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Some Writing Advice
6 years ago
Commissions are temporarily closed
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Hello, my friends!
Yesterday, I was asked by a friend how I know what I want to write. I'll avoid any details beyond that, because I'm fairly certain they're reading this, but I kind of feel I didn't give the best answer, and even if I did, I want to share it with everyone else.
The truth is, my immediate answer was kind of a joke. I know what I want to write by looking at my bank account, i.e. I want to write whatever I have to in order to get paid.
That's a good answer, of course, and on a literal level a true one, but that's not really the best one. What took me aback, really, is that I don't think of it like that, and it gave me a bit of a pause to remember that previously I had. Even when not dealing with the commissions, I still don't know what I want to write. Writing is a skill. Like any skill, it takes time to develop, and like (most) any skill, you can only develop it by using it. In other words, I don't always know WHAT I want to write, I simply know THAT I want to write, and I have to write something, and then I look at my options and figure it may as well be one of those. If I have a character or idea I had once, or a plot I heard, or something of the sort, I just go with that. It may not 'speak to me' and I may not WANT to write it at the moment, but I want to write, and that's as good an option as anything.
These days, my attitude towards writing is rather like my attitude towards wearing clothes (at least when I'm not feeling too fancy.) When I go out, it's not that I want to wear a specific thing, it's that I want to not be arrested for public indecency. Yes, I 'dress well' a lot of the time, in a jacket and shirt and tie and slacks, but that's just how I dress. It's not that I wake up feeling like today is a day fo rthe pink shirt, hyena tie, and checked navy sportcoat. I just feel like today is a day to go to the store, and those clothes will keep me warm and not-arrested when I do so.
So I suppose my advice to a lot of people is that you can choose whether you want to write, or you can choose to write what you want. If you only write what you want, you'll produce some good work, but very slowly, because you won't always want to write, and you'll never reach your full potential. You'll only write the best you can at the moment, but you'll never write the best you ever could. Alternately, you can want to write, and just choose something that qualifies. It won't be as fun, and a lot more of it will be terrible, but you'll get more out, develop that skill, and you will reach your full potential.
My other advice for getting good at writing, by the way, is to accept that you write stuff badly. I often will respond to critiques I get by EXPLAINING my choices here, and why and how something ended up how it did, but those critiques are (usually) valid critiques, and it's fine when people don't like my work. Responding that I didn't try very hard, or explaining what I was going for, is not the same as responding that the reviewer was wrong. Instead, I try to explain to them how it happened, because I want to be able to put it into words, so I can avoid it myself (if I care to, some stories like F/SF are more 'for the fun of it' stories and won't get my full attention, but others I will consider more carefully.
I'm far from the best there will ever be at this job right now. Hell, I'm not even the best that /I/ will ever be at this job right now. If you want to improve, you have to accept that improvement is necessary, and you're probably terrible. Some of the critiques will be nitpicks, others will come down to "I don't like this because I don't like the premise," but you have to read and accept all of them as worth reading, and ask what you could have done that would have addressed the critique. Now perhaps the answer is "Not written the story at all," which means you can safely consider the critique to be rather pointless. Other times the answer is "Write the story in a way different from the way I intended," which means you may not be able to address it in that story or stories like it, but nevertheless you HAVE learned something some readers have in mind, and may even want to take a shot at writing a story like that yourself in the future.
The final, and very important thing to remember, is that any story you write, you write for readers. You determine the audience (for me, it's usually 'People who might find this premise erotic' and try to tailor it to them. If your story is responded to poorly by your audience, it's not very good. It doesn't matter what YOU think about it, because you are only one reader. Of course your target audience doesn't NEED to be 'Literally everyone,' and some audiences won't respond well to stuff other audiences adore. If I write a limited level of smut, and someone else writes mass-market action-adventure types of stories, naturally more people will like their books than my smut, and that's fine. But there is no 'Objective' good or bad writing outside of the readership, and a story that does not get appreciation from the people you want to like it is not a good story.
Writing is a skill. You can only develop it by doing it, even when you don't want to, and you will sometimes write at times you'd rather not, or things you don't feel in love with, in order to develop the skill. It is inherently a form of communication, so the only way to measure the extent to which it is being developed is to try to determine whether the people who you want to communicate with receive the message, there is no other 'right' or 'wrong,' if you communicated what you wanted, you communicated right.
Anyone can write a story they like, and they won't even need to pick up a pen to do it. If you want to write well, though, you need to write a story that your audience likes. Your audience may not be the most massive number of people, but it can't just be 'Me and my idea of what's good,' either.
Yesterday, I was asked by a friend how I know what I want to write. I'll avoid any details beyond that, because I'm fairly certain they're reading this, but I kind of feel I didn't give the best answer, and even if I did, I want to share it with everyone else.
The truth is, my immediate answer was kind of a joke. I know what I want to write by looking at my bank account, i.e. I want to write whatever I have to in order to get paid.
That's a good answer, of course, and on a literal level a true one, but that's not really the best one. What took me aback, really, is that I don't think of it like that, and it gave me a bit of a pause to remember that previously I had. Even when not dealing with the commissions, I still don't know what I want to write. Writing is a skill. Like any skill, it takes time to develop, and like (most) any skill, you can only develop it by using it. In other words, I don't always know WHAT I want to write, I simply know THAT I want to write, and I have to write something, and then I look at my options and figure it may as well be one of those. If I have a character or idea I had once, or a plot I heard, or something of the sort, I just go with that. It may not 'speak to me' and I may not WANT to write it at the moment, but I want to write, and that's as good an option as anything.
These days, my attitude towards writing is rather like my attitude towards wearing clothes (at least when I'm not feeling too fancy.) When I go out, it's not that I want to wear a specific thing, it's that I want to not be arrested for public indecency. Yes, I 'dress well' a lot of the time, in a jacket and shirt and tie and slacks, but that's just how I dress. It's not that I wake up feeling like today is a day fo rthe pink shirt, hyena tie, and checked navy sportcoat. I just feel like today is a day to go to the store, and those clothes will keep me warm and not-arrested when I do so.
So I suppose my advice to a lot of people is that you can choose whether you want to write, or you can choose to write what you want. If you only write what you want, you'll produce some good work, but very slowly, because you won't always want to write, and you'll never reach your full potential. You'll only write the best you can at the moment, but you'll never write the best you ever could. Alternately, you can want to write, and just choose something that qualifies. It won't be as fun, and a lot more of it will be terrible, but you'll get more out, develop that skill, and you will reach your full potential.
My other advice for getting good at writing, by the way, is to accept that you write stuff badly. I often will respond to critiques I get by EXPLAINING my choices here, and why and how something ended up how it did, but those critiques are (usually) valid critiques, and it's fine when people don't like my work. Responding that I didn't try very hard, or explaining what I was going for, is not the same as responding that the reviewer was wrong. Instead, I try to explain to them how it happened, because I want to be able to put it into words, so I can avoid it myself (if I care to, some stories like F/SF are more 'for the fun of it' stories and won't get my full attention, but others I will consider more carefully.
I'm far from the best there will ever be at this job right now. Hell, I'm not even the best that /I/ will ever be at this job right now. If you want to improve, you have to accept that improvement is necessary, and you're probably terrible. Some of the critiques will be nitpicks, others will come down to "I don't like this because I don't like the premise," but you have to read and accept all of them as worth reading, and ask what you could have done that would have addressed the critique. Now perhaps the answer is "Not written the story at all," which means you can safely consider the critique to be rather pointless. Other times the answer is "Write the story in a way different from the way I intended," which means you may not be able to address it in that story or stories like it, but nevertheless you HAVE learned something some readers have in mind, and may even want to take a shot at writing a story like that yourself in the future.
The final, and very important thing to remember, is that any story you write, you write for readers. You determine the audience (for me, it's usually 'People who might find this premise erotic' and try to tailor it to them. If your story is responded to poorly by your audience, it's not very good. It doesn't matter what YOU think about it, because you are only one reader. Of course your target audience doesn't NEED to be 'Literally everyone,' and some audiences won't respond well to stuff other audiences adore. If I write a limited level of smut, and someone else writes mass-market action-adventure types of stories, naturally more people will like their books than my smut, and that's fine. But there is no 'Objective' good or bad writing outside of the readership, and a story that does not get appreciation from the people you want to like it is not a good story.
Writing is a skill. You can only develop it by doing it, even when you don't want to, and you will sometimes write at times you'd rather not, or things you don't feel in love with, in order to develop the skill. It is inherently a form of communication, so the only way to measure the extent to which it is being developed is to try to determine whether the people who you want to communicate with receive the message, there is no other 'right' or 'wrong,' if you communicated what you wanted, you communicated right.
Anyone can write a story they like, and they won't even need to pick up a pen to do it. If you want to write well, though, you need to write a story that your audience likes. Your audience may not be the most massive number of people, but it can't just be 'Me and my idea of what's good,' either.
