Mastering the Vital Elements of Writing - Why it matters

Writers get stuck. Writers are beset by doubts. Writers feel like imposters. Or…

Writers always have ways around the obstacles they hit. Writers have confidence. Writers own their skills, talents, and accomplishments.

One of the greatest gifts writers can give themselves is mastering the essential aspects of writing. The best writers have the tools to create great dialogue or ways to test a story concept or examples at hand that demonstrate ways to solve story problems. To be sure, bad habits (dithering, looping, procrastinating, and more) can undercut the most capable and proficient writers. They need to be guarded against (as do distractions, addictions, and inattention to health). But becoming a master writer is a powerful way to avoid getting stuck or lost in doubts or losing your earned identity as a real writer.

Consider mastery in golf as an example. Like writing, it’s more about the course and you than about any opponents. There’s a poetry to the sport that players own. Choosing the right club. Testing the wind. Reading the lie. Managing pressure and disappointment and doubt.

But there also is a discipline of regular tasks. Driving off the tee. Chipping. Putting. A good golfer defaults to the muscle memory of thousands of strokes to hit the ball just right over and over again. He or she masters dozens of simple jobs by observing, listening, analyzing, testing, and practicing.

Writing is a lot more complex, with more jobs that need to be mastered. Often, what looked like one task turns out to be several. The choices writers make depend on the course — the genre, the audience, where they are in the story, and which way the wind is blowing. Writers also have to face pressure and disappointment and doubts.

Golfers and writers can have good days thanks to luck, but regular success, and much of the confidence and joy that makes engagement worthwhile, is built on a foundation of mastery. Moving easily into writing dialogue or editing for language or developing ideas that resonate — being able to take on jobs like these knowing you can do them can change your frame of mind as a writer.

No one masters everything. Which is probably a good thing. If a golfer hit a hole-in-one every time, it would get boring. (And the golf course would be redesigned.) Similarly mastery in writing is never complete or a deep as it could be. Which is good because otherwise it would get boring. But, more importantly, room for growth does not mean mastery is not achievable. Philip K. Dick never really mastered language, but his insights, odd logic, and clever plotting made him a leading SF writer. Charles Dickens easily slipped into sentimentality and cheap characterizations, but his amazing honesty and pacing turned his works into classics. No writer is perfect. But the ones you return to again and again have become experts with enough of the vital tools of writing to be considered masters.

You can, too.

It means being patient with yourself. It means studying the work of others (dissecting, questioning, exploring, expressing what you learned in full sentences, testing the concepts). It means deliberately writing work that will never be published, just to practice a technique until if comes naturally. It means noticing your own responses to writing and being curious about them. It means attending to the responses of peers and beta readers with humility, judgment, and discernment.

It also means knowing what jobs need to be mastered and having starting points for each. You can just jump in and learn from the writing of others, and, with processes that work for you, amplify your strengths or improve where you are weak. That’s fine. But, for those who may need a little guidance, I’ll begin a series on mastery here in this blog. It will be incomplete and, at times, not right for you. Inevitably, I’ll have times when I do a poor job because I have my own weaknesses and I have strengths I don’t understand.

I hope some of what I post is valuable anyway.

My current list of topics:

• Story concepts
• Scenes
• Characters
• Descriptions and settings
• Dialogue
• Language
• Plot
• Storytelling
• Audience
  

I’ll strive to include basic concepts, clearly stated. I’ll mention benefits (to help with motivation). There will be examples and exercises.

Reading the blog posts won’t make you a master. Neither will doing an exercise each week. It’s also likely that you’ll have clearer ideas and a better approach on some subjects. (That’s good.) Mostly, what is involved in achieving mastery is interest, honest self-assessment, and dedication. I can provide a map. I can’t carry you along the journey. Even if I could, it wouldn’t be much fun for either of us.