YouTube video about fiction writing<\/a>.\u00a0 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\u2019s any good is a hopeless effort.\u00a0 He distinguishes two versions of learning; the \u201ckind environment\u201d and the \u201cwicked environment.\u201d\u00a0 The kind environment is what we would call normal learning.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\nHe compares this to learning to write which he says is one of the worst cases of a wicked environment.\u00a0 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\u2019t even recognize.\u00a0 The only feedback happens after you work on a book for months and years.\u00a0 And trying to find objective criticism is extremely difficult.\u00a0 So it\u2019s very difficult to improve.<\/p>\n
As an example of the advice given by writers, he mentions Stephen King\u2019s advice that writers should write a thousand words a day.\u00a0 But King also states explicitly that writing is a talent that cannot be learned but is inherent in an individual.\u00a0 You either have it or you don\u2019t.<\/p>\n
Now the video maker is someone who sells a program on how to become a writer.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 I guess that does sort of make sense.\u00a0 But I wonder how much it costs to become an author in his school?\u00a0 Well, I see his point about learning to write.\u00a0 It does seem that most of us haven\u2019t gotten an objective teacher to tell us what\u2019s good and not so good in our writing.\u00a0 Oh well.<\/p>\n
But this guy has lots of other information on his YouTube channel and actually I found some things that are helpful.\u00a0 He is a big believer in free book promotions as a way to expand audience and advertise its presence to the larger reading audience.\u00a0 So, there are two promo strategies I\u2019m lining up.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
Well currently my book has sold a little more than four hundred copies.\u00a0 I guess that\u2019s 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.\u00a0 Now as far as Stephen King\u2019s statement that writing literature is an innate talent that can\u2019t be learned, I guess I\u2019m of two minds.\u00a0 I\u2019m sure there are people who don\u2019t have an inner ear for good writing and probably won\u2019t ever write anything very entertaining.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Oh no more writer talk!!! I watched a YouTube video about fiction writing.\u00a0 The premise of the video was that trying to learn how to<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2510,1289,1263,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-37940","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-literature","category-fiction-by-me","category-stuff-that-personally-interests-me-miscellaneous","category-sff"],"yoast_head":"\n
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