When I started this blog, one of my goals was to compile advice that I hadn’t really seen online anywhere. Stuff a little bit beyond the foundations I was already very familiar with. I took university courses and different approaches to writing combined with my own experience and lessons from the mentors and teachers around me, and began to write it all down to share with you.
The idea was never that you would start writing your first character with Character is Plot say. However, I noticed there are a lot of new, beginner, or learning writers on here, and there’s a great value in really nailing the foundations, so here marks the start of a short series of foundational advice for you new writers (or for writers who have been around the block and may need a refresher. I know I do!)
I see a lot of new writers in the tags looking down on yourselves or your ability. Stuff like, ‘why can’t I seem to do this’ or ‘if only I could actually follow this advice’. My posts were never meant to make you feel like you aren’t good enough. It was written with over a decade of experience behind it. It takes time to build those instincts in knowing what to do. Unfortunately you can’t just build writing skill by reading and collecting articles—they can be a guide, but they aren’t meant to instantly come naturally to you “if only you were a good writer.”
No one can automatically learn how to write just from reading some advice because writing skill isn’t about the knowing, it’s about the practicing.
And it takes a hell of a lot of practice.
Writing is mostly intuition—we practice certain skills to get them to a place where we can just do them without really thinking about it. It’s kind of like when you were learning to type, and you had to constantly remind yourself to put periods at the ends of your sentences. Then, over time and a million reminders, you started to just do it on instinct without really thinking about it.
It’s muscle memory, it’s trying again and again, it’s a lot of struggling and tears and feedback and more tears and a million and one false starts and unfinished drafts and finished drafts that are really bad and lost contests and rejections. I have been through it all. I’m still going through it all. Only recently have I been published—it took me over a decade of practice to get there. Oh, and in the same month one of my pieces was published, another was rejected.
That’s how it goes. It’s not some switch that will one day flick where you’re ‘good enough’. And the timeline isn’t so set. While I was working on building up skill, I was also working on building up confidence. In the right publications, with enough confidence, I probably could’ve been published years ago. In the right place, and if you’re brave enough to submit, you probably could too.
It’s about who sees it, very rarely does it really depend on how ‘good’ it is (and you can tell from all the published work that can’t possibly be better than your unpublished work, right?)
TL;DR, writing isn’t about the knowing, it’s about time, patience, and practice. If you’re reading advice and don’t feel good enough to execute on it, just take a little bit more time and get a hundred thousand more words under your belt. One day, it will just become intuition.
