Hi gang, thanks so much for all the advice I got in the reader survey! Now let’s start looking at some of the work I’ve done on the book. My very first weeklong was called “Beyond Good Vs. Sucky”, but this is a total re-write of that, and sets up this week’s series. (Some of which will be re-contextualization of old stuff, but everyone is allowed some re-runs during Thanksgiving week)
The biggest
misconception that anyone makes about writing is the idea that writing is “a
talent”, and you either have it or you don’t.
But it's more helpful to think of writing as a
discipline, made up of
seven separate
skills.
Most people who choose to become
writers are pretty sure they have a natural talent for at least
one of these skills. But once they begin, they belatedly realize that they still have to learn all the other
skills that they
don’t know.
This happens
to everybody: we
all have to
learn
how to write.
At first we focus on
learning whichever skill we
totally lack: Maybe you’re great at structure but
terrible at dialogue.
Maybe you
come up with exciting concepts but you have trouble attaching a meaning theme
to those stories.
So you teach
yourself (or get taught by someone else) the skills you lack, one by one.
And then,
once you’ve mastered all those unfamiliar skills, guess what happens?
That one skill that you had a natural talent for is now your
weakest area, because you’ve been
doing it instinctively, rather than intentionally. Instinct isn’t reliable, but
well-learned tools are.
By the
time you’re done, you jettison your “talents” altogether, and you learn
every skill, even re-learning the stuff
you already knew.
For this reason, it’s way too vague to say that any given manuscript
is “well written” or “poorly written”.
There’s nothing more painful for a beginning writer than to lovingly
craft your first story, masterfully showing off your natural talent for
dialogue, then be told “it sucks”
because the person reading it thinks it’s a lousy
concept.
You mutter to
yourself, “That jerk didn’t even say
anything
about the dialogue!”
The problem
is that, all too often, writers and their early readers are totally
mis-communicating, because they’re each referring to a different skill when
they talk about “good writing”.
In
order to figure out how good or bad your work is, you have to move beyond “It’s
great!” or “It sucks!”
You have to
separately examine the seven skills of writing, evaluate how good you are at
each one, and develop them one by one.
I’ve found this breakdown to be
very
useful, both when improving my own work and when evaluating the work of others.
Here are the seven separate skills:
- Concept
- Character
- Structure
- Scenework
- Dialogue
- Tone
- Theme
In this series,
I’ll look at the misconceptions I had about each skill, and what I’ve figured out since.
But first let’s start
with more misconceptions about writing in general…
