Oh no more writer talk!!!
I watched a YouTube video about fiction writing. The premise of the video was that trying to learn how to write by the commonly accepted method of just writing a bunch of stuff and seeing if it’s any good is a hopeless effort. He distinguishes two versions of learning; the “kind environment” and the “wicked environment.” The kind environment is what we would call normal learning. So, if you wanted to learn carpentry or to play the guitar, you would study objective instructions on learning progressively more and more difficult skills in the field while receiving continuous feedback on your mistakes through a teacher or some objective test of your results.
He compares this to learning to write which he says is one of the worst cases of a wicked environment. Basically, you bang out a book on your own without knowing anything about the objective rules of what is good and bad and so your work has a thousand defects that you can’t even recognize. The only feedback happens after you work on a book for months and years. And trying to find objective criticism is extremely difficult. So it’s very difficult to improve.
As an example of the advice given by writers, he mentions Stephen King’s advice that writers should write a thousand words a day. But King also states explicitly that writing is a talent that cannot be learned but is inherent in an individual. You either have it or you don’t.
Now the video maker is someone who sells a program on how to become a writer. So, his point is that what new authors need is to have constant feedback from an objective judge on whether what they are producing is good or bad. He states that before you write a novel you have to first learn how to write a sentence, then a paragraph, then a scene and then a chapter. I guess that does sort of make sense. But I wonder how much it costs to become an author in his school? Well, I see his point about learning to write. It does seem that most of us haven’t gotten an objective teacher to tell us what’s good and not so good in our writing. Oh well.
But this guy has lots of other information on his YouTube channel and actually I found some things that are helpful. He is a big believer in free book promotions as a way to expand audience and advertise its presence to the larger reading audience. So, there are two promo strategies I’m lining up. The Based Book Sale is having a sci-fi sale in September that I hope to participate in and I also plan to set up a promotion on a site called Freebooksy that has hundreds of thousands of readers looking for a free read. Between these two efforts I hope to be able to distribute around a thousand copies of the book and that should be a large enough sample size to figure out whether the book is popular.
Well currently my book has sold a little more than four hundred copies. I guess that’s not so bad but I do hope to see an increase in sales month over month so I want to give it a boost this fall. Now as far as Stephen King’s statement that writing literature is an innate talent that can’t be learned, I guess I’m of two minds. I’m sure there are people who don’t have an inner ear for good writing and probably won’t ever write anything very entertaining. But I also think that training yourself to put together a good scene or an interesting plot line will greatly improve the quality of your books.
There is a Venn Diagram somewhere of Good Writers and Good Teachers. The two circles have very little overlap. King is, IMHO, an average writer but an excellent salesman. He is a terrible teacher. Sadly, most teachers who claim to teach writing are failed writers themselves. Would you take financial planning advice from a pauper? Yes, you need the basics: Sentence structure, paragraph, punctuation, etc. Hopefully you got that in, ahem, grammar school. But I wouldn’t look for guidance from King or person selling a class. I understand there are some very good writers circle and other orgs for authors… Read more »