Part Two!

Apologies for the late post here. I had a busy family weekend and wasn’t able to take much of a minute to work something out.

Last time I talked about why I think that involving yourself in a group or classes that are geared toward improvement is important. It’s tempting to shrug this off and think you can do it alone, but it just doesn’t work that way because the fact is that if you take this seriously, then you are writing for an audience. And you can’t know what an audience wants to read unless they are actually reading it.

Whether you are training yourself formally or informally, there are three things that you have to do no matter what. The first is to listen. You have to listen. People will say things you don’t want to hear. Things that will make you more defensive than you knew you could be. They will be hard to listen to. But they are probably right, or at least onto something, because readers know when they are dissatisfied. And you can’t defend your writing against dissatisfaction. You just can’t. Examining dissatisfaction is hard, but it will teach you what works, what doesn’t work, what needs to change, and sometimes, rarely, when you need to find a new reader.

The second thing is to read. It shows you what a finished product looks like. Reading is studying. The most direct way this works is if you read books on writing (which you should be doing, and I’ll see about adding a new section with recommendations in the next few days). The less direct way this works is if you simply pay attention to the other things you read. Plot has structure. Dialogue has structure. Paragraphs have structure. If you pay attention to how a book is written as you read it, you’re studying.

The third thing is to write. Well, duh.

From my personal position, I would highly recommend at least entertaining the thought of taking formal classes. I took classes for two years at the college level, and I’m 1000x the writer I was when I started. I learned how to listen. I learned how to edit. I learned how to read. And I learned from writers, which is about the coolest way to learn how to write.

The other thing about formal education is that it further broadens what you can do with your life. I want to go back to school and get my Masters in Creative Writing. From there it’s a few short steps to teaching at a college level. And that’s a writing profession in an entirely different ballpark than the ones I’ve discussed before.

But even if taking classes will not benefit you (because of age, work, family, disinterest, money, etc.), you have to follow some course of education that will actively push your skills and strengthen your knowledge. Any reason that you can think of not to is more than likely just an excuse to get yourself out of it.