Judging by your attention to spelling and grammar, you have made the first step already... grasshopper. I can't point you at a list of exercises, but perhaps there's something in the free MIT online courses (or on some other university's website). I can, however, recommend: Techniques of the Selling Writer by Dwight V. Swain, and Save the Cat! (series of three books) by Blake Snyder. I've read dozens of books on how to write and I wish someone had recommended these way back when I started my quest (although, to be fair, Snyder hadn't written his books yet). There are others, but those are the best ones to start with. Later, you may also want to read Character & Viewpoint by Orson Scott Card. I found the section on character far too convoluted and involved for my taste, but the Viewpoint section was invaluable to me.
Up to now, my writing has been mostly nonfiction (textbooks, biographies, reviews), and with the shift to fiction, my first question was: what do I not know I dont know? What will I need to work on? So this is my exploratory stage. I've just picked up a book that I think is going in the right direction... I think what I was looking for was some tips on how stories are constructed, with sample deconstructions (as opposed to critiques). It's educating me on some concepts that I wasn't aware of earlier, such as choosing theme(s) and writing by scene, and has some exercises that will help beginners. For me it's not so much scale as genre. My nonfiction work (mostly ghostwriting) have been >100,000 words, but there was no call for many of the elements that I will need to learn for fiction. Outlining biographies is pretty easy - mostly chronological order, with chapters based on major life events. I think this is what I'm discovering. A lot of the books 'about' writing seem to be more biography than craft. Leveraging the brand, so to speak. So I will be reaching out a bit more to my colleagues who have undertaken BFA or other creative writing courses. Up to now, my writing has been mostly nonfiction (textbooks, biographies, reviews), and with the shift to fiction, my first question was: what do I not know I dont know? What will I need to work on? So this is my exploratory stage. I've just picked up a book that I think is going in the right direction... I think what I was looking for was some tips on how stories are constructed, with sample deconstructions (as opposed to critiques). It's educating me on some concepts that I wasn't aware of earlier, such as choosing theme(s) and writing by scene, and has some exercises that will help beginners. For me it's not so much scale as genre. My nonfiction work (mostly ghostwriting) have been >100,000 words, but there was no call for many of the elements that I will need to learn for fiction. Outlining biographies is pretty easy - mostly chronological order, with chapters based on major life events. Nobody cares about theme, foreshadowing... the character is already developed... the creativity comes from different elements. I repeat my apology about saying I was a science grad... that was only meant to explain that I considered myself a complete beginner to fiction writing, not that I was looking for a 'scientific' approach to writing. I should have compared with my painting courses instead: when I was learning to paint, there were very tedious mundane exercises (studies) intended to build base skills (light vs shadow, capturing action in a still life, colour mixing, learning each brush type, learning each medium type, learning about substrates &c). I assumed there was something like that in writing, so was inquiring about that.
From the sounds of it, you might find Wired For Story useful - it's not so much about writing, which you seem to have just fine, as story construction, which you seem less confident with. It gets into the psychology a bit more than most writing books, which I loved but won't be to everyone's interest. It's easy enough to skip if it's not to yours.
I've actually read that one, and I did find it interesting. Its only shortcoming for my purposes is that it's very high level and didn't lend itself to connecting to immediate practice exercises.
Learning to write is like learning anything in my opinion, but I suggest you start by familiarizing yourself with the various building blocks that make up a story. A great way to go about this is to pick up a book on writing, and a good one to start with, funnily enough, is On Writing by Stephen King. I break down my learning process into a number of categories which you may or may not find useful: Writing mechanics: grammar and punctuation. This is an important part of the learning process, and it's usually where you start. I like to use the analogy of the carpenter to explain a creative process. Before a carpenter can construct a chair, or table, or even build a house, he must first learn the craft, just like those wanting to write must learn how to formulate sentences correctly, and the better you become at this then the more coherent and cleaner your prose will become. Once you attain a reasonable grasp of grammar and punctuation, you can write what you intend with confidence, just like the carpenter could construct an elegant and balanced table without nails sticking here, there, and everywhere. You can improve your grammar, punctuation, and vocabulary by simply browsing websites or picking up a book on the subject (I recommend anything associated with "Oxford"). And more importantly, paying attention while you read a novel will help you substantially. Observe how authors have constructed their prose. How clean it is. How they use complex words to describe or explain things that would usually take a whole sentence. How they use tools such as the semicolon, colon, em dash to bend the sentence to their will. One last thing: I recommend reading classic literature, not the period studded dial tone crap people write today; it will give you a much better understanding of sentence structure and the tools involved. And don't buy into that crap about publishers disliking semicolons. If that's the case then they're bad publishers contributing to the death of the English language, and you don't want to hand your pride and joy over to such sadists. Writing technique: using your prose to create a believable and exciting story. I found that this part comes later, after you've sat down and tried to write that big idea you've had rolling around in your noggin for months or, in some cases, years, and realize that your writing doesn't have that same quality of a professional author. To the carpenter, this part would be the step from producing a kitchen stool to a king's throne. It's about enhancing its quality and making it appealing among other things. It is possible to learn about writing technique from reading, but it's one of those things you don't really notice until you know what you're looking for. Writing technique involves things such as "showing or telling" and "the overuse of adverbs". For example, you learn to go from John looked angry to John smashed his fist against the table whilst screaming and cursing. I found reading websites and books about writing gave me the most information on the matter, because even when reading, I was unaware of such things until it was pointed out. It's a pretty arcane area of writing which I'm still in the early stages of understanding myself, but once you start to learn this step, the writing ceases to burden and fires up your inner Hemingway. Creativity: creating and developing your idea, plot, and characters. This part is a bag of tricks where everyone finds something they like. I can't really say a whole lot on this area because everyone does things their own way. I will, however, recommend the "what if ..." method, which I kind of stole from Stephen King, but I'm sure it's not copyrighted. The "what if" method is simple: you just ask yourself what if this or that happens. For example, the film Home Alone can be used as a great analogy for this method, and it goes like this: what if a family goes on holiday and accidentally leaves their kid at home? That's the first part. Then you expand on the idea and include the "and" or "but": what if a family goes on holiday and accidentally leaves their kid at home, and burglars try to break in while he's alone. And then you can build on it more: what if a family goes on holiday and accidentally leaves their kid at home, and burglars try to break in while he's alone, but he makes booby traps to deter them. And you just keep going until you have something that works. It's always good to be original when creating, but not so original that it becomes unbelievable ... unless it's fantasy, of course. The more genuine your plot and characters come across the easier the reader will connect with them, hate them, sympathize with them, or even fancy them. There is, obviously, a lot more to creating a good and appreciable story, but this should be more than enough to help your find your footing. Or you can always just ignore it and move on. Edit: and read! Read as much as you can! Reading is the writer's schooling.
I don't think exercises for this kind of thing exist - at least, if they do, I haven't heard of them. Techniques like that are hard to isolate outside the story itself, because none of them make much sense without the story they're a part of. The best I've got is to take the principles you'll find in books like that Wired For Story one, try to notice how they're used in books you like, and use them to write crap stories. Keep doing that, and eventually you'll be using them to write good ones.
I think the best way to improve on your writing is by reading and writing. You read to learn different writing styles and techniques and you write to test them out and to just play around. Learn by doing i guess? Not all writing needs to be serious or meant for anyone else but yourself.
Yes, I take it for granted that practice makes perfect. I'm just trying to see if there are established best practices, so to speak. I'm starting to think that yes, there are quite distinct learning paths, depending on whether a person wants to go pro versus whether a person is pursuing a hobby for personal enjoyment.
I think there's some overlap - people probably don't want to be pro writers unless they get at least a bit of enjoyment from what they're writing. But I agree, an author's ultimate goals are really important. If you're putting yourself in the "want to go pro" camp, I'd recommend spending a lot of time getting to know the market in your chosen genre (assuming you've chosen one). Read the best sellers, break them down and learn from them rather than from an exercise book. I don't mean you should be totally derivative, but see what the top five or ten sellers in the genre have in common, and then try to model your work after that. I really think a lot of writing advice, beyond the very basic stuff, is genre-specific, so if you're interested in pro writing, you may want to narrow your search down quite a bit.
It's interesting because I had started that way (I'm probably the only male who has slogged through every Agatha Christie novel - there's gotta be 80+ of them) and have recently thought that the right thing to do would be to learn some more basic skills instead, so I can be a 'writer' rather than an 'X writer' (with X representing some sort of genre). This was the intention of the expression 'a writer writes' - meaning, a writer's skill should be writing itself. The advice I was getting at the time was from my agent, who pointed out that genres get hot and cold, and there's always work out there somewhere for somebody who can at least write well, so I should become a good 'writer' in general. She was especially concerned that I might end up writing exclusively within a genre just because I personally enjoyed it, even if it was a dead market. My interest in doing fiction is a direct result of this: there's only so many potential clients out there looking for help writing their autobiographies, and us ghost writers have to sit on our hands waiting for scraps of work to drop into our laps. With fiction, I feel I would have more control to respond to the market. Once I've identified a genre, I suspect I can research it and produce. Where I'm stuck as the New Guy, though, is the 'break it down' part - I have no background in Creative Writing or other disciplines, so not sure what to look for, what elements of fiction would be candidates in any example title I might be examining. This is the main incentive for my question in the original post, as I find craft elements tend to have corresponding development exercises. That approach has helped me so much with other skills I've learned over the years, I was just hoping there was some analogue in writing fiction.
Well, your agent's a pro, so... maybe she's right! It occurs to me that maybe there's another goal-defining-moment here - I don't think there are all that many household name writers who aren't fairly tightly tied to one or two genres, so if it's someone's goal to be a really successful pro writer, maybe it makes sense to specialize? But I think there are definitely lots of writers grinding it out in the trenches, writing a short story here, an article there, and maybe a novel or two when they can manage it, and I wouldn't be at all surprised to hear that they're generalists rather than specialists.
I'm trying to ask around as much as possible at this point so I don't get screwed with just One Person's Opinion. She's pretty new to this too, I think. This is why I think I may have had a different attitude toward pseudonyms as well... nothing I've ever been paid to write up to now has had my name on it. My 'customers' have been the publishers and other businesses, such as copywriting flyers. My wife has a friend from highschool who is a professional writer, and I can't help but notice he does greeting cards, poems for filler panels in public transportation, pretty much everything that comes his way. But when I compare my work to his, it's clear he's doing something different as a writer than I do - words truly are his medium. I haven't bent his ear on this topic yet, because I want to ask good questions when the time comes and not badger him with New Guy stuff. But that might be the next step.
I think there's definitely a tendency to think "novelist" when we hear "professional writer", but of course novelists are a very, very small subgroup of the people who make their living with words! And maybe that's where the goals come back into it. I think I'd probably enjoy being a professional novelist, assuming I was financially secure, but a professional writer who does advertising copy or writes instructions for shampoo bottles or whatever else? Much less appealing!
