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About five years ago, I began teaching myself how to create art. It all started for me when I first bought a how-to-draw book designed for absolute beginners. I would diligently sketch each of the exercises. Many of them were nonsensical, but they were all designed to teach you a specific art skill: a fluffy duck swimming among floating ice floes, a leering skull with deep eye sockets and fire bursting from its top, a half-closed rose with thorns spiraling down its stem. Each of the pages was designed to teach me about line weight, shading, negative space, contouring, composition—many of the basics that I needed to complete my training as an amateur artist.
As I completed that book, I began to look for more books, and then I started looking into online classes. I needed a bit more structure on this learning journey. As I took those online classes, I began to feel the need to have some in-person instruction, so I began to take community art classes. That was a wonderful experience of getting immediate feedback and help from an in-person teacher and then forming community bonds with the other folks taking the class.
That journey is the same shape of journey that I’m now seeing as I’ve started to work on my writing. It’s funny; I’ve written all my life. I’ve written essays for school. I’ve written emails and memos for work. I’ve summarized books and movies. I’ve written daily blog posts. But I hadn’t ever really written structured fiction.
After my layoff, I began writing some short stories. I had a few ideas that had been banging around in my head for a while, and as I wrote them, it was such a wonderful and cathartic process. I could feel the pain of the layoff completely blocked as I wrote about ghostly sightings, shimmering sunlight on ripples of lake water, and torturous haunted houses. I was proud of these stories. I shared them with friends and family, and they told me they liked them. They were entertaining and engaging, they said. Ok. That was enough for me.
I started to submit them.
And the rejections came rolling in.
That was a painful reality check. I didn’t really understand what could be going on with my stories and why they were being roundly rejected. No feedback, nothing. I thought, what am I doing wrong? I know how to write, don't I?
Don’t I?
Well, it turns out that I probably don’t actually know how to write. While I had been copyediting nonfiction my whole life and reading a lot, I hadn’t really taken the time to understand the structure of a short story or the structure of a novel. What works to engage readers? How do you hook them? Once hooked, how do you keep them engaged? How do you properly resolve your story? How do you build believable characters? What point of view should I use? To answer that, did I know what I was hoping to evoke in my readers? Did I know anything about the three-act structure?
Well, as you can guess, I had zero answers to any of those questions. I realized that I would need to go on a similar learning journey as I had with my art practice. I needed to read about the bones of writing so that I could understand basic fundamentals. And I needed to read. I needed to read everything. I needed to read more in the genres that I was hoping to write in. And I needed to write.
This near-daily blog post has been part of that learning journey. It is helping me to get into the practice of writing regularly and to work on what it takes to properly structure a piece of writing that someone will actually want to read.
I think that I’m fairly good at the idea generation part of writing. Now, my job is to learn the structure of a good piece of writing and to practice getting better at it. I do have my novel that I haven’t made a ton of progress on, but I’m hoping to get some writing in tomorrow. I’m also thinking about taking some writing classes or joining some workshops so that I can form a community with other fellow writers.
How about you? If you’re a writer, what has your writing journey been like? Share some books that you’ve found especially helpful in your process in the comments below.
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