Writers Can't Get There From Here
Without clear and effective writing, it takes forever to really arrive as an author
You've seen those ineffective newsletters, articles, short stories. Like any editor — at some point, you bounce out of the story. Your eyes glaze over and you lose interest. And that's the same point where the reader does.
Untrained authors who don't know how to write clear and effective text tend to starve in garrets. Or keep their day jobs and all those frustrations.
All a trained writer knows is when to spot the point where they bounce the reader. And to learn that point-spotting is by learning what makes a good piece of writing.
The problem with learning to writing effectively is that there are no schools who teach writing effectively.
Authors teach themselves. It's been that way since forever.
The most common advice you’ll find on this is that writers are made by writing - lots of writing.
The other half of the common advice given to writers - all writers have to read a a lot. The funny thing is that no one tells a writer how to read to improve their writing.
One author did - Dorothea Brande, in her book Becoming a Writer. There, she tells how to separate your editor mind from your writing mind. Her advice is to read twice - once to enjoy the work, and feel the effects that writer creates on you. The second time is to figure out how they did that with their word-choices.
Recently, I dug up a long out-of-print book by Walter S. Campbell, titled Professional Writing. It's a fairly stodgy academic-style book, but he makes the point that in order to learn from the books you read, you should read backward the second time. Read the first scene (short stories) or chapter (book), then read the last scene or chapter. Then read the next to last, then the one just before that, and so on. Make notes as you go. What this does is to keep you from being entranced and transported back into the story as you dissect it. The third time you can read it from the beginning — and you’ll see even more technical tricks they used.
Campbell points out that you are working to find the "devices" that these authors are using. As in the old Rhetorical Devices (that few bother studying once they are out of college.) Accumulating technical devices are the ways that authors improve their writing craft. Professional writers learn to discern and collect devices as they read.
Most starting authors collect these subconsciously. The stories they've read are dissembled there and offered up to use through the imagination as you need them.
Yes, that's a bit like hunting and pecking on a typewriter keyboard instead of learning where your fingers are placed to quickly reach the letter you want. You have all these devices you've assembled, but then what? Learn these consciously. Start making an habitual study of them as you red.
Now, there are available devices in Fiction, Non-Fiction, and Copywriting. And they all are found in retrospect. Read something and you'll know within minutes if you're transported inside the writer's mind — to their world. If you put it down at any point, then they lost you. Readers don't like to be distracted. They are there for the entertainment, education, or inspiration.
The devices you find in these three types of writing are interchangeable. By studying these three types, then you see how to efficiently create effects in your reader. The disciplines of each then enable your writing to be clear and highly understandable — even addictive.
And that one sentence above shows you where any writing will fail: the glaze-over point. If your readers are academics, they'll follow your pure logic and overwrought, over long sentences. If your readers are literary types, then they'll appreciate your emotive, flowery prose. If your readers are hard-boiled non-fiction readers, they love their facts and stepped-processes.
The trick with writing is that you attract your readers (and subscribers) through the quality of your writing. Your style, your cadence, your rhythm, these all either grab the reader right off or they don't. Your writing then either drags the reader through willingly or unwillingly — or it doesn’t.
And you missed getting that subscriber to opt-in, or like, or re-stack.
All a highly-polished and effective writer has over a newbie it that they've been at it far longer. They've gone through their rejected manuscripts and figured out where they mis-wrote. Then they started over with a new story and lessons learned.
Of course, this could take the newbie maybe a decade before he sells his next short story or article to a magazine.
This was the problem Walter S. Campbell decided to solve when he was assigned Creative Writing classes to teach at Oklahoma University. He went back to Shakespeare's mentor, Ben Johson - who had a cadre of students he coached into proficiency. Campbell then researched everything between the Greeks and present day to find a method of teaching writers to become good enough fast enough.
Instead of starving in garrets, his students started getting their works accepted and published and paid for. Routinely. In a year, not a decade.
Campbell’s course turned out thousands of successful writers. Over 20 years, his students earned an estimated million dollars in royalties. 150 books, numerous short stories and articles. His course approach worked.
The rub here is that the course Campbell ran didn't outlast his own death. And his books are all out of print.
But I uncovered them. And have started creating modern short courses which bring back the wisdom that he and Brande and other successful authors wrote up.
I've got the first cohort starting Jan 2, 2024. For paid subscribers, preferably Founding Members.
Your writing could become more clear, more effective. You could attract more readers and subscribers. Join up and find out how.