A Failure for Every Lesson

In terms of writing, there are countless techniques that need to be learned. Length of sentences, rhythm, melody, dialogue, narration, characterization, plot development, revising, editing, and a million other tiny things.

Most of these skills are things that we don't know naturally. That means there is a large amount of learning to be done. It also means that for every lesson you don't know, your writing is likely to fail in each of those regards.

Until you realize that characters don't need to do an action every time they speak (e.g. David smiled and said. . .), you are going to make that mistake every time. If you learned a new lesson for each thing you wrote, then you will write a failure for as many lessons as there are to learn.

Though it may sound depressing to know that there is so much that will need to be learned, consider it as an inspiration. Every piece you write is a chance to learn something new. If you want to know it all, then you are going to need to do a whole lot of writing. That means you can be writing for years to come and always getting better. If that's not inspiring, I don't know what is (except for sweet, beautiful lies).