How to write poorly to write well

March 12, 2023 8:34 AM

I want to be a better fiction writer. I understand that in order to improve as a writer, I probably need to write poorly first but consistently; as I get the reps in, I should improve. I also accept that a big part of writing is actually editing and polishing messy first drafts. And I know I should not compare my early drafts with other writers' later drafts, and certainly not published work. And yet...

I can accept that rationally. But I'm also a perfectionist who is very self-critical. So I can write something but I end up not really disliking it, or fixating on flaws. Then I freeze up. I have lots of ideas of things to write, but I can't execute because I don't think I can get down on the page what I imagine in my head.

I think I could deal with this if I had sense of progress but I really don't. It's very hard to tell, as a solo writer, if I'm actually getting better or not. There's no feedback loop, I guess.

So for the fiction writers out there: how do you get better? How do you know you are getting better? How do you measure progress? How do you learn from your mistakes?

I keep hearing advice to just get words out, to do morning pages or Tim Clare's Couch to 80k or whatever, but I feel very stagnant even when I am pumping words out. I can produce 750 words of awful freewriting easily enough but I don't think it's actually helping me get better at the craft.

(I don't have the access or money to afford enrolling in a course with a proper teacher who could give me feedback but neither do lots of writers who, I am sure, do improve their craft. Incidentally, I don't have the same hang-ups about other kinds of writing, but I have many more years of experience in school writing essays where I did get plenty of feedback and was able to learn from it.)

posted by synecdoche to Writing & Language (15 answers total)

Nearly everyone I know that has gotten to the "publishable" level has some kind of beta-reader relationship with at least one other person, if not an actual group. The feedback-and-revision cycle is very much the way to get better, even if the first significant period of that does not result in publishable or even very good results.

(You can also get stuck in the endless-polishing loop, which is another possible pitfall, but doesn't sound like where you are now.)

This doesn't require money! Writers need feedback, and trading beta reads is a super super common transaction. Find a writing community that doesn't give you hives - back in the day I liked Absolute Write, or you could try something more explicitly transactional like Critique Circle.

One important thing - you are much less likely to get better because you get great critique. This seems contradictory! But in my experience, you will get better by learning how to give good critique. It's much easier to identify flaws and start to see fixes in work that isn't yours! I also got a ton out of spending a couple years writing little Goodreads reviews of everything I read, concentrating on trying to figure out why books worked or didn't work for me, rather than trying to make statements about objective quality. You don't have to publish those reviews anywhere - it's the process of thinking through how writing works that is good for you.
posted by restless_nomad at 9:06 AM on March 12, 2023 [19 favorites]

The community at 24H offer co-writing times, craft discussions, lessons, forums, and more. It's free, but I think I paid a small amount when I joined because they offered stickers and I love stickers. I haven't participated as much as I'd hoped to, but it seems like a good community full of useful resources.

I am part of a writing group that meets weekly via zoom. We write for about 25 minutes to a prompt (though you don't have to stick to the prompt), then people can read what they've written, then we take a break and do it again. We follow a model pioneered by writer and writing teacher Pat Schneider, which only allows positive feedback and appreciation, and in which we practice the discipline of talking about "the narrator" of each piece of writing, even if it's 100% obvious that it's 100% autobiographical. I've only been meeting with them for about six months, but it's been amazing for me in helping get my writing into a consistent flow. Having people I see every week who care whether I write or not is really powerful! And you do develop as a writer from the feedback, even though it's not critique.

You could set up your own writing group via meetup.
posted by Well I never at 9:12 AM on March 12, 2023 [3 favorites]

Have you tried revising your 750 words of free writing? There’s an entire genre of fiction called flash fiction that is pieces less than 1000 words. So try not to get caught up in how much you’re writing and instead look at seeing the ways in which the short writing you do produce can be improved. And starting small is a great way to satiate your inner critic. Can you write one great sentence? Can you find one amazing word?

There are SO many books about craft that you can learn from but I’d recommend starting with ‘reading like a writer’ by Francine prose. As restless nomad says, you learn a lot by dissecting what you’re reading and understanding how writers are creating the effects you like and don’t like.

Others have better recommendations for online communities, but there are many out there and the trick is to find the one that works for you. I think you’ve got this!
posted by you'rerightyou'rerightiknowyou'reright at 9:39 AM on March 12, 2023 [2 favorites]

A way to polish your writing chops without the pressure of Actually Seriously Trying To Write is to join some text- RPGs; play by post and so forth. There's a lot of communities out there so you can probably find one that appeals to you, whether it's Star Wars, smutty romance, or just D&D; you'll get practice with dialogue, description, character development, and you'll meet some writers who are very good and a lot who are way worse than you, and it's all ok because the goal isn't to produce perfect writing, it's just to tell your part of the story as best you can and have fun. You can end up generating thousands of words a day like this, even if it's 'just fanfic' or whatever, but all those words are slowly helping you become a better writer, without the pressure of Being A Writer; you're just telling a shared story with some friends.
posted by The otter lady at 9:40 AM on March 12, 2023 [2 favorites]

I'm a member of George Saunders' "Story Club," and I found it interesting that he does not do the "messy first draft and revise" process that so many others advocate. Hearing this was very validating for me! He describes working very closely on each section and revising it as he goes, which in turn leads him forward to the next section. That's not to say that he doesn't sometimes go back to earlier sections and make changes, but he does indeed polish as he goes. So maybe give it a try: revise and revise till it does match what is in your head.
posted by xo at 10:02 AM on March 12, 2023 [2 favorites]

Here are a couple things that have helped me enormously in the endless process of becoming a better writer:

1) As noted above, find people whose writing you admire, and exchange feedback with them. Join a local writers group or look at some online options. Clarion West, known best for its intensive six-week workshop in speculative fiction, also runs online workshops, some of them free, as well as group write-ins. Developing a peer group, most of whom are better writers than I am, has been transformative for me. Not only is their work inspiring, but they're "ahead" of me in the publishing field, so I learn vicariously from their experiences.

2) Submit your work to aspirational markets. Doing this, while reading the kind of work that they choose to publish, has helped me think about my stories as part of a tapestry of work by other writers who are thinking about the same ideas I am. It also provides an external (but imperfect) validation of the progress you're making in the field.

Everyone is different, but the most important thing I did to improve my fiction has been to get it in front of other people as much as possible, and really listen to their reactions. It helped me refine my focus from "write whatever I feel like" to "write as a means of connecting with the reader." You already recognize that your problem may be the lack of a feedback loop, so I think this may help you, too.
posted by itstheclamsname at 10:22 AM on March 12, 2023 [3 favorites]

One way of receiving non-judgemental feedback is through automation.

Both these tools below are free--you just need to know how to copy and paste and run a macro :-)

Word Frequency Macro--is a Word Macro that can generate a list of all the unique words in a piece of writing and their frequency. This can show you where waste words are occuring (that, just, all, etc) and it can also catch inconsistencies in naming if you scan the whole list.

https://writersdiet.com/--is an online tool and Word add-in that highlights be-verbs, prepositions, and zombie nouns. It's favoured by academic writers.

There is also the free version of Grammarly, which, while not 100% perfect and favours non-UK spelling, will catch words that should be hyphenated, missing commas, etc.

Perhaps tools that can catch the finer details will help you focus on the writing part. Good luck!
posted by Calzephyr at 11:33 AM on March 12, 2023 [2 favorites]

You really need feedback from other writers. I suggest looking at the Internet Writing Workshop. It's completely free, and writing is passed around via email. There are several successful writers of both fiction and non-fiction there. The only cost is the time you put in to offer your own critiques of other people's work. It's been a few years since I was active there, but the community has always been very helpful and kind.

I also suggest pasting your work into the Hemingway app. It will tell you about things like sentence difficulty, passive voice, etc. It isn't to be taken as gospel (none of these things are) but can be a source of hints at what to look for mechanically in your writing.
posted by lhauser at 12:37 PM on March 12, 2023

Join a group. The group I belong to is free to read and critique; you pay ($35/yr) to submit work to be critiqued. We have monthly speakers who address specific aspects of writing, revising, and publishing, of various genres and literary fiction. Not all groups are equal obvs, but since the pandemic, shopping may be easier now that many of them are permanently online or hybrid. Search on “writing critique group (my city or state)” You will probably find your state writers association and all the groups affiliated with it.

Go to a few meetings and decide if these are people you trust to tell you what’s working and what’s not. A good group will have guidelines around how to critique and how members are allowed to talk to each other, for obvious reasons. They will have documents about this that you can read. Ask for their guideline documents if you don’t see them on the website. Pick a group that seems supportive and then give them literally anything you’ve written from beginning to end. Listen to what they say, take notes, ask for copies of their notes, whatever. And then try what they suggest. You will learn stuff you couldn’t figure out on your own, and your writing will get better.
posted by toodleydoodley at 2:17 PM on March 12, 2023

* Understand that almost no writing reaches the page, either manuscript or published, exactly as it is in the author's head. Professionals do have a better shot at that, by and large, but we all often fail to get the entire sculpture out of the block of marble. :-)

* Read and write more. Consistently, or at least regularly.

* Read widely, if you aren't already. Everything's grist for the mill, and you will learn lessons that will apply to your own writing. Read classics, currently popular works, works from other cultures and times. Read things that gatekeepers love, and read things that gatekeepers sneer at.

* Read craft books. There are so many out there, and they vary in quality. Check your local library. Many people I know, myself included, have profited from Stephen King's On Writing. Zissner's On Writing Well is a nonfiction writing classic, for good reason, and it has merits for fiction writers, too. I have read and profited from or know writers who have profited from Bird By Bird, Wonderbook, Zen and the Art of Writing, and About Writing (Delany; a great book). If you ever have trouble getting your juices going, check out Writing Down the Bones.

* Specifically for your situation: read books about self-editing. Self-Editing for Fiction Writers is a fine place to start. Don't finish the book and then immediately jump to the next: try practicing some of the things in there.

* Last but not least... drafts. Multiple. Write your thing, let it sit for a week, and then take a look. Edit it some, until you can't think of what else to do. Then, wait a week and do it again. Sometimes in this process you'll destroy a story you love, or not be able to return it to a state you liked. That's okay early on. Some pieces are learning pieces.

Good luck!
posted by cupcakeninja at 3:57 PM on March 12, 2023 [1 favorite]

You could start writing a webserial at RoyalRoad, ScribbleHub, ArchiveOfOurOwn, or any of the other similar websites. I know RoyalRoad has an option where readers can suggest edits, not sure about the others. OTOH reader comments can be ruthless and/or addictive.
posted by gible at 10:07 PM on March 12, 2023

Are you writing complete drafts? That is, are you writing stories with a beginning, a middle, and an end?

If your freewriting has been more free-form than this, that's where I would start: write a story with structure. It can be a fairy tale or a campfire ghost story or a "Three people walked into a bar" joke--you don't have to reinvent the notion of story. But plot skills are different from sentence-level skills, so trying to imagine and execute a complete arc will exercise your imagination in new ways.

I personally have found writing to prompts with deadlines very useful in practicing plot skills. Archive of Our Own fanfiction exchanges and open anthology calls both work for this. (You'll get far more feedback from posting a story to a fanfic exchange than you will from submitting to professional markets, so if you're at all interested in genre fiction, don't dismiss fanfiction!)
posted by yarntheory at 5:08 AM on March 13, 2023

To add to the advice so far:

One way I recognize I’m getting better—by my own lights if not by some empirical measure that may or may not exist—is very occasionally looking over older, finished work and being able to judge its flaws. When it’s too fresh and/or I was a less skilled writer, I would think, ‘This is as good as I can do.’

Given time, I can see its flaws more clearly and, ideally, know how I might address them. It’s not a perfect system since maybe I’ll make it worse. Or maybe what I think is a flaw is actually a strength. But to be honest, there’s so much subjectivity at play here that I try not to question it too much. That’s not to say it’s a total free-for-all or that progress is linear and clear, but it’s something to steer by if I feel like I’m just drifting.
posted by xenization at 7:03 AM on March 13, 2023

I'm the author of 9 published books and for the first six or seven, I was utterly incapable of writing a good first draft. All I knew how to do was revise a bad draft into a mediocre one, and a mediocre draft into an OK one, and so forth, until I had something that was actively good.

I second all the advice to find a set of writers with whom you can share critiques. They don't need to be vastly better than you and in fact, they probably shouldn't be. They should be roughly on your level, and capable of articulating what they think you can do a little better in your next draft. If you stick with the process long enough, you will elevate each other. I sort of disagree with restless_nomad because I do think you will learn a lot from reading critiques of your own work -- but I strongly agree with restless_nomad that you will learn at least as much, if not more, from critiquing the work of your peers.

I'm in a critique group for picture book writers. When we started a decade ago, only one of us was a published picture book author. We've all lifted each other up to the point where every one of us is agented and published.

For me personally, a major breakthrough came when I stopped trying to share good work with the group and just focused on sharing something. I've come to trust my peers to spot the single rough diamond among the big pile of dross, and to help me polish it into something worthwhile. This is now something that helps me get through the first draft, even when it's obviously broken. I feel like I have a system in place to help me fix it.

In addition to all the other benefits of a steady, ongoing critique group, it also offers that sense of progress you're looking for. I'm able to spot my critique partners improving and getting better and to tell them "This is the best story you've ever written" (or "I think you can do better than this" when that's the case). They do the same for me.

Note that this isn't the first critique group I've joined; it takes most people a few tries to find a group that is right for them.

In addition to a critique group, you might read Refuse To Be Done by Matt Bell. He has a lot of practical tips for forcing yourself to get throught that first draft, and for understanding how to improve it.
posted by yankeefog at 11:02 AM on March 13, 2023 [2 favorites]

I've gotten better at writing through joining discord groups and writing fanfic for AO3. The main thing, for me, was finding exchanges and events that sounded fun and signing up for them. (It's all free and volunteer run.) All of the stuff being run has support, which meant I could ask for beta help if I wanted or for bigger events, talk on a discord about writing. (I also betaed for other people.)

Every piece I've had betaed had taught me a ton and I've brought that to my next pieces. There's a lot that I just write now, without having to be asked. (I still have a ton to learn too. Probably always will.) And most importantly, the writing was fun to do. Why not enjoy it?

If original fiction is your thing, that's fine. But if fanfic sounds fun, memail me if you want links to any upcoming events or an invite to a discord focused on that.
posted by blueberry monster at 10:04 PM on March 13, 2023