How Regular Practice Can Transform Your Writing

Writing got easier to publish and no easier to do well. A story still fails when the sentences cannot carry it. The usual reason is that we read to be carried along, and we never look at how the carrying is done.

Practice is the unglamorous answer. Read like a writer, then put those sentences through your own hands. You cannot skim a line you are retyping.

Read for the device

Recent books inherit their tricks from older ones. Read a classic and ask what the paragraph is doing, not only what happens.

The first sentence of Pride and Prejudice is a good test. "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife." The comma after "acknowledged" is a pause that sets up a joke. The sentence pretends to state a law, then admits the law is gossip. If you only follow the plot, you miss the pause. If you type the sentence, your finger has to make it.

Frankenstein does the opposite. The sentences are long because the teller is building a case. Moby Dick will hold a description until it becomes an argument. Notice the period the book comes from, and how the length of the sentence reflects it. Three classics about prejudice is a reading of Frankenstein and two neighbors if you want the theme, not the syntax.

Copy before you invent

Painters copy paintings. Writers can copy prose. Not to publish it, and not instead of your own pages, but to feel how a paragraph is built. Type a scene. You will notice the punctuation you usually skip, and the places the author repeats a shape on purpose.

That practice also makes the keyboard less of an obstacle. If your hands are slower than the sentence in your head, you drop the clause you meant to keep. Pen and paper are fine for a note. The draft you will edit still ends up typed. How to type faster is the practical version of learning the keys. Fifteen minutes on a book is enough to start.

Write for one reader

Write the idea down when you have it. A note on your phone is enough. Later, pick one and give it a place, a time, and a person it is for. A story for children needs clearer sentences and a smaller vocabulary than a story for adults who want a long, difficult scene. The reader changes the prose. Write with that person in mind.

When a page is ready and you want another pair of eyes, send it to contact@typersguild.com or the Discord.

The day is three moves. Read a few pages for the device, type a passage so the device is in your hands, and keep one idea you might actually write.