Language, craft, and the literal act and art of writing

[FifthView]

It's a slippery topic and not one on which I'm certain nor particularly clear. It's been my own experience that I'm not aware of my own voice--perhaps somewhat like we never sound to ourselves like we sound in a recording. Voice has been what others claim to hear.

I think this may be a sort of funny paradox, or the banana peel on the road to understanding...

Meh, purple, ain't it?

Anyway, we do make choices—but I'm not sure we're clear on the metric we are using.

Here is another gulf, then: weighing the desire to reach and positively entice/entertain other readers vs the desire to please oneself or one's own tastes. (Continuing the subject of the writing itself, the prose, more than the story elements per se...)

A lucky author will find that these are the same, at least her tastes will be alluring for readers as well. The voice she is most comfortable writing sells books, heh.

The unluckiest author will be conscious of the fact that she doesn't know, with certainty, whether the competing desires can be reconciled. I mean, she will be in that limbo in the gulf, and this will impede the writing, perhaps halting it altogether.

Then there are those who simply don't worry about this. They either don't write, or they do, come what may.

 

[Yora]

"Your voice" is a kind of mythical thing, in my opinion. It is presented as an ideal, a natural part of you to be discovered, yours, something that emerges from your very being, even.

It's simply that you write sentences in a way that comes naturally to you, using your own vacabulary.
The only reason to ever talk about it is to tell people not to worry if their sentences don't look like those of other famous writers.

 

[A. E. Lowan]

I've been doing this for forty years, since I learned at my mother's knee. The only and best advice I can offer is to read widely. Read outside your genre. Read the backs of cereal boxes. Read everything. And then write. Write every day. Pick a project and stick with it, filing new idea away so you don't lose them, and finish something. Nothing beats that feeling of finishing your first book. Then stick that book in a drawer and pick a new one to work on.

It takes 10,000 hours to master a craft. Your hours begin now.

 

[Svrtnsse]

You're all doing it wrong.

Okay, you're not, but it's an opener as good as any.

One thing I've noticed is that writers are often really keen on figuring out how to translate their images, visions, and ideas into words to put on a page. There are "rules" and advice for how to write, and there are innumerable blog posts explaining how to show and not tell (I've done at least one).

There's not nearly as much talk about how readers translate the words on the page into images in their minds.

I think the main reason for this is that we are so focused on how to write that we forget about what happens when we read. We're so keen on putting our vision on the page, on getting the details right, and on making sure the reader sees all the awesome things we see.
Only, the reader's never going to see what we see.

We're all different, and words aren't pictures.
Those of use who are visual readers, read the words, and translate them into images, but we all get different images, and there's no way any writer can know what image.

People who aren't visual readers, well, they probably don't much care about descriptions anyway, but I could be wrong.

How much thought have you actually put into what happens in your mind when you read a word?

Volcano.

That's a word. It's also a kind of desert they serve at a nearby restaurant that comes with brownies and ice cream and a lot of chocolate sauce. I would guess that's not what you were thinking of when you first read it.

...anyway.
The point I want to try to make is that detailing your vision on the page isn't all that important. What matters is that you give the reader enough cues to create a workable image, and then they can fill in the rest on their own.

 

[Devor]

It takes 10,000 hours to master a craft.

While this is more or less true.... you also can pass more than 95% of the population in any skill with as little as 20 hours, if you use them wisely. The key to doing that is to first learn just enough to self-correct as you go, and then practicing.

But what does that mean? What are the handful of writing skills you need to self correct for? I would suggest clarity, tension and structure, to start. But it's not enough to just write. You always want to be self-correcting for something. Maybe as you progress you swap clarity for flow and tension for a higher bar of emotional impact. But you want to be looking for ways to improve.

 

[The Dark One]

You also have to have something to write about.

That helps a lot.

 

[skip.knox]

>It takes 10,000 hours to master a craft.
Ah, but they have to be the *right* ten thousand hours.

I do believe I have mastered the craft of glaring at an empty page.

 

[Yora]

You also don't improve if you keep practicing doing somethig wrong.
That's why teachers are often pedantic about little things that seem irrelevant at lower skill levels, but will become quite important at advanced levels.
Learn doing it well, before you get used to intuitively do it wrong.

 

[Prince of Spires]

it indeed takes 10.000 hours to become an expert on something. But you don't need to be an absolute expert to write good stories. You can get by with a lot fewer hours of practice. I've read a lot of comments saying that you need half a million to a million words before you start producing good work. At 500 words per hour that equates to about 1.000 - 2.000 hours worth of writing before you start producing writing that is good enough (whatever that might mean). Perhaps no one will write a "master of suspense" review for that work, but that doesn't mean it's a good read. And yes, how you practice matters. The main thing here is that you need feedback and that you need to be honest with yourself.

Read the backs of cereal boxes

I thought I was the only one who did this sort of thing. I'm always amazed at what marketing departments come up with.