write-to-tell-your-story

[write-to-tell-your-story]

Remember that learning new skills takes time, but improving old skills takes time, too. There is never a point, if you want to master a skill to the best of your abilities, at which learning is done and no more growing occurs.

You can always learn, grow, and improve, but only if you start working today with where you are now.

Set reasonable expectations for your writing based on how realistic assessments of where you are now and what writing skills you have yet to master.

Resist the urge to compare your writing to the works of others. Instead, compare the writing you are capable of now to your own writing from a month, a year, a decade ago, and take a few minutes to appreciate how much you've grown from the work you've put in since then.

[write-to-tell-your-story]

There's a popular post that goes around periodically, to the effect that steps 1 & 2 of storytelling are as follows:

Step 1: Run your character up a tree. Step 2: Throw rocks at them.

This is perfectly reasonable advice, but it misses important nuance when aimed at a novice-level audience with very little prior creative writing experience.

If you have never written a story before, then Step 1 is simply to practice writing storytelling elements. For example: character development, setting a mood with different settings, and short pieces focused on individual scenes (e.g. action scenes, tragedy, romance, etc). Practice the basic elements first, before you worry about putting those elements together in a full story.

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When you're ready to write your first full story with character(s) and plot, it is useful to start off simple (this is, in fact, a useful tip for learning just about anything new!). This is where I'd recommend the following steps as a guide:

Step 1: Introduce your character, and give them a goal (something the character wants to obtain or achieve). Step 2: Run your character up a tree (introduce an obstacle that stands in the way of your character achieving their goal). Step 3: Get your character down from the tree (learn how to navigate your character through a reasonable path and overcome the obstacle standing in the way of their goal).

You may notice that I've introduced a new Step 1 to the list, as well as simplifying the last step. Creating characters and giving them goals is part of the storytelling process, not a separate task that occurs independently.

A few additional thoughts to keep in mind, at this stage:

If you've already created characters and given them goals by the time you want to use those characters in a story, then you've simply already done Step 1. In which case, congratulations!

Mastering the simplified steps - as is the case with learning any new skill, field, craft, etc - often takes time, practice, and then more time and more practice before you feel comfortable advancing to more complex problems.

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Once you feel comfortable navigating the process of giving a character a goal, introducing reasonable obstacles to that goal (with the definition of 'reasonable' often heavily influenced by the genre in which you are writing), and figuring out how the character might reasonably face and overcome the obstacle in question, then you can add the next step of complexity. To repeat the steps quoted at the top of this post (in which it's assumed that you still have the same character with the same goal, but you want to write a more complex story for them):

Step 1: Run your character up a tree. Step 2: Throw rocks at them.

Here, however, Step 2 comes with some important corollaries:

Corollary 1: Consider the size of the rocks you are throwing. Corollary 2: Be deliberate and intentional in throwing your rocks.

What does this mean? Great question!

If the rocks are so small that you're effectively throwing sand: a handful of sand should act as little more than a minor nuisance to your character's progress within the narrative.

If the rocks are too large or thrown with sufficient force: you might knock your character out of the tree, at which point you've either changed the entire scope of the story, or you've ended it as tragedy by killing the character off.

If the rocks are very large (say, e.g., you've got a giant throwing boulders): you might knock the whole tree down, character and all. This move generally requires a significant level of care and experience to navigate through the aftermath, if you don't want your story to unravel into chaos and leave an unfinished mess behind while you move onto a different project.

As with the simpler set of steps, it will likely take plenty of time and practice to write stories with the more complex steps at a level satisfying to your own standards of a 'well-written story.'

Keep these corollaries in mind, however, and you can at least save yourself a few headaches as you learn!

[write-to-tell-your-story]

Write things that you don't intend to share with anyone. Write things that bring you joy, spend some time appreciating your ability to bring joy to yourself with your writing, and don't worry about whether or not anyone else would or would not enjoy it, too.

If your words, your ideas, and your stories don't matter to you without external validation, then they won't matter to you with external validation either.

At least, they won't matter any more than the kind of work you'd do for any job that you do solely for money, a paycheck you can spend on the hobbies you enjoy for their own sake in your free time.

[write-to-tell-your-story]

Writing is a skill that takes time to develop.

Understanding human nature from different perspectives, researching experiences that differ significantly from your own, turning creative ideas into a coherent story without losing the story you were trying to tell - all of these things are skills that take time to develop, too.

Learning how to write complex, compelling stories grounded in realistic situations and characters that feel like people, requires practicing and maintaining all of the skills that go into a well-written work of creative fiction. Both together, and individual skills on their own.

Consider:

Professional musicians still practice scales and breathing exercises, even though the pieces they're expected to perform on stage are well beyond the level of those basic skills.

Professional sports players still practice weight lifting and basic drills, even though no one goes to a football game expecting to see players doing bicep curls or sprints on the field in the middle of a game.

Professionals in any field - those worth their salt, at least - don't stop practicing basic foundational skills just because audiences don't see that part demonstrated in public as much.

Storytelling is not an exception to the rule.

Don't practice only the complex, high-level thing you'd like to show an audience. Practice all the pieces on their own, too.

Play around with heavy-handed character tropes.

Sketch out the most basic expected plot beats and lists of common tropes for any genre in which you'd like to try your hand.

Do technical writing exercises focused on developing a solid foundation in basic skills such as syntax, spelling & grammar, and word choice.

Practice little 10 minute flow-of-consciousness pieces, and then throw them away because the point is to practice creativity in general, not to find the creative idea today.

Practice writing.

Practice writing.

Practice writing.

Get comfortable with writing all sorts of things that aren't meant to be shared with anyone or even kept around past the moment you're done.

Then sit down and write a bit more of your story.

[write-to-tell-your-story]

"Your characters need to be complex," this. "Your characters need to be human," that. "Your plot needs to be nuanced and realistic-"

Well, if you want to be a writer, then the first thing your plot and characters need to be is written down.

Nuance and complexity will come with practice, oftentimes whether or not you even intend those things to occur. Ignore anyone who claims a story isn't good enough until it achieves their definition of correctly portrayed humanity, and practice writing things that you enjoy instead.

[write-to-tell-your-story]

Don't take advice on complex, high-level writing skills that is written like a lesson on basic technical dos and don'ts.

[write-to-tell-your-story]

Write for yourself.

Edit for other people.

[write-to-tell-your-story]

Oftentimes, "Write for yourself," means, "Don't let the fear of other peoples' opinions stop you from writing the stories that bring you the most joy."

[write-to-tell-your-story]

Write for yourself. Don't give other people the power to decide on the stories that matter most to you.

[write-to-tell-your-story]

It's okay to try your hand at original stories, whether or not they wind up being good stories. Practice creativity, whether or not every attempt turns into something worth showing to anyone else. Exercising creativity for purely personal growth is not a waste of time.

[write-to-tell-your-story]

One of the most important things for new writers to learn is that it's okay to still be learning.

Your first stories don't have to be novels, they don't have to be original, they don't even have to be good. You may start off with overdone tropes and flat characters and plots full of holes. The first novel you complete is unlikely to be the first novel you publish. The characters and themes you began with can wind up as ideas you've outgrown by the time you start the second draft.

And that's okay.

Give yourself space to improve. Allow yourself to try things that you'll probably fail at the first (or first dozen) times. Accept that skill building takes time, and don't beat yourself up when you're unable to start out where you hope to eventually wind up. Don't expect expertise from yourself before you've put in the work of years to develop it.

Let yourself begin badly, and trust that you'll grow.

[write-to-tell-your-story]

Whether or not you edit as you write, whether spelling and grammar are well-honed skills or your personal nemeses...

Do a basic spelling and grammar check at minimum, before sharing your work with an outside audience!

I cannot emphasize this enough. Use a spell-checker. Comb through for incorrect usage of your basic their/there/they're, your/you're, and other easy-to-miss homophone mistakes.

There will always be the stray typo, misused word, or silly grammar mishap that sneaks into a final draft, especially in longer works. "Perfect is the enemy of good enough," and even published books will sometimes contain an overlooked typo or three. Some elements should be 100% typo free, however. Of those, the most important is the summary (or elevator pitch, synopsis, trailer, or whatever relevant term applies to that brief pitch you use to draw a new audience into giving your work a chance).

After all:

If you couldn't be bothered to put in the work to clean up basic mistakes, even in a brief summary that will be seen first by all new potential readers, before sharing your work with the world, why would you expect an audience to do the work of reading it?

[write-to-tell-your-story]

All the best stories, without question, are those which lean into exactly what they intend to be. No more, and no less.

Is it silly?

Is it serious?

Is it precisely crafted?

Is it just meant to be fun?

Understand what kind of story you want to write; understand what kind of story you have within you.

Then set that story free.

Worry about refining that story only as much as it needs in order to be the best version of itself.

[write-to-tell-your-story]

Don't look for advice on how to avoid writing the things that someone else hates.

Look for advice on how to improve in writing the things that you love.

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Other people can offer guidence, advice, and support, but at the end of the day your motivation must still come from within yourself.

Why?

Because motivation - or self-esteem, or a sense of your own self-worth, or recognition of your value, or whatever you choose to call it - will never feel like it is yours until it comes from you.

The answer may sound obvious, but it can be surprising how often we forget that it is true:

Motivation will never feel like a part of you until it is a part of you.

[write-to-tell-your-story]

Be creative, and don't let anyone tell you that certain stories can't be written.

On the other hand, certain genres and story structures become popular for a reason, and there's nothing wrong with wanting to write your own version of a story that has been told before.

Just because something has been done before doesn't mean there's no room for it to be done again by you.

[write-to-tell-your-story]

The most important advice for begining writers is this: don't expect your first written work to be great.

Honestly? You might not even expect it to be good!

Writing is a skill. Like any other skill, it takes practice to improve. Let yourself write badly, or you will never learn how to write well.