[fiasco360]

(02-03-2017 08:40 PM)John Michael Kane Wrote:  

If you're journaling, you might as well be posting on a blog to build your audience, plus get feedback from your readers.

Writing is a highly energy-consuming business if you want to do it well, and do it for the long-term. The way to thrive is to pick the genre you have the most knowledge with, and focus intently on becoming an expert in that field. You have to pick something that you have passion for, otherwise it will just be a grind. When writing becomes a grind, then the results are usually poor.

Writing coherently isn't easy. That being said, it is best to get it out while you think about it, and give it literally a half-dozen passes worth of editing later. Don't lose out on great ideas. Put them in outline format first, then flesh out from there. I use Evernote for that, works great. You be all the mistakes you'll catch, or ways you can improve clarity when you go back and make editing your focus after several revisions. Don't get hung up on the perfect draft, get it down on paper and start refining from there. I always recommend outlining and story arcing before you write. You need structure to your writing, and these tools help keep you in line.

I also recommend this book: On Writing Well by Zinsser. Great book for non-fiction writing. Consider it your bible. Helped me a lot, because I suffered from the same problem of sometimes not tying the major themes together well. There's lots of meat to chew on there. I've never written fiction, so I can't comment on that process.

This was more of a handwritten journaling I was doing for some mental clarity.

As for editing and moving paragraphs around. I actually did that for this post.

I'll definitely check that book out. See, you even helped me express something I was trying to get across earlier but wasn't specific about it: tying themes together. This is especially problematic for me when I try to argue or convince someone of something.

Thank you.

(02-03-2017 08:53 PM)weambulance Wrote:  

Writing is a craft. Like any craft, some people pick it up easier than others--they have a talent for writing--but anyone of normal intelligence can become a skilled writer the same way anyone of normal intelligence and coordination can become a skilled craftsman with enough effort.

As with any other craft, getting good is at least 90% practice. So write a lot. Preferably where people can see it.

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I have always been told that if I want to be a better writer, I need to read more books. I definitely agree with this, but I am curious to see what else is out there.

Reading is worthwhile mainly (I think) because spending a lot of time immersed in good writing lets you develop a feel for what good writing is. Even if you're not a great writer already, it's obvious whether or not someone else knows what the hell they're doing. There's plenty to learn from bad writing as well, of course, it's just mostly "what not to do".

Formal instruction and how-to material can be pretty useful if coming from the right sources but the world is full of fucking terrible advice about writing. There's a lot more bad than good out there, in my experience, though most of it isn't so much outright harmful as discouraging and scary for inexperienced writers.

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I think my weakest part of writing is stringing together a coherent writing style. I jump around a lot. It seems as though my brain moves too quickly to get all the information out in a manner which is engaging for someone else to read. A main skill I'm after is to use imagery in a stronger manner, maybe analogies as well.

Perhaps you should take a more structured approach to your writing, since it sounds like you just jump right into writing.

1. Do some brainstorming: I do this out loud with a voice recorder much of the time.
2. Narrow the topic to something coherent and trim extraneous crap.
3. Outline: Useful for making sure the piece builds logically instead of jumping around.
4. Write!
5. Read and edit for clarity if necessary: Trim anything that's confusing or tangential, add anything that needs to be added to support your case, and rearrange points if necessary. I regularly move paragraphs around wholesale to improve the logical flow of a piece.

From there you can tweak your style as necessary. Getting specific feedback is useful and even minor tweaks can really improve your style.

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While I'm not reading a book a day or week, I consider myself fairly well educated and well read. However, I notice that my writing style is not nearly as captivating or persuasive as I would like it to be.

If you're interested in persuasion Scott Adams has a whole recommended list of books you might want to check out. Studying effective rhetoric is probably worth your while too, but I have no specific recommendations there. Studying storytelling techniques--both written and oral--is useful even if you're not writing fiction because they're all about hooking and keeping your reader engaged, which are fundamentals of communication on any topic.

Speaking of fundamentals of communication, here are the basic things I keep in mind when writing or speaking to a group:

1. Tailor the message to the audience. Don't talk to high schoolers like they're PhD candidates and don't talk to graduate students like they're high school freshmen. Don't assume knowledge your audience doesn't have, and don't waste time on information you can assume they do have unless it's just to quickly establish your foundation.

2. Show the audience why they should give a shit. Don't assume they already know why they should pay attention. There are endless variations on how to do this but you should be more subtle than "this is why you should care: A; B; and C" most of the time.

3. Keep your audience engaged. This is mostly about being interesting and ensuring your presentation is palatable. You don't have to be a clown or wave shiny objects but you can't bore your audience to death or present a really dense load of information in a big wad. It's equally true for writing and speaking, but obviously the media are so different it's hard to compare them in this way.

Those concepts are easy to say and understand, but complex and difficult to master in practice. The best communicators are constantly paying attention to how effective their methods are and tweaking them to improve. There's really no point at which you'll be able to say "welp, I got my Good Writer merit badge" and rest on your laurels forever after.

Finally, don't let studying the craft become an excuse for not practicing the craft. Go write. A lot. Write fiction if you don't have any good non-fiction ideas.

All excellent tips. I actually do read Scott Adam's blog and picked up the Cialdini book as well.

Something just popped into my head because of these responses and a PM I got. I believe I don't immerse myself in the reading and really let it sink in. Writing and oral story telling is indeed not just logic but emotion - if I'm only extracting the logic and information from writing, I think my brain might be bypassing what makes it a thought provocative or persuasive piece of literature.

Thanks for the advice.