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The dirty little secret of writing is that it never gets easy. It might look like other writers can bust out beautiful seamless prose without breaking a sweat, but what you don't see are the hundreds of little revisions and rewrites that happen, sometimes just inside their brain. That is so true. I read somewhere once that a big reason many people don't try writing is because they read their favorite writers, and then try to write something, and when their words don't come out like, say, Stephen King, they give up. And the thing I was reading (sorry, don't remember the exact source now) was basically making the same point you just made. So, if you want to write like Stephen King, or Dean Koontz, or Haruki Murakami or Ernest Hemingway or whoever, you have to realize that their works didn't just flow from their fingertips in one continuous stream of perfection, from beginning direct to end. The great writers revise and revise and edit and revise and rewriter obsessively. Or so I hear. Koontz is notorious for saying that he only writes one page at a time, and he keeps rewriting that page until he's happy with it. Because writing, at its most fundamental level, is the art of making your own ideas more clear to yourself. So how do you become a better writer? Become a more clear thinker. That reminds me of another book that I see recommended here on HN quite often, and which I myself bought on such a recommendation. It's called The Pyramid Principle. http://www.amazon.com/The-Pyramid-Principle-Writing-Thinking... I'm only part way through it, but I think it's quite worthwhile. The basic premise is about logic and clarity and organization in thinking & writing. |