How do I become a good writer? Clearly I should write...

How do I become a good writer? Clearly I should write, but I recognize that that can't just mean disorganized here-and-there practice. Are there any books worth reading that deliberately teach good writing (so not great works of literature)?

Finally, how could I make money out of my writing skills, if/when I develop them?

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youll never live up to your own standard of what being a 'good writer' entails

There is no single """good""" writing. Styles change, sensibilities change and there's so many different types of stories and types of content that each lend themselves to their own aesthetics. Asking for a single one sized fits all guide will only be a guaranteed path to mediocrity

But there is something that distinguishes both Tolstoy and DFW from me. There is good prose and bad prose. I imagine something could be taught.

But whether or not there's a helpful book, how do I improve?

If you're posting here it's already too late

They both read a great deal for a start. Frankly if your problem is simply that you want to "write well" you've already lost. To be a great artist you need to have a drive to express something, to get some sort of understanding or sense of the world across to others. Quality at that point becomes a means not an ends. You study writing to find how others found how to convey what seemed so utterly impossible to convey.

Thats the best advice I can give you, think about what you actually feel the need to have people understand or experience and how you can find the right ways of doing it.

Essentially this. You can, however, find employment that requires writing. I was professionally employed as a technical writer for a manufacturing facility for several years. It paid the bills while I was able to hone my skills the direction that I chose.

i've recently been aiming to become a novelist myself, i've started from nothing and here's what i've found useful:

open.edu/openlearn/history-the-arts/culture/literature-and-creative-writing/literature/approaching-prose-fiction/content-section-0?intro=1
wikis.sub.uni-hamburg.de/lhn/index.php/Perspective_-_Point_of_View

in my opinion good vs bad prose comes from the strength of your imagination, you can only become better at writing or expressing what you see it through practice, but i don't think you can ever make up for the lack of a vivid imagination

how well can you visualize places, objects, and people in your mind? very easy for children, but how well you hold it into adulthood is critical... and this ultimately cripples the quality of your prose if you don't have a quality imagination

but i should add this is from the perspective of a fiction writer... being able to create environments and animate people in your mind is important but obviously has less value if you're trying to write self-help books

Some of the greatest works were critically panned at release. Most bestsellers are hot garbage. Some writers are at their best when they're churning out pages that a 9th grade english teacher would fail.

There is no objective yardstick for literature. Not all good writing will be sold, not all great writing will be enjoyed, and if you ever think what you've put your all into is enough then at that point you've lost your spark.

This is the only good book on writing practice I've ever read

Basically his advice is freewrite a lot, but he gives you a step by step process to get from freewriting to a short story or essay or whatever you're writing. You first bits of writing will be crap but you just keep doing it over and over until you get good.

>Finally, how could I make money out of my writing skills, if/when I develop them?
two options i know about (again, if we're talking fiction)

- self-publish
i've never heard someone say this was a good idea unless you're a one-trick pony and have a unique book

you'll have to do a lot of self-promoting and shilling, and the amount of energy it'll take from you is what you could be using to write book #2

- agent into a publishing deal
only viable way to make a career out of fiction writing, and it's actually believably simple: have a good first novel

that's it, there are no tricks, you're completely judged on the content of your writing which is what i love, you are in complete control of your success or failure

i grew up most of my life wanting to be a filmmaker, but there's so many hoops you have to go through, very expensive process, and so much collaboration required and potential meddling, assuming you even get past step 10

with being a novelist, you're literally the only barrier to entry, you are in complete control... can your work invoke an entertaining and enduring experience to the reader? can it teach them or remind them of an important moral? that's the only question you have to answer

if you produce a good first, you will get signed, and if it's marketable you will get a publishing deal... if it's not markable your agent will still sign you based off your talent, but will try to work with you to create something he can sell and you both can profit

Read more to write more. Trying to be a writer without being well-read is like trying to be a sculptor without having ever looked at a statue.

Disorganized here-and-there writing is exactly how you get started on honing your craft. Just be sure to hold on to your older writings as reading back through them can provide valuable feedback, even if it is just cringey erotic fanfiction.

Literally anything you write can aide you in some form or another

So, I'm not OP, but I'm in the middle of writing some extremely /d/-esque literature (there is gratuitous sex in some portions but it's also a combination of my take on politics and future society, sociology, and psychology - all wrapped up into one strange, festering, unfinished [for now, WIP obviously] novel(s). So I have no qualms with calling this literature, even though it is highly erotic.).

Now, I do publish the chapters online, but I've had hopes of maybe one of these days publishing the work because I have got some fans interested in it and I think it would be nice to give them the option of actually buying it in physical media rather than just read it in a myriad or conglomeration of pdf's.

I assume that no publisher would even want to touch it because it's already been posted online - let alone the fact that my content is outrageous (even for an erotic label), yes?

If so, that means I would have to self-publish, and that's probably the line I want to go down anyway. I don't really want to make money off of it and I think that would be the wrong way to look at this. Again, I want to eventually do this to thank my readers for being awesome, so self-publishing may be the best option.

However, I must ask, would a printing company stop production of my book for, say, reasons of containing content like dicknipples and 3ft. cocks?

having an online following of your work is actually a selling point... some people have gotten agents and publishing deals from having sensational tweets and a high follower count... they would most likely want you to write original content for the deal, although so people have gotten their book traditionally published after self-publishing to mild success

erotica is a popular genre, but it's market consists primarily female, they're not going to vibe with your material... with that you describe, i don't see a publisher ever looking at your work seriously

i highly doubt a printing company is going to deny you for text because it's extreme fetish, as long as no illegal instructions are being given or promotion of any hate/illegal activity, common sense stuff

well you can write ravings on notepads, notebooks, the margins of textbooks and schoolbooks like i do. or you know on your computer or phone or tablet or walls or whever.

Word, good to know. Thanks man!

Also, yeah, kinda realized that I would probably get laughed out of a publishing house but that's fine, may be worth a shot though and it still isn't the ballsiest thing I've ever done.

>but I recognize that that can't just mean disorganized here-and-there practice

Being a good writer requires you to be smart about the subject on which you're writing. That's it.

That is completely and utterly wrong.

>t. man who is not smart about writing

Here you have your proof.

I'm not even going to try to explain why you're wrong, it should be obvious after a moment's thought.

I got slaughtered for my writing style by my professor while I was doing my MA. I asked him for tips on improvement and he said that Mind the Stop and Eats, Shoots & Leaves were his personal choices for books on grammar and structure, but the best advice for being a better writer is to read 'good' literature and poetry. It's just a case of seeing what has worked before and internalising it.

Far as I can tell, unless you're a genius, most writers seem to read books that are a step up from their own writing. Ian Rankin reads Amis, Eco read Borges, Self reads Joyce, Nabokov read Beckett, Green reads Eric Carl, Kaur reads bumper stickers while defecating. That sort of thing. I don't know if it's causal or just a matter of their intelligence but I imagine it's worth pushing yourself to appreciate better works in order to improve your own. Stands to reason really.

depends on what your challenges are. if the problem is that you're just not satisfied with what you write, then this thread has offered some advice already.

if the problem is that you can't get motivated, or get distracted easily, or can't really dedicate yourself to the task, try reading Deep Work by Cal Newport.