Do You Get Better At Writing?

Earlier today an old tale of mine came to my attention. I read it, Parts are sublime, parts are crap or too much of a bad thing.

PTBARNUM said:

Earlier today an old tale of mine came to my attention. I read it, Parts are sublime, parts are crap or too much of a bad thing.

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I believe we improve with experience. I have been editing some of my stories, and that is certainly true with them.

Boxlicker101 said:

I believe we improve with experience. I have been editing some of my stories, and that is certainly true with them.

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I'm crowding 69 and notice I'm now aware of writing issues I've never encountered or read of. Like congruenxe for all the story elements. Few consider if all the elements play well together. Is the scene teamwork or a crew of prima donnas?

I think I have imprived a lot since starting writing erotica 4-5 years ago. I had never written anything besides technical/scientific texts before. When I've checked on old stories I can see how I would have written it better today. And readers seem to agree. Controlling for lower scores for certain categories (LW), there is a positive trend in my scores. I've gotten a bit spoiled with vote scores, and merely reaching the H level isn't really satisfying anymore.

Yesterday I had an anonymous comment on one of my stories I posted 15 years ago. Anon said several things including 'too many uses of that'. Anon was right for that story.

But anon was wrong about a piece of dialogue, describing it as a 'lower class usage'. WTF! When we speak we don't follow precise grammar rules and dialogue can be part of character development.

But anon's remarks made me consider my older stories. Some are painful to read. A couple - Stag Party and Hen Party - are awful. But I have left every story posted as they were originally written. They show me, if no one else, that (It's that word again!) my writing has gradually improved.

But my writing could be much better if I put more effort into the editing.

Yes, you get better. I had never written a work of fiction until last December, when I published my first story. I notice now that I am a more attentive reader. I'm better at editing myself, although editing skills still are a work in progress.

I wonder how important grammar really is. I suspect its importance is greatly exaggerated. I remember reading the beat poets and they seemed to delight in not using accepted grammar. I've read a lot of things that don't use it. I think the rule is to be consistent throughout the work. It also helps to get rid of unnecessary words and repetitions. James Joyce particularly showed us it doesn't have to make sense.

weftandwarp said:

I wonder how important grammar really is. I suspect its importance is greatly exaggerated. I remember reading the beat poets and they seemed to delight in not using accepted grammar. I've read a lot of things that don't use it. I think the rule is to be consistent throughout the work. It also helps to get rid of unnecessary words and repetitions. James Joyce particularly showed us it doesn't have to make sense.

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I would say it is very, very important to know grammar, but not as important to obey it. A great writer like Joyce plays around with writing conventions, but he knows what the conventions are, and he knows how to use them. The right way to think about grammar is not to think of it as a collection of rules to memorize; it's how the language works to communicate something. Knowing how it works is essential to being a good writer, even if you decide at times to set the rules aside.

oggbashan said:

Yesterday I had an anonymous comment on one of my stories I posted 15 years ago. Anon said several things including 'too many uses of that'. Anon was right for that story.

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That's better than someone commenting they are looking forward to part two of a standalone story that was posted 15 years ago.

weftandwarp said:

I wonder how important grammar really is. I suspect its importance is greatly exaggerated. I remember reading the beat poets and they seemed to delight in not using accepted grammar. I've read a lot of things that don't use it. I think the rule is to be consistent throughout the work. It also helps to get rid of unnecessary words and repetitions. James Joyce particularly showed us it doesn't have to make sense.

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Nothing takes me out of a story quicker than consistently bad grammar.

If nothing else, it is a chore to read poor or non-standard grammar. Years and years of reading and writing teach us to expect certain patterns. Deviations make our brains word harder to comprehend what we're reading.

If you have some specific story purpose for deviating from standard grammar, such as in dialog, fine. But otherwise, it's just a writer being experimental, contrary or cute.

There are certainly better ways of eliminating "unnecessary" words than resorting to bad grammar. Chances are good the words were unnecessary because the grammar was already bad.

rj

weftandwarp said:

I wonder how important grammar really is. I suspect its importance is greatly exaggerated. I remember reading the beat poets and they seemed to delight in not using accepted grammar. I've read a lot of things that don't use it. I think the rule is to be consistent throughout the work. It also helps to get rid of unnecessary words and repetitions. James Joyce particularly showed us it doesn't have to make sense.

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To me, grammar in narration is very important. Consistently sloppy writing is like a speed bump on a street and too much of either can cause me to stop reading or to avoid that street. Grammar in dialogue can be part of character development and should fit the speaker.

I hope you would not use beat poets as an example to be followed. James Joyce is successful enough that he can make his own rules.

I've found that writing erotica has made me far better at descriptions and vocabulary. You can't just write a boring description of the lead-up to the sex scene(s); you have to captivate from the start. This focus has spilled into my other writing projects. I never imagined that what started out as a fun distraction would lead to improving my writing skills, but it has.

weftandwarp said:

I wonder how important grammar really is. I suspect its importance is greatly exaggerated. I remember reading the beat poets and they seemed to delight in not using accepted grammar. I've read a lot of things that don't use it. I think the rule is to be consistent throughout the work. It also helps to get rid of unnecessary words and repetitions. James Joyce particularly showed us it doesn't have to make sense.

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Bad grammar distracts from the story. You can break grammatical rules, you can break all sorts of rules but the language needs to flow naturally and in the context of the story and the reader to draw them in, enthrall them and keep them. One piece of bad grammar can throw them out and break the pace of the story.

I think the beat poets, not that I've read much of them, worked in the. Context of their readers and what they were trying to do and that shared vision. Look at G A Henty and his novels, best sellers in their day with a huge audience but when you read them now the language seems stilted and artificial and it's so hard to lose yourself in his stories.

Grammar is good but there is a lot that discredits it. Try reading Chaucer, Shakespear, the King James and all are said to have great grammar but are barely decipherable. Try reading Woolfe's speach to his troops before the battle against Montcalm . Try reading newspapers from the 1920's and earlier and they are very difficult to read. Grammar isn't such a fixed thing.

Georgiana Cavendish and her clique demonstrated this when they changed the rules of English and many of those changes persist today. She tried to beautify English. It does a lot to explain why English english and American english are different today.

I don't remember the exact words she used but I heard a professor of English once say that grammar subjegates people because there are those who think that perfect grammar is essential to communication. She disagreed.

I read tracts from authors who have to have four points to every sentence and every sentence has to be two lines long. I hate the style but they consider it to be good grammar, good communication, educated....and it's not. Good grammar reminds me of text books- dense and impenetrable. They always made me think the author didn't have a clue but was very good at rote learning.

It's much the same with music. I remember when, during the time of the Beatles, a professor of music proclaimed it as some of the best music ever . The response was extremely disparaging but slowly I think the veracity of what he so bravely proclaimed is being demonstrated. Like every thing else in the language, grammar changes in its useage. It contributes to it being a relevant and dynamic language. I'd love to see it change with its crazy spelling too.

igottapussy said:

I've found that writing erotica has made me far better at descriptions and vocabulary. You can't just write a boring description of the lead-up to the sex scene(s); you have to captivate from the start. This focus has spilled into my other writing projects. I never imagined that what started out as a fun distraction would lead to improving my writing skills, but it has.

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I have found the same. My other writing is scientific, and therefore very different. But writing is writing, and skills spill over.

weftandwarp said:

Grammar is good but there is a lot that discredits it. Try reading Chaucer, Shakespear, the King James and all are said to have great grammar but are barely decipherable. Try reading Woolfe's speach to his troops before the battle against Montcalm . Try reading newspapers from the 1920's and earlier and they are very difficult to read. Grammar isn't such a fixed thing.

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Of course, grammar isn't fixed. Language evolves. There are rules, but the rules change over time. That doesn't mean YOU should change them or ignore them.

Your original post asked, "I wonder how important grammar really is." Now you can answer it. If you ignore currently accepted good grammar (e.g. use 1920 grammar or some other non-standard grammar) you run the risk of writing something that's "very difficult to read." It may be justified in a particular story, but not every story.


rj

Sometimes we can be the worst judges of our own work.

Without a doubt. After all, the only thing that can improve one's writing is doing more of it.

In most cases, yes.

However, there are exceptions to the rule. An author could publish a great first story yet subsequent works are mediocre. Or an experienced author could write an especially bad story.

RetroFan said:

In most cases, yes.

However, there are exceptions to the rule. An author could publish a great first story yet subsequent works are mediocre. Or an experienced author could write an especially bad story.

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Yes. Nellie (Harper) Lee and JD Salinger would support this. I think it relates to a burning yearning to get a message out. Once the message is out the burning yearning has gone.

Of course you get better, assuming you're putting any work into it. How could you not?

TamLin01 said:

Of course you get better, assuming you're putting any work into it. How could you not?

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I suspect there can be a poignancy that is best elicited by unpracticed simplicity. What would the dairy of Ann Frank be like if she had more writing skills? While, as a rule , writing will improve there are exceptions, as with every rule.

weftandwarp said:

Yes. Nellie (Harper) Lee and JD Salinger would support this. I think it relates to a burning yearning to get a message out. Once the message is out the burning yearning has gone.

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Is it really fair to ascribe this to Harper Lee? She didn't publish anything else at all after Mockingbird until the recent Watchman, many years later. It wasn't a deterioration in her case, it was a complete absence.

loquere said:

Sometimes we can be the worst judges of our own work.

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Agree, but you forgot to add "and the best".

My writing changes with, and to some extent chronicles my life experience and world view. So the OP's question is for me, is related to the question "How much has my insight deepened in the last fifteen years?" And the answer to both questions is "I don't know".

I'm still amazed at how my own judgement of my own stories usually differs starkly from readers' opinions, if vote score is taken as a measure of their appeal. That's something I haven't learned at all.