Comment by GPPrior on How can I most effectively improve my writing abilities? · 2019-01-01T17:23:08.589Z · LW · GW

The short answer is: practice practice practice.

The longer answer that you need to find a peer group or community that encourages practicing and gives meaningful feedback, because writing something you know no one will ever read is a stressful and exhausting chore.

To lay our my priors and sources, I've been an amateur writer for about ten years. I started with fanfiction back in college, and I've since been published in a few sci-fi periodicals. I'm told I'm pretty good, though I certainly didn't start that way.

A lot of professional writers will say that fanfiction is bad practice for becoming a writer -- that it teaches bad habits, that it disincentivizes world-building, and that it distorts expectations by giving the writer a very friendly audience. All of those criticisms are fair. But because fanfiction gave me a community I enjoyed writing for, over the last ten years I've written about 900,000 words.

That's eighteen standard-length novels. Imagine writing 18 novels you knew nobody was ever going to read, simply because you "needed practice." I doubt I could finish one.

There are lots of nuanced steps to becoming a good writer: learning to construct scenes, leaning to show instead of telling, learning to establish character voice, learning to edit, etc. But you can't execute any of them if you aren't practicing, and to practice you need people who will read your writing and encourage you to continue.