writing exercise, practice?

[Tyler.Tinsley]

Any of you writers out there have any tips about getting better at writing? Like methods of practice or something? good books? I think my concepts are strong but my execution could really use some work.

[Eero Tuovinen]

Plan your writing top-down. Think analytically, make lists of what you want to communicate. Treat writing as a form of communication. When you're ready, write in short, concerted bursts. Step out and gather your thoughts at short intervals, then go back in. Don't sit dumb in front of the machine, only sit there when you know what you're doing. Spend other time in exercise and think, forming analytic models of the structure and content of your text. Don't slide into "research" or utter iddling in the Internet, stay self-aware and recognize it when you're not in shape to write. Go through your text in waves, iterating it towards completion, rather than jumping back and forth. However, do not get stuck on problematic pieces; analyze their rough shape, put down some notes and interface forward - if you know roughly what the function of the missing piece externally is, you can leave it for now and write forward, only referencing its external properties.

Those are things that have been pertinent to me this writing summer. You should tell us more about your current experience level, achievements, strengths and weaknesses, though.

[Adam Dray]

What kind of writing are you talking about?

In general, my advice is to read a lot and write a lot. Study the masters critically and practice, practice, practice.

[Warrior Monk]

First, take a second read of each book you've readed before and analyze what did it had that you liked, what made you read it in the first place, how did the author accomplished each stage of the communication, as in stating the reality around the characters, defining them, avoiding archetypes or throwing a different light on them. You say your concepts are strong, that's good as long as you make sure they look completely new. The less and more popular are your sources of inspiration, the higher chances that's going to look like it's copied from somewhere. The broader, rarer and less known sources you get, the more originality you get on your work.

I agree with Eero, to get ideas, get out of the web and walk the streets. Let your own imagination work, instead fo googling or visiting wikipedia to fill the blanks. Actual life is the best source of inspiration. After writing everyting your inspiration gave to you, go back on it and fix, cut, explain, embellish, cut, fix again and edit. And that's it.

[Tyler.Tinsley]

I will try your advice Eero, I have been having some finicky writing sessions lately.

[Grimgor]

There are also various exercises to get started on your writing. There's sitting down with a blank Word document and simply writing for ten minutes. About anything. Just don't stop typing, even if it's a long string of colorful profanities, repeated 'what am I going to write' or whatever comes to your mind. I generally find it a good idea to reach for some idea, no matter how stupid and far-fetched and just start writing about it. This tends to activate your 'authoring muscles'.
Secondly there's self-discipline. Sit down and write one page a day. Or five, or however much you can manage. Again, even if it's crap, just make sure you keep it up. The inspiration is lurking, it mostly just needs to be activated

[trick]

Eero said to go top-down, which is good advice, but if you get stuck sometimes going bottom-up can be helpful to if done properly. For example, come up with a bunch of random NPCs. Then when you get to a point where you need to have some random NPCs, you can just drop them in.

[Daniel B]

It also depends *heavily* on your goals for writing.

A novel is going to be written differently than a piece of fiction being used as an example for a game manual, which also is going to be different than world history for a setting.

Daniel

[JoyWriter]

I find grimgor's method is good for getting over internal pressure to "only do something good", but that's only the start. The idea to break it down into different elements is a very good idea. I often find that when I have block it is because I can't get where I want to go from where I expect to start: Say you have this idea for a city, and you want to describe a walk through it. Well that might require you to start at the gates, which you haven't imagined yet. So don't try to start there; your inspiration isn't there! Start with the bits you do imagine and see what they require of the bits you don't imagine, how they structure them.

My reflex is to start with an assemblage of paragraphs, fitting the different concepts, and then start to put them in order. The way you order them can be a bit more high level, putting the paragraphs first that explain the most, or are easy to get into streight away. This often causes you to shift and rewrite elements to make them flow better, and may well suggest further changes to the overall structure.

You may find, as I often do, that your idea has holes. Now in a book the reflex is either to check your style and see if you can evoke the feeling you want in those gaps without actually stating them, or whether you will need to find new inspiration, new cool things or appropriate concepts you can slot in to fill the gaps. In an rpg the same is true actually, although in an rpg leaving the holes is split between "this is left out because it's not the focus" and "this is left out 'cos you are supposed to fill it". Encouraging players to focus on filling the latter is better than "stopping" them filling the former. The third hole type I didn't mention is the permanent mystery, like cthullu's birthday, or the lady of pains favourite colour, where the absence of info is part of the thing, and so filling it in is particularly a bad idea!

Eero's point about encapsulating problematic elements is so useful when you actually get to polishing the thing you are writing; if you can start to look at a piece of writing in terms of what it should be, both in terms of the wider piece and in terms of specific notes or vibes you want it to hit, then you are closer to getting it working. On the other side, doing this can make you realise how much work you are concentrating into a single chapter or paragraph, and sometimes you can give yourself a break; by shifting some of that load around, pulling that weight of explanation somewhere else, providing the problems that moving it causes are resolved. As an example of that, you can get these "what is roleplaying" chapters at the start of the game, and to be honest you sometimes cannot express what you want to about rpging in that small space, and you're better off replacing it with some less taxonomic introduction like "is this for you" or "what first excited me about the game and what excites me most now" or something, and making sure that the divisions of creative priorities and authority are clearly flagged up in the text itself, like in chapter intros.