How to Get Better at Writing

During one of the many Deep and Meaningful conversations I've been having with a friend from college online during the procrastination sections of our assignments, I stumbled upon a realisation. Stumbled, and fell, mouth agape. I realised that my ability to write has improved over the years.

I feel as if this shouldn't have surprised me, like maybe I should have known that I was getting better as time went on. But no. Surprise. A bit of confusion. All the usual things that happen when I stop paying attention.

Here's what I think happened: I wrote so much stuff that was bad, like the first three-four years' worth of blog posts here, that I reached my quota. At that point, my brain decided I had to start doing things right, like maybe writing any old garbage just wasn't going to cut it anymore.

Or, the following advice I can now impart upon you in the infinite wisdom that comes from systematic procrastination, I got better with practice. Here we go...

1. Write more. I think there's still something to that whole writing enough bad stuff that there's none left idea. With enough practice, everyone begins to develop their own authorial voice. They figure out how they write, their idiosyncrasies, what they enjoy doing and how they can make the most of a bad situation when writing. (Exams became an easier experience as my writing ability developed - I knew how to write the way I enjoy writing, even when I didn't like what I had to write about.)

It's the standard advice given to every young write: write more, write often, and just keep writing, because you will get better. And it's true. If you don't believe me, look at the nonsense I wrote on this site back in 2009. Then, you will begin to understand the evolution of my writing.

2. Read broadly. Years of writing isn't enough. It never is. But it's one of a few necessary elements to developing your writing ability. Reading a lot also helps, and reading across genres and topics and authors is the best decision you can make when it comes to building upon your existing skills and vocabulary, which affect the way you write and think.

Just like you can't learn to make a movie by having seen a few and then picking up a camera, you can't write a book without having read a lot of other books, by a lot of other people. My advice is this: look for recommendations from people whose opinions you trust (or, look for a Staff Recommendations section in your local bookshop - independent bookshops are more likely to have them). Read across the board. Try some Contemporary Fiction, some Literary Fiction, some Classics, some Science Fiction, Crime Fiction, Fantasy, and yes, even try some Young Adult and Children's Fiction. Read a book on Business, on Personal Development, History, Biographies. Read newspapers, magazines, reviews, opinion pieces. Heck, even read those long Facebook status updates that are much easier to ignore.

Why? Because by exposing yourself to so many different types of writing, you force yourself to examine your own use of language.

3. Look for feedback. I know, the idea of sharing your writing with someone can be a terrifying experience. However, if you want to improve, you need to find out what other people have to say about your writing, and in a safe environment. Writing and critique groups are an essential part of many writers lives, where they can talk about their current works in progress, receive constructive criticism on the latest chapter they've written, and figure out whether or not an idea is working out.

Finding a writing group is easier today than it used to be. Facebook and Twitter are full of writers who write at different levels and across different genres. Even if sharing your material through email isn't to your fancy, you can still use social media to connect with writers you can then meet face to face.

(A note on meeting people online: public places are your best friend. Pick somewhere you know well, preferably somewhere with CCTV. It may seem paranoid, and things are definitely better now than they used to be - meeting people "from the Internet" is generally more acceptable than it once was - but there's no point taking unnecessary risks.)

4. Leave the house. I know, it's a counter-intuitive idea if you plan on writing using a computer (or a typewriter, if that's more your thing). But here's the thing: most writing is based in the real world. If you don't leave the house and see some of that world, you don't stand a chance at really capturing what it feels like to walk through a park, or along a beach, or through a city in the middle of the night. You might just know how a school feels, or your workplace, or the usual haunts you visit with friends and family, time and time again.

I'm not suggesting a trip around the world - though, if you plan on writing a story set in a foreign city, it does help to spend some time there. I'm merely suggesting that rather than write in a house or apartment in a town (or near a town), you actually get out and see what it's like. Keep a notebook with you. Use your phone as a camera if you have to, to capture some images for reference later. Get to know the world in which you're writing.

Importantly, you can also get to know the Arts world around you. Visit museums, especially when there are short-term exhibits present. Look for events, like poetry readings, or storytelling nights. They do exist, if you look for them. Get involved with the community of artists that live around you.

5. Do your research. I've put this last for two reasons: if I'd put it first, it might have turned people off reading the rest of the article, and; "last but not least" tends to stick with people. So, last but not least, you need to do your research. If you're writing a book in which a character has "a terminal disease" - an example I'm using because of its frequency in writing groups - "that isn't cancer", you need to figure out everything about that disease.

Whatever your specific subject of choice, knowing something about it beyond the standard Wikipedia entry is a must, particularly if your novel deals with one of a number of greater subject areas in Science, Business, Politics, History, Sports, or Religion. If your protagonist is a rugby-playing, devout Muslim, student, doing research in Theoretical Physics while helping his father run in the local elections, while his sister is running "a successful business" and his mother is undertaking a Doctorate in History, you really need to know a lot about each of those five specific fields. More generally, if your character is an expert, or proficient, in an area of which you have little to no knowledge, you need to educate yourself.

How do you research? That depends on what you're researching. Sports are maybe the easiest thing to research, if they're regularly televised. Watch it. Ask a friend who's interested in it about the rules. Pick up a book on tactics, look up the official governing bodies, read what they have to say. Business, you need to be selective in what you study. Think about how much you need to include in a story. If you need to know more about the legalities of running a business, focus on that area. If you need to know more about marketing, there's your focus. The same applies for everything you might need to research.

A good rule of thumb is to research more than you need, but not so much you never write anything. Read books. Read articles. Look for YouTube videos. There are dozens of channels out there that specialise in educating their audiences in a number of different areas, from literature to sexual health, the American Civil War to the psychology of mental illness. Mashable kindly listed ten of them here: http://mashable.com/2013/04/04/youtube-education/

The reason research is important is that it gives your writing substance. It's not enough to try write a story with a modicum of information and a good idea. While the good idea is essential, good writing should immerse a reader into the story.

Plus, all of that extra reading nicely fits in with Tip #2. You're welcome.

***

Improving your writing skills is relatively easy. There's a lot you learn without a mentor or a teacher to tell you how to do it correctly. For the most part, I'm a self-educated writer. Yes, I turned to books on writing to pick up some advice, but I didn't have a teacher. I couldn't ask those writers questions. This isn't to put down participation in writing courses and workshops. I've taken part in a couple myself. They're incredibly useful and powerful experiences. But they're not the most important part of your learning experience.

By writing as much as you can, and reading as widely as you can force yourself, you're already ahead of the competition. Feedback will help you hone your skills, research help you focus on the finer details you wish you include in your book, and real life experience - both of activities and places - will help make your writing feel more authentic. You can begin now, easily and cheaply - even, it could be argued, freely, depending on where you live.

What's your best advice for people looking to improve their writing? And, for those who want extra help, what do you really want to know?

The Effect of Poetry

Since the New Year started (with its grand importance and suitable capitalisation), I took to writing poetry a lot more often. Because I wanted to write every day this year, it was necessary to force myself to do something before going to sleep. Easier said than done, especially if you're tired and/or intoxicated. (But that only really happened once...)

However, turning on my laptop late at night isn't generally considered a good idea. From experience I know that I would end up awake a couple of hours after I had planned to go to sleep, probably with an early start the next day, and it's possible that in those two hours I wouldn't write a single word (beyond looking things up on YouTube...). Often, I can't even be bothered to take out my tablet and keyboard and write a blog post (though that has happened in the past), so I turn to the only other option: I pick up a notepad and a pen, and I force myself to write a poem.

Two or three years ago, this wouldn't have produced much. More recently, it's helped me explore some thoughts and feelings that I had refused to deal with for months. Rather than insisting on bottling things up for the sake of it, only for it all to come out in one big burst of emotion, I've been letting myself lash out through poetry, ranting and raving (and moaning...sometimes...) about the things that are bothering me, and masking it all in metaphor...because poetry.

(Yes, I am aware that not all poetry requires metaphor, in the same way that not all poetry requires rhyme or rhythm or any of the fun little things teachers are required to have students find in the published poetry of prescribed poets. However, for the simple sake of making things easier on myself emotionally, I use what sense I have left at midnight to create a semblance of a veil over the truth. Raw emotion, at that hour, is bound to result in some sort of trouble. And that one time when I was drunk and writing a poem, I made the inebriated decision to avoid talking about whatever feelings I was experiencing and talk about the fact that I was drunk, instead. To this day I don't know how I managed to even hold the pen, nevermind pen the poem.)

What all of this has done for me, however, goes beyond mere therapy. While I cannot deny that it has helped me to de-stress and to deal with some things that were on my mind, that's not the only thing I've found has been a result of writing poetry in an increasing quantity.

Most notably among the other effects of poetry has been its affect on my sense of language, and the way in which I care to express myself. It has been subtle, but finding words has been easier in the past few months than it has been for a long time. A similar effect takes hold when I write a large amount of fiction in a short period of time, though keeping up the writing of longer fiction while having essays and reflections to write for college on a weekly basis is hard to justify with what little time I am left with at the end of the average day.

To this end, I have avoided writing longer fiction for a while, preferring to focus on short chapters of non-fiction books, blog posts, and poetry, all with the aim of producing something, keeping words fresh in my mind, and exploring new ideas and concepts that writing fiction for years on end did not help with. I don't regret spending so much time writing fiction,  and nor will I stop writing it, but it has been nice to get a change of pace and find new ways of using the words at my disposal. While I can't boast to having the most extensive vocabulary in the world, writing has helped me to at least utilize the words I have in a more coherent and expressive way. Poetry has helped me to play upon my strengths, to pick the words I use with more imagination and consideration, rather than using excessively convoluted language for the mere sake of it.

(It has also helped to realise when I accidentally enter a mode of irony... why I've been using words such as "convoluted" in this post, I do not know, but I personally find it funny that that was the word I chose to use at the time. For the record, it wasn't even a word I thought about until sixth year, when a friend of mine defined a complicated word as "unnecessarily convoluted", to much laughter from the rest of the class. We don't know if he did it for a joke, or if that's just how he thought of the word, but "convoluted" has stuck with me to this day as a result.)

Poetry has also, rather by accident, become the most shared genre of writing in the Feedback Forums at college. This has, consequentially, allowed for many of us to discuss certain things that had been bothering us at one point or another, even if just to highlight their existence. It has brought a group of us closer together, and it has made writing much more communal than it has previously been. There was nothing more exciting in my week than getting to read and listen to poetry with my friends once a week, and that, too, comes as a result of writing poetry more this year than ever before. Most of what I have shared with the group has been written in the past three months, and of late I have brought several entirely new pieces per week, simply because I had an inkling to share them instead of the previous work.

With all of this in mind, I cannot help but recommend that you try it, too, to write poetry before you go to bed, or when you wake up. I don't always have an idea of what I will write, and often just decide to put pen to paper and see what comes out. Sometimes the metaphor exists before I even understand what it is I want to say, and other times I know what I want to say but haven't yet figured out how. It has become easier, during the year, to perform this practice of poetry, and this coming from someone whose production of poetry this year has bested his previous attempts from the previous three years (both in quality and the accumulative quantity of poems). Don't set out to write the next award winning poem. Just write, and see what happens. You might even enjoy it.

The Answer is...

In accordance with my New Year's Resolution to write every day in 2013, I've found myself writing even when I didn't really want to. If I've been at my laptop, it's easier to force myself to do some work (except for  tonight, for some reason, when work just seems disgusting, so I'm writing this instead...) However, it's happening more and more often that I don't even switch my laptop on, sometimes for three or four days in a row.

The biggest problem with that is that I do most of my writing on my laptop. While I can use my tablet and keyboard anywhere, and have written blog posts in bed using them, I find it much more annoying than if I'm sitting at my laptop. I also can't write flash fiction while using my tablet, because I can't accurately judge how many words the story has. I don't like writing fragments of pieces on my tablet, so I can't write a novel/novella, and I can't concentrate when I'm in bed on writing an article or a chapter of a non-fiction book.

So what do I write?

My Twitter followers and my Writers' Soc friends might already know that the answer is...poetry. Which really surprised me.

I have never really considered myself much of a natural poet. I once tried writing a poem every day, and the end results were too awful to share with the outside world. However, more recently I've found that I can more easily express myself in poetry, and I tend to enjoy it more than I used to. I've written, if I counted correctly, 21 poems this year.

Okay, it doesn't seem like a lot when you add it all up, but considering the fact that's probably more than I wrote all of last year I'm pretty proud of myself. It's become a more comfortable experience, even though I'm usually lying uncomfortably in bed while I write in an A4 pad. I've written poetry about friendship and alcohol and relationships and Dublin. I've explored the weirder side of my mind, the feelings I've been hiding from myself, and the notion of death as someone I might have known from school passed away.

Overall, it's been a weird but fulfilling experience, and it has led me to the conclusion that anyone can make an attempt at writing poetry, and if they're honest with themselves they might actually produce something worth reading or listening to. The feedback I've received on some of my poems has been positive (I can't say anything about the poems people haven't heard or read or given feedback on, so... yeah...), and I didn't really consider myself much of a poet to begin with. Occasional poetry was the most I ever had to my name.

Now I'm a bed-time poet. If I haven't written anything on a given day, I pick up the notepad and pen and just start writing, not trying to come up with something clever half the time, just letting the words come out as naturally as possible.

If you're in a situation like I am, where you want to write as much as possible but find yourself without the time to write anything, there's an answer available to you. The answer is poetry.

Feedback Forum

The Writers' Soc met today in college, for the first time in way too long. We had to put our Feedback Forums on hold last semester, with most of us - if not all of us - actively involved in what became a triple-header showcase of plays at Christmas. It didn't make sense to try squeeze one more thing into an already busy schedule, not when it required producing work, and not when it usually goes on for about two hours.

It was so good to get to hear a lot of new work from people, with a mix of poetry, short stories, blog posts and letters, written in various emotional and sobreital states.

The Feedback Forum is a good chance for us to get to share our work, but that's not its only purpose. The poems we share - because it's usually poems, but that's not intentional - tell us something of the people who wrote them, and that leads on to various conversations about the meanings behind the work. We ended up talking in length about abortion in Ireland as a result of someone's work. Her first time coming, and that's what happens.

It was awesome.

I shared a single poem, this time, written at the start of the year for a friend whom almost everyone in the society knows. It was a very personal piece, and one I haven't had the chance to share more broadly, yet. All in all, I think it went down well.

The Writers' Soc is due to go on to become part of the first ever English Week in my college. Several societies - Drama, Writers, Tea and Sci-Fi confirmed, from what I know about it - are planning events to fit into the week, to make it known that there are lots of fun ways to share the joy of the English language and its various media. Thankfully I'm not in charge of running the entire thing, or I'd be freaking out right now.

It will be fun, though. We've never had so much to do in the various societies. Drama lasted the longest out of the non-sports socieities last year, with two plays in the second semester drawing in massive crowds - almost selling out twice! That's a lot for a small college. This year, we split up the work a lot over the two semesters, and created something entirely different out of the Drama Society than has been seen in previous years. Just as well; the number of new members jumped up this year, making it the biggest Drama Society I've seen since my first year in the college (possibly the biggest it's been since before that!)

With English Week, Drama is going along with three much younger societies to create something unique to the college. There's such a wide variety of events in the works, and I'm delighted that the Writers' Soc, my baby in the college, gets to be involved in it. We're still planning something massive, but it all focuses on the type of work we do in the Feedback Forum. We're going to get a little bit more public than people are used to seeing us, if they even remember we exist.

I canny wait.

In the meantime, I'm going to take advantage of the poetry-buzz I'm on and work on some new material over the coming week to get as many thoughts as I can out on paper in as best a form as I can manage. The next Feedback Forum is going to rock!