Learn It The Hard Way

Every lesson in writing needs to be learned the hard way. There's a lot of advice out there about writing, things you should and shouldn't do. But talk is cheap. How do you know that it's worth a damn? How do you know any piece of advice is even good?

Try it yourself. I advise people to use shorter sentences more than long ones. No matter how much you might think about it, talk about it, even discuss or argue with it, the easiest and fastest way to find out if it's good advice is to try using shorter sentences.

This same system works for the rules of avoidance. Good writing is concrete. The more abstract your words and ideas become, the harder it is for readers to connect or care. Am I right? Try it out. Write something with lots of concrete language and write something abstract. Which one do you like better? Which one do other people like better?

I want to clarify what I mean by "the hard way". The hard way isn't necessarily painful. It doesn't mean you spend hours or days or more on a project, show it to everybody you know, and have them all call it garbage. It doesn't mean submitting it to a publication and being rejected. All I really mean is personal, hands-on experience. In my examples, I suggest using yourself and your friends as testers. I'm suggesting writing experiments which do not have to be too involved (though still sincere and wholehearted).

In fact, you don't necessarily have to write to learn some of these lessons. Go read a low quality literary magazine. You will find countless examples of terribly abstract writing with incredibly long sentences. If it makes you cringe to read, then you have experienced firsthand these lessons. And if you find yourself enthralled with that writing, then you have still experienced these lessons firsthand; you simply know that they are wrong.

The importance here is that you are not reading discussion of craft; you are reading the craft itself. Discussion of craft can be great. This is my 456th discussion of craft on this site. But discussion only goes so far. Sooner or later, you have to test that discussion to see if it holds water.