January 8, 2023

One of the hills that I will happily die on is that writing is a skill, not an inherent ability or gift. 

This is a good thing. If writing is a skill, that means it can be learned. There are tools aplenty to teach the skill and art of writing: books, masterclasses, workshops, convention panels, online courses, collegiate programs. Unfortunately, education and knowledge are often barricaded behind privilege gates. Time, money, health, responsibility–all act as barriers between a writer and their education in writing. So, if the education is too expensive, too time-consuming, inaccessible, or not above other priorities you have in your life, how are you supposed to learn and develop new writing skills?

You teach them to yourself.

I want to start by saying I have privilege. I did go to school for creative writing, I have access to the internet and disposable money to spend on some courses and materials, and for the most part no one and nothing is demanding that I not do these things. However, a good chunk of the skills I have, and pretty much all of them I’ve developed in recent years, are self-taught. 

So, I thought I’d share my process when it comes to learning a new genre, format, style, structure, etc.

Step 1: Read

This is where you will spend most of your time and where you will return, over and over again, to gain new insight. If I want to learn to write drabbles, for example, I must read drabbles, any and every drabble I can get my hands on. When I was first learning, I was combing through archives of (free) drabble magazines and reading whatever made it in front of my eyes regardless of whether or not it was a genre/style I’d personally work in: sci-fi, fantasy, horror, romance, humor, mystery, contemporary. You can’t see the big picture if you’re only looking in one corner. See all the different variations that are already out there.

Step 2: Map It

Once you feel you’re seeing the big picture, start looking for patterns: themes, plot structures, character archetypes, pacing, tropes, word count, etc. After I had read through a bunch of drabbles, I started marking what happened at what word count, how the sentences were structured at certain points, and what parts of speech were being utilized. Most importantly, see if you can figure out why these things are there. What purpose are they serving being done this specific way? That’s going to tell you which patterns are integral to learn and which you can mess around with or discard. This is sometimes tedious, but what it is doing is giving you a list of things you need to practice. And practice, you must.

Step 3: Practice, Practice, Practice, and Yet More Practice

You wanna learn how to use a writing skill? Then write. Write tons and tons of stories of all kinds. Write garbage for your eyes only. Compare it to those pieces you read that inspired you, feel inadequate, take a nap, have a snack, feel better, and then go write some more garbage. It’s not always fun, but the actual act of writing is the best way to learn a new writing skill. Research and outlines can only take you so far. You gotta get your hands dirty. 

Here are some ways I practice new skills:

Option 1: Start Small

When you are ready to begin trying your hand at writing in this new skill, start small in order to conserve your time and energy. I wanted to learn how to add a romance subplot to my novels, but I most certainly wasn’t going to write an entire novel (or more) just to practice this. I already knew the flash format, so I wrote flash romance and practiced making it work there. That way, I could move through multiple iterations of different flavors of romance quickly.

What if you don’t know or have no interest in short form writing? 1) I personally think it’s worthwhile to drum up some interest and education in it, so maybe do that, and 2) That’s fine. Start small by writing an excerpt from a novel to practice. A chapter, an interlude, an epigraph, whatever! Use what you got and start from a place where you can fully practice something quickly.

Option 2: Fanfiction

Another option for practice: fanfiction. I love fanfiction as a writing tool. When learning something new, don’t burden yourself with the weight of an entire original story. When I was teaching myself fight scenes, I didn’t want to waste time coming up with a character and a villain and a setting and a reason for them to be fighting. I just wanted to write about two people clobbering each other to death. So, I borrowed. I practiced with stories I knew really well, some of my own (fanfics for your own work is a thing. Let’s talk about it sometime) and some written by others. But using a ready-made character, setting, and conflict saved me the time, trouble, and mental space so I could focus on what I was there to do: practice a fight scene.

Obviously, do not, do not, seek to publish fanfiction as if you own the rights to it. Post it to AO3 or Tumblr or whatever as fanfiction if you want, but the purpose of this exercise is to learn a skill without being burdened by currently unnecessary work, not actually create a sellable story.

I usually end up doing some combination of these two methods to practice learning the ins and outs of a new skill. Whatever works best for you is what is going to work best for you. If you don’t like fanfiction, don’t work with it as a tool. If you are Brando Sando Jr., by all means, write an entire novel to practice something.

Step 4: Find Your Story

Something drove you to learn this new skill. Something made you sit up and say, “I want to do that!” Identify it. Now wait, you may be thinking, why didn’t we do this as Step 1? Good question. The reality is you have to understand a new skill before you can match a story to it. A while back I decided I was going to write a novella. I had never written one before, barely read them, and the first thing I did was come up with a plot idea. I spent ages developing this story and trying to cram it into a novella. Then, in a better late than never stroke of brilliance, I thought to actually, you know, learn the novella format. After the most cursory of research it became wildly apparent that my plot idea was not suited to the novella format at all. I wasted months trying to do something that was never going to work, and I could have realized it was never going to work if I did my research first. 

Maybe what drove you to learn a new skill was a story idea. Great! And maybe it will actually be suited to whatever this new skill is. Fantastic! I’m jealous. But you won’t know until you understand the new skill and how you actually want to work with it.

When you chose to become a writer, you chose to become a lifelong learner. If you continue to pursue writing, you will continually need to learn new skills. That’s part of the appeal! Learning is fun. Exploring through fiction is exciting. And there are resources out there you can access for free, for low cost, on scholarship, etc. But even if you can’t access those, you still have yourself and your own brain and the tenacity that made you sign up for this wild writing ride in the first place. You can teach yourself to write.