Lessons 14 and 15: Keep telling your story
I’ve spent a good part of the last decade or two helping people improve the technical quality of their writing, be it a novel, memoir, technical document or even just a chart or graph. Elsewhere on this website, you can download my top 13 tips to fix mistakes that good writers make and benefit from what took me years to learn and apply in my own work.
Since putting together that document, though, I’ve learned two more important lessons about good writing.
The first, on its surface, contradicts the first 13 lessons completely. It’s what I call the “James Patterson lesson.” Patterson, perhaps the most prolific and successful writer on the market today, provides writing tips of his own, but they amount to this: put story first, not the sentence.
Patterson’s point is a good one: Don’t worry about how good your sentences are (at first). Focus first on how good your story is – or, put another way, how good you are at telling your story. A compelling story will attract readers, no matter how badly written. (Fifty Shades of Grey, anyone?) A dull story remains dreadful no matter how perfect the prose.
Having said that, and I think Mr. Patterson would agree, bad writing can get in the way of a good story. A member of a writing group of which I was a member wrote brilliant stories – in gibberish. This guy could dream up fantastic characters, plots, dialog, and scenarios, but his writing mechanics were worse than a fourth grader’s. Punctuation, capitalization, spelling, you name it – all bad. As a result, his vivid imagination has never (to my knowledge) met a willing publisher.
The second and probably even more important “new lesson” is this: Keep writing. Every day: write, write, write. If your story can’t find a publisher, movie producer, or stage in its current form, tell it another way tomorrow, and see if that works better. Give yourself writing assignments and work through exercises to improve your craft. Every day, without fail, put words to paper (or screen). Be it for 20 minutes or eight hours, carve out the time and give yourself the gift of writing. Every time you do, your writing – and your story-telling – will improve.
And don’t let writer’s block stop you. Beat writer’s block at its own game: When you have nothing, write about having nothing. Write about your zits, how grey it is outside, why your keyboard makes those odd clicky sounds. Just write.
If you can focus on the story, and keep on writing every day, you will be a better writer – and eventually, a great writer.
