How should I write?

There are as many different ways to tell a story as there are stories to tell.

Many writers worry about how they write: whether they’re writing too fast or too slow, whether their outline is too detailed or too sparse, or whether their story is even any good.

When I started taking writing seriously, I’d worry about these things all the time. Every other writer I talked to seemed to do things in a completely different way to me. And so I’d find myself thinking that, in some way, my writing must be wrong.

The truth is, the impact these things have on your writing is considerable. There are advantages and disadvantages to the ways each of us writes. I myself am a rather slow writer, who relies quite heavily on detailed plans and outlines for each chapter I write. 

It means that it takes a long time for me to see tangible evidence that my work is bringing results. I can get disheartened when I see the pace others can write at, and makes me feel as though my project will never be finished, and that my efforts are being wasted.

But there’s another truth, a harder truth. And that is that there’s nothing that you can do about that.

I write the way I do, because it’s how I write. I wouldn’t feel comfortable writing any other way. My methods are my own, because I know how I work best. 

Despite the hundreds of books, classes and blogs teaching writing out there, when it comes down to it, the only person who can give you an honest assessment of how you can write best is yourself.

This can be seen across the writing world. Some writers can write page after page at incredible rates – Brandon Sanderson – while others can take weeks or months just to finish a chapter – infamously, George R. R. Martin.

If there was one, foolproof method of writing, a formulae through which we could all become award winning novelists, all the best writers would use it. But they don’t. Because it doesn’t exist.

If you want to improve how you write, by all means learn how others write and try out new things. But just keep in mind that no ones method is better than your own. Don’t throw out everything you know about outlining and get frustrated when writing without a plan doesn’t work for you. Or start outlining for the first time, and get angry when writing doesn’t immediately get a thousand times easier.

Your method of writing is going to be as unique to you as your own fingerprints, and hopefully more creative than that analogy. We can all learn, we can all improve as writers. But we also have to accept that we’re each on our own paths. The lessons we learn aren’t going to suit us exactly, and every new skill we try is an experiment, not a rule.

So if you want to improve how you write:

1. Experiment with new ideas in your writing. Try doing a full plan first. Or try improving it incrementally draft by draft. Or writing huge chunks in one go, 10,000 words before a second draft of a chapter. We can only find what works best for us through trial and error.
2. Don’t let adversity get you down. No matter what you do, writing is always going to be hard sometimes. That doesn’t mean you’re doing it wrong; it just means you’re human. Keep on going, we all struggle at times, even the greats.
3. Write. There no better teacher than experience. If you want to improve how you write, first you need to be writing.