A resonant opening line

Sometimes, that's all you need to get a story rolling.

Now, I thought I had discussed this idea on here somewhere before, probably in the comments to this post on Great Openings to Novels; but it's not there; not anywhere on the blog that I can find with Google. Very strange.

Oh well, this is the latest of my ideas for a novel, and the one that I currently feel most interested in actually trying to write (although I suppose I've been pondering it for a bit over a year now, and haven't got down to making a proper start on it).

I was thinking about opening lines, and suddenly "Nobody dreams in here" occurred to me. I really liked it. And it immediately suggested to me a prison setting - the most obvious implication being the metaphorical dimension of 'dreams', that long-term prisoners do not dare to imagine their future freedom; the bleakness of their environment dehumanizes them, stifles their capacity to look forward with hope.

But.... that opening line suggested to me an opening paragraph describing the typical beginning of a day in this prison, the protagonist suddenly returning to consciousness after a night of dreamless sleep. Actual dreamlessness. I suddenly pictured the entire prison population all waking at exactly the same moment (roused by a buzzer or klaxon), none of them being able to remember any dreams. How might that happen?

And so, what had started out as an idea for a fairly conventional and realistic prison story abruptly evolved into a more mysterious and surreal fable with a Kafka-ish quality. I envisaged a prison population who had all forgotten what crimes they had been imprisoned for, but rarely contemplated or questioned this puzzling fact. Moreover, they faced daily interrogation sessions which were ostensibly directed towards encouraging them to remember - and acknowledge and express remorse for - their offences, but which in fact seemed to be merely encouraging extended reminiscences about whatever they could remember of their lives before prison.

Why have their memories become so frail and fragmentary? And why are their memories so important to whoever is in charge of the prison? And why have they lost the ability to dream?

I always find, when developing a story idea, that if I ask questions, the answers come to me. And the answers build the story.

How far can you push a gag?

I generate a lot of my story ideas just by taking a random situation and teasing it apart logically - exploring different ways in which it could have come about, and different places that it might lead to.

A favourite example is this (which I had considered using as the opening scene for my surreal comedy film, The Catalyst [I wasn't actually going to call it that, but it was a convenient working title, since it summed up the core concept], which I wrote about a little earlier today): a man is making breakfast in a strange apartment, is uncertain if the milk is out of date, so gingerly takes a sniff of it before adding it to his coffee or cornflakes. It's a scenario familiar to most of us. I think the idea of using something like this in a film was initially suggested to me by William Goldman's fascinating book on screenwriting, Adventures In The Screen Trade, in which he observes that such simple moments of everyday human fallibility can be an effective means of establishing audience identification with a protagonist - he gives the example of a gumshoe movie (I think it might have been Paul Newman's Harper) in which we see the hero in the opening scene being forced to reuse a coffee filter salvaged from the bin.

But I thought to myself, How far can we take this, how many times can we reiterate the gag? What if it's not just one carton of milk that's gone off, but two, three, four... twenty?

Once we find that the fridge is full of part-used milk cartons, it gets a bit surreal. And it presents us with a mystery - WHY would anyone have this much milk?

I found an answer to this - one that sets up an intriguing back story, and creates tension, threat for the protagonist.

Why is he in a strange apartment? Because he's just slept with a girl for the first time. This immediately adds to the potential stress and embarrassment of the situation. Why doesn't she have any fresh milk? Is she just a disorganised slob? Well, he's not going to want to complain about that, is he?

Why does she have so much milk? Well, who drinks a lot of milk? Athletes... body-builders. So, her ex-boyfriend is a body-builder, and he's still obsessed with her, has become a stalker; he's in denial about the break-up, and is bullying the milkman into continuing to deliver his order of several pints of milk a day to the apartment, in anticipation of an imminent reconciliation. Hence, not only does our hero find himself in an apartment mysteriously awash with milk, but this leads him to the discovery that his new girlfriend has a complicated past, and that he may be under threat from a burly and psychotic ex-lover of hers.

[This scenario was, I think, suggested at least in part by Roger Doesn't Live Here Any More, a superb BBC2 sitcom from about 1980, written by John Fortune - there was only ever one series of it, alas. One of the gags in this was that the protagonist, going through an acrimonious divorce, had found himself a very beautiful but rather kooky girlfriend, who was also intermittently dating a professional wrestler. She later conceived the idea that perhaps the illicit thrill of adultery was a crucial element of their attraction, so when Roger's divorce finally came through, she immediately went out and married the wrestler, to maintain the excitement in their affair.]

Advice to would-be writers - a final word

In two long posts last week, here and here, I summarised the lessons I've drawn from some three decades of experience of writing groups, writing classes, and trying to scratch a living as a writer.

I suspect many of these observations go rather against the general orthodoxy, especially in North America, where the teaching of "creative writing" has become a significant industry and writers' groups are now enormously popular. In particular, I imagine my extreme scepticism of writers' groups, and even of one-to-one mentoring, may arouse a fair amount of animosity.

I've already gone into the reasons for my scepticism in some detail in the second of my posts on this topic. In essence, I believe very strongly that writers should cultivate their autonomy and learn to rely on their own judgement; I don't think depending on anyone else's support or advice is ultimately conducive to that goal. With mentoring in particular, it is the status inequality between the two parties that most bothers me: I don't think it is good to "look up to someone". You should be looking up to yourself; or trying to become someone that you can look up to. For every positive story I've heard about mentoring, I must have heard four or five that were much less so. And I suspect most of the positive experiences were more to do with the strength of the friendship and the emotional support given than with the mentee's development as a writer. I tend to think that if you've got it in you, it's going to find its way out sooner or later; if you're lucky enough to find a mentor with whom you enjoy a very positive relationship, you may feel that's helping you to develop as a writer, but it's probably not really making very much of a difference either way.

The one exception I might allow - which is the substance of this final post in my mini-series on writing - is the 'writing buddy'.

You don't want to be sharing your early attempts at writing with a much more experienced writer, whose opinions you may feel obliged to defer to even if you are inclined to disagree with them, and measured against whom you may always feel yourself somewhat inadequate. You want to find a peer: someone who's in a similar position to yourself, in terms of their experience, their motivation, and - if possible - their level of ability.

And you don't want to have to be struggling to form a personal relationship with a mentor (or members of a writing group) at the same time as you are entering into this quasi-professional,skills development relationship with them. It's much better to find someone, if you can, with whom you already have a fairly close relationship, and share your work with, solicit feedback from them. They don't even have to be a writer; spouses and siblings have often proved to be a writer's best sounding board. However, I think their criticism is likely to be more astute if they are also writers; and it makes the relationship more balanced and reciprocal if you are each critiquing and encouraging the other's work.

If you already have such a close rapport with someone, hopefully that will mean that you are aware enough of each other's particular sensitivities and insecurities to express negative opinions as tactfully as possible; but also it should mean that there is sufficient trust between you that you can be fairly uninhibited in your critique, secure in the knowledge that, although such negative opinions may often cause irritation or distress, your relationship should be strong enough to survive any such strains. It's much, much harder to attain that sort of intimacy with strangers.

I've never done this myself, but it occurs to me that, if you can't find a suitable 'buddy' within your circle of family or friends, you might possibly try to find one online. I can see this might be fraught with the same kinds of difficulties one encounters in making friends or dating online, but similar caution can be exercised in the early stages of seeking out and establishing such a relationship. And there is something nicely insulating about non-face-to-face interactions, a distancing that allows us to be more forthright with each other. 

I'd far rather have a real-world social dimension to a 'writing buddy' relationship; but an e-buddy could also work. Ultimately, the most important thing is how much in common you have, how much sympathy or connection you feel in discussing your writing, and how that builds into a solid rapport between you - whether you are lifelong friends or you've only just met each other in a chatroom.

It's difficult to find a really well-matched 'writing buddy'; if you do, you are blessed. But don't worry if you can't; just forge ahead on your own. That's what most of the world's great writers did.

Advice to would-be writers (2)

Following on from Saturday's post about what I see as the four basics of turning yourself into a better writer (reading as much as possible, getting writing practice on a daily basis, tying your reading and writing together and cultivating an awareness of the mechanics of writing through regular analysis and critique, and experimenting with a broad range of different genres), here's the concluding part of my accumulated wisdom on the subject. [Well, not quite the concluding part; I came up with a final afterthought as well.]

These pieces of advice are rather more specific, and aphoristic in form; although I fear they will require a fair amount of elaboration to justify them. I suspect some of them, at least, will prove a bit controversial as well - particularly for readers from North America, where the formal teaching and mentoring of 'creative writing' and the communal support mechanism of writers' groups have become something of a cult phenomenon in recent decades.

More Froogly Advice: 8 tips for aspiring writers

Be self-aware, but not self-conscious; be self-confident, but not complacent

This is a restatement or elaboration of something I touched on in my first post. A writer needs to cultivate the ability to view his own work with a detached eye, to be alert to its flaws and foibles, and to be ruthless in attempting to eliminate them. However, there is a danger that such extreme self-criticism may undermine the writer's confidence in his work, and make him unduly afraid of the possible criticism of others, more hesitant to present his work to a wider audience. This is a fear that must be faced and conquered. A writer must try to be as acutely sensitive as possible to all the possible shortcomings of his own work, without allowing himself to become afraid of his readers' reactions. He should never allow himself to believe that his work is flawless, or nearly so (if he does, the quality of his writing will start to deteriorate rather than continue to improve); but he should always believe - by the time he comes to seek publication - that he has produced something worth reading.

Remember - you are not your audience

I think this is perhaps the No. 1 vice I have encountered in writers whose passion for writing exceeds their talent (which is the majority, by far). There is a common prejudice among writers - borrowed, inappropriately, from other areas of artistic endeavour - that one should not "pander to the market", that one should remain "true to one's inner vision" and not "compromise" that to seek a wider audience. Oh yes, all well and good up to a point. I don't favour trying to appeal to the lowest common denominator, lowering my standards to reach a wider readership. I'd like to write literary fiction (or literary non-fiction) for a narrow, discerning audience. But there is always an audience; writing is fundamentally a public and commercial act - you have to write something that someone else is going to want to read. 

By all means, writers should enjoy the process of writing. And the content of what they write will naturally be things that they themselves find entertaining. But writers must guard against a solipsistic experience of their work, where they are writing primarily or solely to entertain themselves, with no consideration of how their target audience might respond to it. Unbridled indulgence in private quirks - arcane vocabulary, elaborately contrived wordplay, intricate descriptive passages, comprehensive back-story - is likely to produce something that is hugely entertaining for the writer... and unreadable for almost anyone else.

Make it a job

I noted in my first post on this topic that many of the great writers served long and tedious apprenticeships writing journalism or promotional copy. I therefore always urge people to find ways of getting paid for their writing, or at least of making their writing useful and getting it out before the public (if you can't get work as a freelance magazine writer, you can almost certainly find some local business or charity group that you can offer your services to cheap or free - helping to produce event programmes, catalogues, flyers, and so on). 

This is valuable in several different ways. It helps you to overcome any artsy preciousness about your writing, and leads you to consider it more as a practical - and useful - craft. It opens up more contact with the outside world, preventing you from lapsing into the writer's stereotype of the self-obsessed and anti-social hermit. It relieves you of the burden of self-motivation (having to force yourself to keep putting in the hours on a private writing project that may never see the light of day becomes emotionally exhausting; having other people depend on you to produce some writing, having external deadlines to meet, can be such a refreshing change from that). It helps to wear down that damaging self-consciousness about your writing, getting you used to the idea of your work going before the public (albeit work that is fairly short and utterly unimportant to you). And, above all, it helps to cultivate the daily writing practice habit that I recommended last time; people often find it difficult to maintain such a regime if their writing is to be purely self-motivated and self-consumed; creating responsibilities to produce writing for others is great for improving the regularity of your output (and for getting you to diversify in genres).

Avoid (like the plague) writers' groups

I know a few people who swear by them. And perhaps I have had unduly disappointing experiences - finding groups where no-one really had much talent, and the meetings became primarily social get-togethers. Perhaps also I am temperamentally unsuited - too much the rugged individualist - for a culture of mutual support. But I am wary of the very idea of the writers' group; very, very wary.

I think a group is unlikely to be of much use to you unless you can find people who are: a) similarly talented (you're not going to learn much from people who can't write their way out of a paper bag; but equally you might be intimidated by people who are clearly at a much higher level than you are); b) similarly motivated (many naturally gifted writers just aren't that fussed about writing something, and many more are just enthusiastic amateurs, hobbyists with no clear goal of publication; if you've actually made a commitment to producing a book about a particular topic or story and you are determined to bring it to completion within a given timeframe... you are a one-in-a-million aspiring writer, and you will struggle to find group of truly like-minded people in your locale); and c) capable of giving astute, unbiased, and uninhibited feedback.

I think there's a particular danger that writers' groups may often just provide band-aids for the fragile ego, that they may help a writer to feel better about himself, but they won't do much if anything to help him make his writing better. If most of the feedback he's hearing is undiscriminatingly positive, it's likely to make his writing worse. This has been the situation with just about all the writers' groups I've ever experienced or heard or read about it; they became big love-ins where nobody offered any meaningful criticism at all. 

On the other hand, you may also occasionally run into criticism that is unhelpful because it is excessively harsh, spitefully motivated, poorly expressed, or just misdirected or inaccurate. Being a really good critic is perhaps an even rarer talent than being a good writer, and I don't think I've ever encountered one in a writing group.

And even if you are fortunate to have found an appropriately matched group of writers which does include some astute critics, all kinds of problems can emerge with the social dynamics of such a gathering: admiration, jealousy, irritation and a range of other factors interact with personal friendships to strain relationships between the group members and distort their perceptions of each other's work. 99 times out of 100, you're better off keeping well away from all of that.

Writing is an essentially solitary pursuit. If you can't learn to do it on your own, then you're probably not going to be able to learn it.

Be your own mentor

Most of the same problems I identified above with writers' groups also apply to mentorship. Most people, I think, join a writers' group largely in the hope of finding one or more mentors through it, or viewing the group itself as a kind of collective mentor.

I know a few people who feel they've had a very positive experience with a mentor. But I know rather more who started off enthusiastic about the notion, but found over time that all sorts of tensions arose within that relationship, often ending in a complete meltdown. 

My major concern is that there is too much of a status gap between the two parties: it is almost inevitable that the mentee will feel - at least at first - overawed and inadequate before the mentor; and it is likewise almost inevitable that excessive adulation from the mentee will make the mentor unduly self-satisfied, lead him to put on airs and graces, and perhaps even become too domineering in the relationship, or start seeking to extend his own career vicariously. None of those are healthy attitudes for either party.

As I just said above, writing is a solitary pursuit: learn how to do it on your own.

A writer needs to be robustly self-reliant, and confident in his own judgement. I don't believe that relying on the guidance of someone else is an appropriate way to develop those qualities; rather, it is likely to stunt them.


Edit rather than redraft
Of course, there will be a need to redraft something from time to time. But too many writers become obsessed with endless redrafting. It becomes an instrument of procrastination. And it is a prime means for allowing 'perfect' to become the enemy of good. Compulsive redrafters may never finish their work at all. And the manic need to keep on making changes somewhere leads them to start making changes that are unnecessary, even deleterious: their book starts becoming worse the more they fret at it. You have to learn to accept something as 'finished', to be able to walk away when it is good enough.

Worst of all, the redrafting impulse betrays a lack of confidence in your writing; and confidence, as I said above, is vital for the writer. More particularly, it suggests a lack of confidence in your subconscious. At least 90% of the writing process occurs in the subconscious mind. And your subconscious is much more able than you think. Your subconscious also learns and gets better very quickly. Learn to trust your subconscious creativity: your 'first thoughts' will be best most of the time - and subsequent more conscious tinkering with them will more often than not weaken your writing.

You should go over your writing carefully to weed out errors in spelling and syntax. You should remove any repetitions or inelegancies. You can tweak a phrase here or there. You should excise any of your trademark tics that you now notice - those features of your writing that may seem natural, and even perhaps attractive, to you but which are likely to be obtrusive and irritating to other readers. And you should edit for length, trimming out any superfluous material - however good it is, however much you enjoyed writing it - to improve readability.

But this is all editing. Wholesale rewriting, recasting great chunks of your 'first draft' is to be resisted as far as possible; it can too easily become a destructive addiction.

Focus on structure

A lot of writers like to "go with the flow", just start writing and "see where it takes them". There's more to be said for this with fiction, where strongly realised characters can "take on a life of their own" and suggest new plot developments during the course of the writing. However, you still need those strongly realised characters, and a strong basic story idea, before you start writing. And, in my experience, I would say that it is only very experienced, or uncommonly naturally gifted, writers who can excel in such an improvisational approach. For the other 95% of us, it is essential to prepare thoroughly and make an outline for the work with as much detail as possible (particularly for non-fiction, but also for fiction). This process can take several weeks, or even months for an ambitious book - don't rush it. Don't let it become procrastination, but don't rush it. Don't start writing in earnest until you've got a very clear idea of what you're going to write about, and how it's all going to hang together.

Make a connection with other aspects of your creativity

Everyone - almost everyone - has some special interest which excites their passion, and through which their creative imagination most readily finds expression. And for most people it's not writing; they come to that later in life, often because there's a particular book project they'd like to realise.

I believe that if someone's writing is going to be compelling, exciting, distinctive, if it's going to suggest an individual "voice", it has to tap into that person's primary passion(s).

I'm not thinking so much about subject matter; although, if your passion is cooking, obviously it might be a good idea to make food a central focus of your projected south-east Asian travelogue. My more important point here is that creative individuals - and we're all creative to some extent - have already developed their own ways of viewing the world, of interacting with it, of expressing their responses to it. If you're a musician, what is it about music that especially appeals to you - performance or composition, solitary playing or the buzz of communal creativity with a band, highly structured pieces or free-form improvisation? How can you bring elements of your musical experience - those preferences, those insights, that passion - into your writing? Similarly, if you're a photographer or a sculptor, or a carpenter or a mechanic - what is special about the way that you look at the world? How can you incorporate that into your writing?

I have found these maxims useful in developing my writing abilities and my confidence in my writing. I hope they might prove useful to others too.

Advice to would-be writers (1)

Although I am profoundly sceptical of the notion of teaching creative writing, it is something that I've had some experience of attempting myself: in my first career as a high school teacher and more recently in Beijing with Chinese university students. A few years ago, I was asked to deliver such a course for a bunch of American college kids studying in China for a year. That fell through, vanishing mysteriously into the ether as so many job opportunities in China tend to do; but I had spent some time sketching out what 'wisdom' I might try to impart to these students and what kind of exercises I would ask them to undertake; and I've just discovered that I still have some of those notes.

My thoughts on this area were stimulated again just the other day when an old friend told me she was interested in trying to write a book and was wondering how to go about it. This was one of those coincidences that struck me as somehow timely or significant; it goaded me into codifying the various (hopefully useful) prejudices on this topic that I have accumulated through a lifetime of writing, and teaching, and teaching writing. And now I am ready to share them with you. 

[This will probably end up being at least a two-parter. In fact, a three-parter: further instalments here and here.]

Froog's Thoughts On Becoming A Better Writer

Read more

Many writers, I know, don't like to read too much, if at all, while they're actually writing a book. That is a hangup I can sympathise with, particularly if you are prone to reading gluts of books in a single genre or by a single writer - that can imprint itself too strongly on your consciousness and skew your own writing style. When I was a boy I went through 'phases' in my reading: devouring T.H. White's Once and Future King tretralogy in a matter of weeks, reading the collected short stories of Saki one after the other, polishing off nearly all of Evelyn Waugh's novels in the space of just a few months. After one of these reading splurges I found I could mimic or parody the content and style of those works quite well - but I couldn't do much else, I couldn't stop myself thinking and writing in that admired writer's manner. So, yes, you have to be careful.

However, in general, I think the best way to improve your writing abilities is to read as much as possible: read every book you can get your hands on, every kind of genre, every kind of style, scores of different writers. I am deeply suspicious of attempts to teach the essence of 'good writing' in a systematic fashion. It seems to me that such a mechanistic approach must invariably focus on a handful of features, to the exclusion of many others, and tends to engender formulaic and homogenized styles (I feel I can always tell when someone has attended a 'creative writing class' - and it's not usually a good thing!). Most great writers, even most reasonably competent and confident writers, have an innate sense of how to write - without ever having formally studied 'the craft'. You absorb the elements of 'good writing' by osmosis - through reading a lot of good writing. There really is no other way. 

People who've been avid readers for much of their lives are thus usually well prepared to embark on a career in writing. However, many people who take up writing later in life have been only intermittent readers, have perhaps not read very much at all since their school days. Folks like this need to do some catching up, they need to start reading A LOT.

I'd even say that it is useful to do a lot of reading in your own chosen genre/subject area. Many people fear that this may stymie their originality, that if they immerse themselves in other similar writing, they won't be able to help themselves picking up certain quirks of style or adapting another writer's ideas (whether being tempted into deliberate emulation or doing so merely subconsciously). I believe it should be possible to guard against this danger, if you do this reading some way ahead of commencing your own writing, in the early stages of your preparation - rather than immediately before or during the writing itself. Perhaps in non-fiction even more than fiction (and particularly if you are thinking of entering such an overworked field as, e.g., 'the China book') it is useful to know what other writers have done in a certain area, and how they've done it; to know what to avoid, to understand how to make your contribution more distinctive (let's not get hung up on unique - hardly anyone ever manages to achieve that!), and hence more saleable.

Write more

There is no substitute for practice. Most good writers honed their skills through years of drudge-work in journalism or advertising. If you've never written much besides your school and college essay assignments and the occasional diary, then you've got a lot of catching up to do. Make writing a regular habit, a ritual in your life; try to write something every day. A diary or a blog is a good place to start; but try to vary the length, content, and style of the pieces you write; and take care to write 'properly', rather than in a chatty or notey style.

Furthermore, if you haven't done much or any extended writing before, don't be in too much of a hurry to get started on 'the book'. Take the time to build up your writing skills with daily exercises for at least 3-6 months first. You can't run a marathon without training for it first; writing a book is much the same (if you're not already a well-practised writer).

Cultivate awareness about what you read and write

Of course, doing huge amounts of reading and writing won't do you a lot of good unless you are alert enough to learn from it. When we read, we do so for education or entertainment; we focus mainly on the content, and on the feelings and impressions that content produces in us. We don't pay much conscious attention to how a writer has achieved these effects. We probably have an intuitive sense of when a writer has been particularly effective in conveying something, and we feel an additional pleasure in reading such writing, but we don't pause to consider the nuts-and-bolts of how it is done. An aspiring writer needs to start doing that on a regular basis, needs to become almost compulsive about it. Any time you find a piece of writing particularly striking, go back and read it again - and again - more carefully; analyse why it had such an effect on you; consider what might have been done differently, and what the effect of such changes would have been. Study pieces of writing at different scales: a whole article or chapter, a single page or paragraph, and individual sentences. Sometimes you can try to write a formal critical essay on such a study, as a writing exercise; or, try to rewrite a piece yourself, to see if it can be 'improved' upon (probably not; but there's no harm in trying).

Similarly with writing, most of us don't bother to think about how we write. Most of us believe that we are competent in our writing, at least at the basic level of spelling and syntax; and we are all deluded in this - the English language is so monstrously complex that nobody manages to get everything right all of the time.

Unfortunately, the era of instant communications has had a very deleterious impact on our writing habits: even e-mail encourages us to write more briskly and to mimic the unconsidered sloppiness of casual speech, with its slang, its fragmented grammar, its unconventional punctuation, and so on; even more immediate and condensed forms of communication like IM and Twitter promote the abandonment of upper-case letters and the rampant use of abbreviations. Most people - though they seldom fully realise it - make frequent and often quite horrendous errors in their spelling and syntax; instant communication tools like Twitter are making this worse.

Don't kid yourself that you can 'code switch', i.e., maintain awareness of different language situations and shift seamlessly between different levels of formality and correctness in your writing. If 90% of what you write most days makes minimal requirements on formal grammar or punctuation, the other 10% is going to be negatively impacted by that. If you want to get 'serious' about your writing, you have to shift the proportion between formal/correct and informal/incorrect writing in your daily output; use Twitter and IM less, use e-mail more - and try to approach e-mailing as you would writing a formal letter on paper. 

Eliminating 'basic' errors of spelling and syntax, errors of the kind that will make your writing difficult to read and unimpressive to a prospective agent or editor (no matter how wonderful your content may be), is a huge task for most people. Indeed, it may often require several months of hard effort just to reach an adequate (not perfect) standard in this regard. However, this bootcamp work on the basics of writing doesn't have to be done in isolation; it can be undertaken alongside your more targeted preparation for your major writing project and the more general self-cultivation of the creative or artistic dimension to your writing.

At that higher level of writing we also, alas, tend to be complacent about our competence, blind to our faults and blemishes. It is natural to like our own writing, or at least to believe that it is reasonably 'fit for purpose'; and it can be hard for us to accept that in fact it may not be objectively very good; or that, whether it is 'good' or not, not many other people are likely to enjoy reading it. The aspiring writer has to cultivate the habit of carefully re-reading everything he or she has written, and reading it, as far as possible, from the detached perspective of an imagined reader, reading with a ruthlessly critical eye. That ruthlessness is the key that very few people achieve. If you can read your own writing and say "This sucks", you will continuously improve; if you read it and say "This isn't bad", you will stagnate or deteriorate.

Practise in as many genres as possible

Consider it cross-training. In my experience, people who focus exclusively on one genre may become adept in handling the conventions of that genre, but they rarely become truly impressive writers. To do that requires an all-around writing education. 

You can often learn more by moving outside your comfort zone, by attempting to write something in a format that is quite unfamiliar and even unappealing to you. Try your hand at writing everything; fiction and non-fiction; long pieces and short ones; news items, travelogues, advice columns, opinion pieces, restaurant or theatre reviews; novellas, short stories, micro-fiction. 

I particularly recommend having a go at poetry. You almost certainly won't be any good at it; poetry is HARD, and 90% of published poets aren't worth a damn. It doesn't matter whether you're any good; you'll learn a lot from trying and failing. Poetry teaches you about rhythm and structure, conciseness of expression, allusion, and phrase-making in a way that no other kind of writing can; and yet every kind of writing can benefit from these lessons.

That's enough - more than enough - for one session. There will be some more to follow, next week some time.

I hope I may actually provoke some comments for once with this post!

Bon mot for the week

"Back-story is an easy refuge when your main story isn't strong enough."

Froog

I'm not a fan of back-story, on the whole. I think it's significant that the one genre where it really thrives is in superhero comic books, where the genesis of the super-powers and, sometimes even more so, the prior life of the hero as an ordinary person are far more interesting than the established superhero premise. It's a perfect illustration of my point here.