Is writing easy for you?

Writing in and of itself is not a complicated task. You could fill a page of A4 with nonsense in no time flat.

However, writing something good is different. It takes research, development of the characters, settings, and in some cases numerous iterations.

The way I see it, this person is seeing the tip of the iceberg and arguing from ignorance.

 

I find it difficult to even explain, with speech or writing, the essence of a story that I really like if someone else has written it. Hell, I find it hard to paraphrase my own work in a way that doesn't make eyes glaze over. However, there are a few people out there who have told me that they like some of what I've written, but it takes me ages* to write to where I'm happy enough with something to "put it out there," even in the Workshop for critique, so I'd say that anyone who thinks writing is easy is either very lucky or very wrong.

*I don't really do "drafts" or "rewrites," I hammer things out ugly, then go back and edit, then read for continuity, then go back and edit ad nauseum until I'm happy with the final result. I kind of come from flash fiction though, so I have an ugly habit of obsessing over every single word, even if the work runs to several thousand. God forbid I ever finish a novel, it would kill me.

 

The act of writing is easy.

The act of making sense of what you're writing is hard. The act of adding inspiration to that sense is hard. Writing is hard work. Do I find writing hard? No. I have been naturally gifted with the use of language since I was very young. I was the flamboyant kid who got the English Literature work that told you to use X word in a sentence and I'd write paragraphs. Or short stories on my homework.

But developing your writing, developing your style, the act of actually turning it into something is the hard work and the hard part of writing.

Would you say the same to a painter? That painting is easy. Certainly it is. But placing your vision into a constructive developing, functioning world on any canvas is the hard work.

 

Writing is very hard for me because every word I write reminds me of some emotional pain, if I attempt to write honestly and fully. Also i'm not really a fan of the english language either, I feel like it is very clunky and unsmooth to write with but maybe if I change my style and my use of phrases I can improve my writing.

 

If writing were hard, I would find something easier to do. Why should it be hard? I think it is one of those things that gets easier the more you do it. Also, being an avid reader, I believe, makes writing easier. I don't need someone to believe writing is hard work for me to know I am working hard at it.

 

It's easy enough to string words together that tell a narrative. Anyone can do that. However, there's a difference between just writing a story and writing a story well, because otherwise there'd be nothing separating J R R Tolkien from some hacky third rate LOTR fanfic writer. To write a story well, you need to know how to develop plot, how to use narrative in a compelling way, and be able to write characters who feel like fleshed out human beings.

 

Writing is easy. Writing well takes a lot of practice and dedication and learning. Writing successfully, in a commercial sense, requires more learning, networking, humility, and a fair share of luck.

 

Do you find yourself in cycles where you love what you write until you hate it?

I've realised this is a necessity as you become complacent if you don't look at your work critically and is just a sign that you are, at the very least, becoming better at spotting flaws.

But more often than not, I find my entire style is utter garbage because I don't have the vocabulary to express what is happening.

Just look at this, I used Prowritingaid.com and it said that I had vocabulary that was more dynamic (unique words/total) than 1% of ProWritingAid users.

I use these words a lot:

(It's a 25 000 word text)

could - 78
feel/feels/feeling/felt - 50
hear/heard - 25
initial -ing - 105
knew/know - 103

This is what Hemingway had to say, if you are familiar with the site:

187 of 2060 sentences are hard to read and 58 of 2060 are very hard to read.

So I guess it's easy to read, at least.

I know I just need to read and write more but it feels like I will never finish anything that I'm proud of... I guess I'm way too early in my career to even consider it.

Ps: Thanks for reading my rant. I just needed to get it out there.

 

You'll improve. Writers to write and practice and study tend to improve with each book.

If you're finding problems with wording or word choice or vocabulary, like you indicated, reading and writing more will help. Pick out novels/books that you can study. See how those authors created description and dialogue. Note the words and phrases and sentence and paragraph structures. Then, from what you've observed, apply it to your own stories and writing style.

Yes, it takes time, but very, very few writers are overnight successes.

 

I was listening to an ABBA song the other day and was struck by one particular rhyme from Lay All Your Love on Me

I used to think that was sensible
It makes the truth even more incomprehensible

which was far more exotic a word than most English First Language speakers would have thought of using.

Keep plugging away, keep learning, and don't lose heart!

 

You think you got problems; there's over 2000 uses of 'just' and over 8000 sets of ellipsis in my present manuscript. Admittedly that's 130k words but, well, we all have little foibles.

Yes, we all have problems with being self-critical. It doesn't matter how many times you read back what you wrote, you'll always find something to change to make it 'better'. That's just the nature of it because there isn't really 'perfect' in this world, there's just what seems to be better to us at the time. It's easy to come back to your work and say "What was I thinking?" literally every single time you ever read it even though every single time you thought you had it perfect last time. That's just the nature of the beast.

It's also very easy to play tricks on yourself. You can start writing, then move where you are going because at that moment you think maybe your audience would probably connect better with this type of character and then when you come back you think actually no maybe that way would be better, then a different one, then another, and on and on because you are you and you don't know what your audience would actually really like the best and there's no way to really know that short of showing them the completed book. But that can lead you into another spiral of self criticism because you audience isn't homogeneous, it's made of lots of people with weird views on things. You can easily ping-pong between thinking your audience wants a more complex, engaging, boundary pushing book and thinking they want a more simple, basic, entertaining story. But you can't make a book be both of those at the same time and your audience in fact probably wants both; that is to say some of them would prefer the more challenging read and some of them want something easy and comforting to read before bed.

Suffice to say that truth is that the chase towards 'good enough' is the rabbit hole with no ending. You can chase it forever. You need to know when to stop and move on, you need to have faith that people will like your ideas as you conceive them and you need to be careful not to confuse other missteps for mistakes. You shouldn't feel bad because your earlier ideas weren't the greatest. You shouldn't feel bad that you didn't know things. You shouldn't feel bad that your earlier writing doesn't meet your present tastes. And you shouldn't judge your abilities based on work that you didn't finish.

As you write more you learn. When you first wrote something you'd never run into this specific challenge before, or any others, so you took a stab and maybe you didn't quite hit it but when you run into another challenge like that you know a bit more and you can do it better. Almost everyone starts out with bad ideas, or more accurately, with ideas that appeal to them and no-one else. And that's ok. Because most of us start writing because we say "Man, I wish someone would write this book I want to read." without thinking if that's something that can really sell or even really appeal to anyone.

And of course that book that you wanted to write initially probably isn't what you eventually find you want to write or even to read. Because writing isn't like reading. The things that you like to write are weird and different because it's a different process. I like sci fi books, as well as historical adventure (Sharpe, Hornblower, Templar knights) stuff. But I write teen romance, a genre I've never read anything in. It's complicated why I ended up there but I feel really great about what I write even if I'd never have thought that's what I was interested in. But it's a process to find the things that engage you. Maybe, like me, you might find that within your first book you really enjoyed writing the romantic sub-plot and the interpersonal drama much more than the main plot. Your tastes will change in both types of books and kinds of writing, and your earlier work being in a different genre or different style doesn't mean it's bad, it just means it was something that doesn't work for you right now.

Equally you shouldn't feel bad that work you left in the middle or never edited or so forth was bad work because writing must be judged on where it ends up, not where it starts out. We might wish that we could just sit and type perfect, elegant, engaging, meaningful prose all day long but we can't and it takes a lot of editing and honing and improvement to make your writing good. Just because you wrote something a while ago doesn't mean it was finished, even if you don't have an intention to improve it now. You shouldn't feel bad about your 50% finished thing isn't 100% finished.

In a more general sense; I actually think that in writing it's right to forget the old maxim that a wise man only knows how ignorant he is; you badly need to avoid the situation where as you improve as a write you become more and more critical of your own writing to the point that you simply cannot write. That's a real problem too; that as you become a better writer you might become snobbish and judgmental and start to judge yourself for writing things that are simply functional and important. You could easily start to think that every sentence needs to be like the best sentence you've ever written even though there's absolutely no way that can happen. Some parts of books just need to communicate the plot and trying to jazz it up makes it pretentious and focus pulling and that's the exact wrong thing. It's trapping you into the abstract idea of writing instead of trying to write a good book. And good books sometimes say "He walked over to the counter and poured himself a glass of milk".

It's a trap to think that because now you can recognize good writing everything you write must be that and only that. A book is a really big project and you need to look at it holistically, not on a word by word basis. On a book-scale 'good writing' is more about what the writing is doing than the vocabulary or the structure or really anything else. If the writing is creating the right effect and communicating what you want then it's good writing, even if on a word by word basis it doesn't strike you as being amazing. Sometimes the right effect really is 'not being noticed'; writing so that the reader can stay in the moment and doesn't even really think about the words on the page. That's one major mistake that people who strive to make every single sentence amazing fall into. They end up writing prose that pulls the reader away from the scene and the moment and leaves the reader not engaging or feeling anything. Now maybe they are amazing sentences. But that is bad writing.

I've banged on far too much here, as I am wont to do, but I think the bottom line really should be that we shouldn't be asking the question of if we are or even if we can be good enough. We just need to try and do better. But there is no good enough. Just better. A little bit, a tiny bit better every time. And that is all. Because there is no good enough.

Just do better. And good enough will take care of itself.

 

It's a blessing in disguise to be dissatisfied with your work @Stammis. Onward.

 

Two things:

1. If you're using these tools as some kind of way of figuring out if you're writing well, then you're always going to be dissatisfied. Not only is it raw data, which people can make mean anything they want to mean, but I'd argue the data it gives you is meaningless. Who wants a novel with 100% simple sentences or 99% exotic words? No one. Plus, those goals are mutually exclusive, so no matter what you do, you'll always give ground to one or the other. I've said it before, and I'll say it every time the subject comes up: Hemmingway, the tool, is fundamentally useless. Even if you idolise the guy's writing, simply stripping complexity from your writing isn't the way to emulate it. His was more about encapsulating complex ideas and emotions in a few words, not just simplifying individual sentences until they read like a five year old wrote them.
2. Look at and internalise this graph, until you understand that this process is why you fluctuate between "this is great!" and "this is shite!" The important thing is that, all the time, your skills are getting better.

 

I somewhat, although not completely, agree with this. It's certainly very true for lots of art forms but I wouldn't quite go as far as to say that it holds true entirely for writers. Now, I do agree that it can happen like this, especially for writers who are just starting out where they go from being a random person who doesn't know anything about good writing and so there's big leaps in their ability to recognize good writing when they see it. It's much easier to see good writing that it is to write good writing and it can be frustrating that you can never write well no matter how much better you get.

But once you're past that I think that it stops being as true. Writing is more like music than painting. It doesn't matter how good a musician you are if you can't write a good song. And the things that make a good song are actually really divorced from being a good musician. Things like drive and groove and emotional resonance don't come from technical ability. When you are a great musician you can maybe better appreciate what parts come together to make something a great song but just looking at the sheet music will never tell you if a song is any good or not. There's lots of great musicians who simply cannot write a good tune even if they can tell you in very complex terms exactly what makes a great song great. In both writing and music technical ability is just one part of the equation for making good stories or good music.

In the end, good writing and good music are measured not by technical ability but by the reaction they get from the reader. And on that axis there isn't really an 'ability to execute'. Whether something works or not is a really complex thing that resists being quantified. You can put two great writers into a room and one will say yes this is amazingly well executed and the other will say this is garbage. How can you execute your plot twist better? Well, mostly by not doing anything at all to the twist itself, you have to change the rest of the book lead into that. The writing of that twist can be perfect, and indeed in the rest of the book, but the two have to dovetail together to effectively execute.

It's really holistic and the problem for authors is seldom that they can't execute, at least not after they've written for a while and know about foreshadowing and set up and pacing. The problem is that the author and the reader relate to the text in different ways. Writing takes a really long time, reading not so much. And what works to me as a writer who's really labored over the text and what works to the reader coming to it fresh is very different. It's not that you aren't skilled enough to do it right, or indeed to think that you did it badly, it's that you aren't the one who gets to judge that. You can never know for sure until lots of people are reading it and seeing if it connects with them the way that you want it to.

So yes, there are times when you need to be careful about how your perceptions of your writing change. Definitely you can get over confident in your abilities and even arrogant about how good you are. Equally you need to be careful to avoid being hypercritical of your work because it doesn't make you react the way things you read do. But I think a much bigger problem is that no matter how well you write it's the audiences reaction that matters, not yours.

 

I just sent my novel to beta readers. I won’t start a new one until September (research and outline) so that I’m well on my way for NANO.

Between now and then, I’m going to do some short stories, read both fiction and writing books, and do some copy work of great, current authors.

Help me out: what else can I do to get good before I start my next novel?

 

Do whatever feels natural. Writing is an art, not a science (that's such an asshole thing to say but it's true lol) so objectively speaking there's no way to really "Get Good" at it outside of understanding English/Grammar mechanics (since even a story you subjectively love may be objectively full of misspellings/bad editing/etc).

My best advice is to just keep reading whatever you like reading. Reading a lot helps you naturally pick up on rules and writing techniques, not to mention helps you develop your own voice in your head for writing out your ideas. Further than that, what someone might need to do to improve their writing is so personally subjective that I don't know if I could really give them any helpful broad advice.

After awhile it's not so much about getting better at writing as much as it is expanding or changing your voice and perhaps using more (or less) complicated language to write your ideas.

 

It seems like you already have a good plan -- I only know to recommend practice and study, and you've got that covered. I'd suggest studying your practice, as well, picking apart your short stories (and novel) on a line-by-line, beat-by-beat, chapter-by-chapter basis and figuring out what works and why it works, what doesn't work, why it doesn't work, and how you could fix it. Justify everything -- ask every sentence why it is the way it is, if it's doing the job it needs to be doing, if it could be doing it better and how, if and how the story would be impacted if you cut it entirely.

Now that I say this 'out loud' it actually sounds quite insane, but that's my deal, anyway.

eta: Oh, and don't forget the importance of taking a breather. Sometimes your best creative work is done when you're just looking out a window daydreaming. Rest and relaxation is genuinely crucial to learning -- don't crunch all the time.

 

In my case, I spent so much time writing and correcting little stuff, that it's almost impossible for it to be bad. But mistakes still happen, so it's good to review what you had written from time to time.

 

Writing is easy, being motivated to write is hard.

 

It's relatively easy for me now, but only because I've been doing it for so long. The first dozen books are the hardest.

 

Writing is easy for me... Its the "staying focused" that is hard. I write something, and then i get inspiration for something else and jump to that other project and it keeps going and going until i have folders of unfinished stuff.

Writing Forum and the Progress Journal has helped me reign things in. I FINALLY finished my first draft of my WIP that i had started years ago.

I dont even want to worry about if its good or not (i mean, yes i want it to be good, but worrying about it pulls my focus), i just want to write and continue to finish stuff.

 

I had a natural talent for it since I was young but it's been a long journey to get to the point where I consider it easy.

 

Arrrrghh! Zombie!!

 

Writing is hard. The more seriously I look at it the harder it becomes, just like everything else.