I’ve been thinking about the process of improving at writing, lately. There does seem to be one, but I don’t think you hear much about it because usually new writers are asking experienced writers for tips, not for how the whole thing operates.
Of course, it comes down to practice, mostly. Early on, I think almost all writers go through the stage where writing seems like magic (unless they started writing so young that this stage didn’t register). You probably remember this stage, if you’re not still in it: where writing comes and goes as it pleases, and happens however it feels like, and you seem to be more or less completely at its mercy. You’ve got no sense of…anything, pretty much, and why should you? You’re new at this.
Writers always seem too busy saying things like, “The muse is a figment of your imagination” and “You just need to practice” to get around to telling you that this stage is normal. You’re new at this, and at first it’s all about getting into tune with yourself, developing a sense of context and direction. If you keep at it, you start developing a sense of how to aim it, how it refine it when it doesn’t turn out quite perfect the first time, and even how to make it start when you want it to (where I am now, that one’s still a bit rough; I think there’ll always be times when it comes harder than others).
Once you stop feeling quite so lost, you start getting a handle on all those techniques and tools they tried and mostly failed to teach you in school. This is an ongoing process. Tenses and POV and theme and the various sorts of conflicts, remember all that? Yeah, well, it doesn’t all magically work, and if a particular thing never seemed to work for you, that doesn’t mean you’re a failure. Not everybody uses all the writing tools. If it doesn’t work for you, then you don’t have to use it.
Of course, it also doesn’t mean it will be useless to you forever. Like, my teachers started making me do outlines when I was in, oh, 5th grade? And it seemed like total crap to me. It felt artificially tacked on, added work that I had to go back and do later, because my process wasn’t in a place at that stage where outlines were helpful. I just discovered them as a functional tool last month, when I was working on Man Who Sold the World and I realized, “Oh! All these notes I keep jotting down about things that’ll happen later? MY GOD, I’M OUTLINING.”
One of the things I’ve found it really hard to deal with—because it’s such an insidious thing—is having the wrong definitions for things. We’re taught so much about writing in school, and we’re taught as though there’s some fixed definition, which is a bunch of bull. Sometimes when you find yourself beating your head off the wall of some idea that just won’t yield, it’s not you. For instance, the definition of ‘plot’ I was fed throughout high school and my B.A. in English Lit was pretty much a pack of classical elitist lies. We’re mostly taught about plot as being an external force driving your characters through the story. And it can be, sure: a villain or a murder mystery or a natural disaster. But sometimes the plot actually is the character, with their internal forces driving the story via their own personal struggles and choices, their journey of, I dunno, self-realization or self-destruction or their quest to define the qualities of the perfect cheeseburger. (A great example—of the internally-driven plot, not the perfect cheeseburger—is Ivy Blossom’s “The Quiet Man.”)
That redefinition has been a big eye-opener for me with some of my writing, because suddenly I can see the progression in stories where I hadn’t even known how to look for it before. It also helps with self-confidence, because now I realize that it’s not me Doing It Wrong just because I’m not Doing It Like Shakespeare.
Mixed in through all of this is developing your personal writing style and ‘voice.’ To an extent, you’ve got one built in. We all have idiosyncratic ways of phrasing things and looking at the world. But one of the things I did was think about stories and writing styles I loved and what made me want to nom on them like a piece of delicious beef jerky. I realized that one thing I love is stories where the writer creates a vibrant, visceral sense of environment. I wanted that, so I set out to do it. (Couple of tips for that: invoke as many of the senses as you can, and also make an effort to establish your characters IN the place: what are they smelling, tasting, picking up and fiddling with? When they bump into a delicately wrought antique iron table, what does it feel like?)
Another thing that you’d expect to start out already knowing but, it turns out, not everybody does: figuring out what kind of stories you want to tell, as well as figuring out what kind of stories you’re good at telling. Sadly, these are not always the same thing. I adore those non-sequential, deconstructed stories where the writer is following…I dunno, a sense of mood or something, rather than the chronological story. But I can’t write them. (Maybe someday I’ll figure out how. You can start doing that, as you get better; you can figure out how to do things that were completely impossible to you before.) What I am good at, and enjoy writing, are stories where I dig into my characters’ heads and turn up their psychological innards like garden soil. One way to find out what kind of stories you want to tell, and are good at telling, is to try telling a few and then look back to see what they were.
I think that’s part of the reason that the first stage has to happen. Because when you first start writing, you have no way of knowing what kinds of stories and characters you even have in you.
So, there’re my mental wanderings on the subject so far, based on my own experiences and what I’ve seen in others. I think that exposing the process of writing (and of learning to write) is tremendously valuable, because if you start by looking at the end product, it all looks so solid and mystical. But that’s an illusion formed by not being the person on the inside, not seeing the frustration and hair-pulling, the crappy first drafts and the lines that they never quite worked out to their satisfaction but that none of the rest of us know enough to care about. Hopefully this’ll be useful to somebody, but if I’m honest, I’m selfishly hoping it’ll spark more discussion about process, because I find this stuff not only academically interesting but really enlightening and beneficial to me as a writer.