ll learn more than you could on your own.
Well, that, and of course “write more” as well. King’s On Writing is a good place to start, but almost every piece of advice I’ve seen from professional writers is that a writer writes, period. And many of them will say they face a crisis of confidence frequently regarding what it is they are actually writing, as well. But they persevere. I’ve felt I could write (I’ve written a couple of pieces of short fiction) and maybe even sell, but I lack the perseverance and will power to develop whatever talent I may have.
I agree with all of this wholeheartedly. Read, read, read and write, write, write.
I’d also say that, if possible, find yourself someone you trust who can critique your writing. And never take it personally if someone rips your work apart.
There are some locked online forums that you can go to in order to find other authors to commiserate with and who can provide you with additional tips. I’d caution you, though, that if you’re tempted to find someone there to critique your work, you should never post it on the forum unless it’s a locked-down forum with a limited number of authors that explicitly states that the work is not considered “published.” Posting your work to an open online forum is considered publishing it, even if it’s a draft and you’re asking for a critique. If what you’re looking for is to make money on your writing, loopholes like that can cause you to lose money on your work, since it’s considered a reprint even after being posted for critique. You can get money on reprints, but obviously not nearly as much on a new work.
I have good news and bad news. The bad news first–that’s never going to go away. Most writers hear that sentence, or a variation of that, all of the time. Hell, I’ve been hearing it for the last 10 days and I’m working on things that are already under contract.
But the good news! That little voice might be right, but it doesn’t have to be right forever! I’ve written some truly awful crap. Crap that I’m deeply embarrassed over–crap that people still have access to, even. But the only way to get over the crap is to keep writing. I once read somewhere that you need to write a million words of crap before you start to get to the good stuff. I think that’s probably true. It’s like picking up an instrument. You are not going to be Eric Clapton when you pick up a guitar for the first time…or the first hundred times…or maybe even the first thousand times. George Harrison practiced on his guitar until his fingers bled. I always keep that in mind when I feel discouraged.
If you are serious about improving, then you need to sit down and write every single day. Even if you are writing “I don’t know what to write” over and over and over five hundred times. You need to get to the point where writing is part of your daily routine, like taking a shower or eating dinner. You need to get to the point where you feel uncomfortable and out of sorts if you aren’t writing. One hundred words a day. Five hundred words a day. A thousand words a day. 15 minutes a day. Whatever works best for you–but set your goal, stick to it, and write.
Finally, you don’t have to share your work with anybody right away. Who gives a fuck if it’s awful and embarrassing? The writing police won’t throw you in writing jail. Tell your internal editor to shut the fuck up and then get to work. Forget about publishing. Forget about receiving the love and acclaim of everybody who reads your work. That comes later. Or it might not come at all. Because even if you manage to get yourself published, there will be reviewers and readers who hate you and think you’d better serve the world be shoveling shit. So just write. Because you can’t control how people will respond to you. Hell, there are people on this very message board who say that Shakespeare is an over-rated hack. If Shakespeare can’t please everybody, what shot do you or I have?
Just write (and read) and write some more. Ignore all the writing books except King’s On Writing. Don’t take a creative writing class if what you secretly want is a captive audience and validation about how good you are.
[ol][li]Read more[]Write every day. And I mean every day. No excuses.[]When you finish something, set it aside.[]Write something else while waiting.[]After a time, read it. Pay attention to everything that doesn’t work (if you can’t see anything wrong, you’re either a genius, or your not looking carefully enough). Edit the hell out of it to remove the bad parts.Look for a good writing group. If they have nothing but praise for your story, it’s the wrong one. You want to know what is wrong.[/li][/ol]
I agree with this; now, keep in mind that I’m approaching this from the perspective of a professional illustrator as opposed to a professional writer, but it seems that there are several parallels to be found in the creative process and development in both arenas: observe, create, repeat. I was told by one of my illustration instructors during sophomore year that most artists will create dozens or even hundreds of bad drawings for every fairly good drawing that they end up with. The artists that tend to have created large numbers of good drawings very often have simply persevered and drawn more.
I agree with the notion of “read more” and “write more.” What’s important, in my opinion, is to read and write with purpose.
First: understand story structure. Read Greek and Roman myths, read fables and parables. Read histories. Read the classics (such as Sophocles and Shakespeare). These stories have survived for centuries because something about them works. There are elements to certain stories which repeat, which satisfy. As much as I personally avoid it, the TVTropes is Joseph Campbell for the Internet generation; the former (in my opinion) promotes dissection of stories without a fundamental understanding of them, but it’s on the right track. The more you read these kinds of stories, the better you will recognize them when other writers shamelessly plunder them.
Second: understand what your story is about. Reading about myths and story structure is a boon, here; it enables you to see the enduring and essential elements of your story. I’m not saying that every incident of self-sacrifice has to be written as a Christ figure, or that every incident of parthenogenesis is necessarily a Zeus-Athena relationship, but if you know those myths then it becomes your choice to echo them or avoid them at your option.
Third: watch how other writers put the plot into the hands of the characters. Rare is the story over which the protagonists have no control whatsoever. Observe how the characters’ choices affect the outcome of the story. That’s not to say that Fate or Karma or Random Chance never enters a story, but there’s a certain satisfying symbolism in what the characters choose to do about it all.
A challenge I give to my ambitious writing students that goes beyond just “read more” is to imitate some writer you admire, and do it systematically, as if your goal above all else were to publish this somewhere AS him or her. Most of them don’t do it because, even if they try, figuring out how that writer puts his or ideas together, and constructs sentences, and creates dialogue, and proportions dialogue to narrative, and selects backstory, and the zillion other things all writers do (and for them it nearly always subconscious, not the result on choosing) is real WORK.
But it’s very useful work, even if the immediate result is a bad watered down imitation. If you show it to a careful reader of that professional writer, he may even be able to point out what is lacking in your attempt.
One thing I did was take books I was dissatsified with and rewrote passages of them. Then I’d ask people to compare the two and see what they liked about my rewrite and hated about the rewrite.
There is a difference between good writing and good storytelling. Even a big difference between types of storytelling
I love the “quilt” books by Jennifer Chiaverini. The interesting thing about this author, when she writes characters that are evil or just bad, she IS SO interesting. You can’t put the book down. Then when she writes about a good character she gets very boring quickly.
Whenever Chiaverini writes about faults and woes she shines. Then comes the good guys or the resolution, I often find myself rooting for the bad guy in her books, because they are JUST that more interesting.
(Lots of people think H. P. Lovecraft was an awful writer. And true, he had all sorts of faults–but you really start to develop an appreciation for his skill after reading a few bad imitations.)
Actually, Stauderhorse, if you’re looking for a little sample throwaway exercise it might be interesting to take a crack at revising “The Eye of Argon”. It’s a godawful piece of writing, but there’s actually an interesting little story lurking inside it.
Seriously, though, this is also a great exercise. Again to use visual arts as a parallel, one of the more instructive exercises during foundation year was an assignment to replicate a famous work of art, then “diagram” the work using tracing paper with the goal of discovering the underlying structure of the work. How does the author/artist use certain cues to direct the reader/viewer to see/read/feel what is intended?
This gives me hope. You’d be astonished at the number of people who think, way past 18, that they are simply naturally gifted at ~Poetic Feeling~ and ~Writing from the Heart~.
I can’t do much other than echo the reading and writing recommendations. Tons of people think they can write poetry without liking poetry, which strikes me as weird. You don’t generally see people in other media/genres that try to create what they don’t like, but poetry attracts some very strange thinking.
I think that part of the reason for this is that there are many people who have encountered poetry that doesn’t seem to follow a particular structure; they read something that, to them, seems like just an off-the-cuff collection of words that evoke certain images or feelings…then they think, “I can do that!” and off they go. This is kind of like the phenomenon of people seeing abstract art and thinking, “my kid could do that!”
I mentioned Gil Orlovitz before; you can read a few pages from his Diary of Alexander Patience here…I know at least a few people who have tried to read a few lines of Orlovitz’s work and just scrunch up their brows and say, “It’s just random words!” Yet I don’t think that it’s nearly so random as they think.
On the other hand, trying to emulate this sort of work as a fledgling writer might be a Bad Idea. Not that you expressed a desire to do so…just sayin’.
In addition to the excellent advice already posted, I’ll say that persistence pays off. Of all the published writers I know, most either wrote multiple manuscripts before they finally wrote the one that sold, or they had a job that required them to do a lot of writing before they sat down and wrote a novel. Very few of the people I know wrote one novel and found an agent/publisher with it.
Writing a novel is an incredibly complex task, when you think about it. There are the mechanics, of course–good spelling, punctuation, etc. But then there are things like plot, character, pacing, conflict, etc. that have to come together well to keep a reader enticed the whole way through. Every once in a while, you run into someone who seems to have an intuitive grasp of story, and all of that stuff just falls into place naturally for them. Most people have to practice a lot to figure it out, however.
The good news, as I said on another recent thread, is that writing is like working with clay. If you don’t like what you end up with, you just reshape it until you get something that works. You aren’t going to run out of words, after all.
