Inexperienced writers tend to seek the recipes for writing well. You buy the cookbook, you take the list of ingredients, you follow the directions, and behold! A masterpiece! The Never-Falling Soufflé! Wouldn’t it be nice? But alas, there are no recipes. We have no Julia Child. Successful professional writers are not withholding mysterious secrets from eager beginners. The only way anybody ever learns to write well is by trying to write well. This usually begins by reading good writing by other people, and writing very badly by yourself, for a long time.
Inexperienced writers tend to seek the recipes for writing well. You buy the cookbook, you take the list of ingredients, you follow the directions, and behold! A masterpiece! The Never-Falling Soufflé!... See more
Wouldn’t it be nice? But alas, there are no recipes. We have no Julia Child. Successful professional writers are not withholding mysterious secrets f
Saved by Alex Dobrenko and
Everyone has a story inside, but in most cases extraction proves too difficult, even for talented writers; because having a story isn’t the same as being able to fill a hundred, two hundred or three hundred pages with incident and atmosphere, to create breathing characters, to calibrate the tension, hit the moments of revelation at the right time a
... See moreBefore my first published novel, Something Missing, I wrote hundreds of thousands of terrible words. Pages upon pages of uninspired, unentertaining stories. I spent more than eight years writing bad fiction before finally stumbling upon a method and mindset that made fiction writing click for me. Had I not allowed myself to write poorly, I never wo
... See moreYou learn to write by writing. It’s a truism, but what makes it a truism is that it’s true. The only way to learn to write is to force yourself to produce a certain number of words on a regular basis.