L: What advice would you give to other writers?
Whan people think of ‘writing,’ they tend to think in terms of talent, or inspiration, or ‘skill’ in a nebulous, experience-related way.
But writing includes actual, transferable techniques that an experienced writer can tell you how to do! If you ask a writer, “Your story has such a ____ quality about it. How did you achieve that effect?” often they can actually tell you. (Sometimes they can’t, because they made it up as they went along and haven’t analyzed it well enough to figure it out.)
But, for example, when I write, my early drafts tend to be somewhat stagnant. They’re filled with passive tense (which is something that, in my experience, MOST writers have to deal with in their early drafts). To shake that out of my later drafts, I try to convert my story to E-Prime.
E-Prime is a tense that avoids all use of the ‘to be’ verbs—no ‘is, are, were, was, will be,’ or even ‘become.’ Realistically, this is an almost impossible tense to achieve in writing meant to be enjoyed by others. So I set a threshold—go for the low-hanging fruit, as it were. If something fights me too much, or I just can’t figure out how to reorganize a sentence and keep what I like about it (or make it better—usually converting a line to E-Prime actually makes it better) then I just leave it as-is and move on to the next thing.
So, my advice is to talk to other writers and ask them about the techniques they use to achieve the things you like about their stories.
And to not think about writing as a monolithic thing. Just like painting, writing can be broken down. This is what we mean when we say that writing is a ‘craft.’ It’s not magic. Like other skills, some parts of it you have to learn for yourself, but some parts you can actually be taught.