How long does it take to become a good writer?

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How long does it take to become a good writer?

My writing skills suck, and that's putting it nicely. I was wondering how long it takes to become a good writer and how to become a really good writer?

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Jonnie Comet

It takes decades.

Start by reading.  Read all the literature you can.  Enjoy and understand the stories; but pay attention to the authors' craft-- how they use the language, how they describe things, how they set up the plot and provide suspense, and so on.  There is nothing wrong with sort of copying another author's style, at least when you are getting started.  Many people have begun this way.  I wrote Love Me Do as a modern (1970s) take on The Great Gatsby.  My style is/was very different from Fitzgerald's; but even when I teach Gatsby in the classroom today I am sort of amazed at myself for having understood (and sort of copied) his book so well... when I was 17.  And Love Me Do is not at all a bad book.

The second thing, as you begin to read a lot, is to try to discern good writing from bad.  Avoid Nicholas Sparks and Stephanie Meyer.  They tell great stories but their craft is not worth emulating.  They write after their audience-- 8th-year girls.  Move on from that. Read Vonnegut, Rand, Delterfield, Trollope. Explore stuff you never thought you would like. Again, study craft. 

Sting, the bass player for The Police, once said, 'Whenever I run out of song ideas I go back to my craft.'  He sits and plays the bass for hours on end, for days on end. And we thought this guy was good; and still he practises.  Why? --because there is truth in the adage that one learns well by doing.   So, do.  Write everything and anything that comes into your mind.   Read, think of something, write that down.  Critique films, TV, the books you read-- decide what is bad and good about each.  Criticise your own writing from days/months/years ago.   Improve it.  This is not playing for an audience; it is practice.  But it's the only way you can grow.  To avoid attempts, even when they (will) end in failure, is to choose to not improve.  You can't pitch a ball till you try to do it.   So, try.  Fail.  Learn.  Try again.  Fail again.   Learn more.  And repeat. 

As you write, go back to the books you liked, read alternate passages, and compare them.  Is your grammar/mechanics/spelling/usage equivalent to that guy's?  If not, why not?   Evaluate and improve.  This is called editing.   It's been said that there are no great writers; there are only diligent editors.  All writers are editors before they are 'famous published authors'. Get out of your head the idea that the first endeavour is the purest, the sweetest, the most valuable because it's so pure and sweet and original.  That's Romantic; and whatever they write, no good writers are purely Romantic.   They believe in hard work-- and that lies in editing, revising, critiquing, really looking judiciously at what they have written. There is nothing accidental or innocent or 'pure' about it.  All art, including literature, must be deliberate.  It's what makes it 'art' (artifice: that which Man creates).

During the editing process, I take my work in a 3-ring binder to the beach.  (It's where I live.)   I sit there reading like it's someone else's work, like it's from a student or someone, with a blue pen in hand, and truly beat up the whole text.  'Stop repeating,' I write.   'Delete this,' I write.  'What idiot wrote this?' I write.  I put myself into the mindset of the reader.  Then I fix it so 'he' will like it (even when it's just me). It's all about the reader.   If you don't serve the reader, why are you writing?  You write to be read-- that is the definition of an author.  So think of how it reads when you read it.  If it rots, fix it.   That's your job.

I'm sorry for preaching at you but there is really no easy way to do this without just doing it.  There is no app for your iPhone that you can buy and install and *become* a good writer.  You have to just start doing it, like riding a skateboard.   And you will fall on your bottom and become injured-- in this case, in your ego-- and you deserve to get slapped about a bit by it and then you will learn.  And you will go at it again, and again.  And then you will have succeeded, because you will have succeeded.  And no-one can ever take that from you.

There are plenty of easier things to do.  You could sell flowers in a shop.  You could flip burgers at McDonald's.  You could deliver newspapers (does anyone still do that?).  But you want to write.  So what are you reading this drivel for?  Start writing. 

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Asker's Comment:

I thank you for giving your time to help me and help me realize that it's not going to be an easy process, more like a difficult one. This was a good answer, thank you.

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'Love Me Do' - cover artwork

Here was a bit of fun from the making of this book.  The cover art was compiled from actual 1970s artifacts I had lying about, augmented with some credible relics that were close enough.  It represents the materialism of the 1970s period without having to depict actual people, so that a reader's images of Jon and Jeanne, though their descriptions are reasonably complete in the text, can be of anyone and not be bound by human images on the cover (don't you hate when book covers warp your perception like that?).  Besides, it's about as individual and unique as anything could be, since so much of the objects in the illustration are unique in the world.

From the top right corner, proceeding clockwise, here are some details about what's seen.

1. The ring is my daughter Mary's.  It is brown and embellished with gold glitter.  Being blonde as well Jeanne might have preferred this very 1970s colour scheme.  I actually wore this on my little finger for a while and when someone asked me why I replied, 'When a cute blonde girl gives you a ring, you wear it.'

2. The handwritten paper on Kant is from Mary, whose handwriting is an excellent example of a slightly-distracted high-school student's work.  It is feminine, though she writes very fast at times, almost sloppy.  I do keep a file of my kids' important schoolwork, poetry and short stories but chose this because I liked the subject matter.

3. The guitar plectrum is mine; it is very old and worn.  All my guitar cases tend to be swimming in old picks.  Aside from guitar I have nearly always played bass with a pick, like Paul McCartney, Philip Lynott and Chris Squire.  Bass-guitar strings, being thick, tend to take their toll on a plastic plectrum; about the only thing I know to be harder on one is when a lead-guitar player uses the edge to catch false harmonics (especially on higher strings) and gradually gouges it.

4. The strawberry stickers are featured in the text (see Chapter 2) but these were were cut out of paper rather than stamped.  At some time I will be offering authentic stickers and much else besides (keep in touch with the blog to see when!). 

The hall pass and tickets I explain in another place.

5. I think the purple ponytail ring belongs my daughter Rachel, from when she was little.

6. The little nickel-plated locket I borrowed off Rachel's bedside table.  It is only a simple little thing, something a (female) friend gave her as a part of a more substantial gift long ago, and she has rarely worn it.  I thought it looked a little childish, the sort of thing a girl keeps just because it connects her with her childhood.

7. The 1974 silver Kennedy half-dollar is one I have had since it was new and is now the coin placed under the mast step when my boat, which is a 1974 model, gets rigged and goes back into the water (not every spring).  This is an old sailors' tradition, a form of payment to the gods against the fear of having the mast break or come down.  So far, so good.

8. The hair grips (aka 'bobby-pins')  are from the bathroom; they are the girls'.  I did not choose any of their 'blonde-coloured' ones as I am not sure they existed in the 1970s.

9. The printed matter under the hair grips is a tract about how to tell your boyfriend 'no' and still keep the relationship going.  It is really dated (late-1960s)  and makes a quaint, if still relevant, read.  I have no idea how I came to have it-- I believe it was stuck in the pages of some old book.  It's very apropos because Jon and Jeanne will face this very issue (and get past it, along with many others).  We can presume Jeanne may have read such things; but above all we must conclude that she knows what she is about on her own.

10. The 'peace sign' doodle is on a manila folder.  In the 1970s we did not carry spiral-bound notebooks in rucksacks.  Most attentive students carried a three-ring binder, the kind with the canvas-over-cardboard cover, as Jeanne has  in Chapter 9.  The binders were not attractive and came in only a few dull colours with no printed patterns.

The coolest guys would carry all handouts and assignments in a single manila folder, regardless of which classes they all belonged to (a perhaps feigned sense of disorganisation was appealing then, a kind of antiestablishment statement).  Of course the folder got completely decorated in felt-tip pen and pencil over the course of many boring class periods.  One would exchange the folder for a new one only when it got too full of doodles or stickers to add more, not because it became torn or fatigued.  You could usually procure one from a teacher's supplies stash in the back of a classroom and so the practice was even financially expedient.

The biggest vulnerability came from when one of your rivals or mates would approach you from the back, tap the end of the folder near the top, and cause it to tip out all your papers onto the floor in a crowded corridor.  Then you would have total strangers glimpsing all your drawings and homework assignments or just walking all over them and kicking them aside.  This happened to me exactly once, in ninth year, and after that I was ever vigilant to the risk.

11. The mimeographed test paper is my own 12th-year British Lit final, taken in the last week of my high-school career and stuffed into the back of my yearbook which I was carting about collecting signatures (and where the test has been returned for posterity).  For some incomprehensible reason, in the topic that would become my baccalaureate major, I got only an 83 on this and so was very careful here to show only a part where I did pretty well.

Mr Romm was brutal with this test, providing a matching section (near the top) with 28 or 30 separate entries (as a teacher myself I never gave more than six at a time) and taking 3 and 5 points off at a time with abandon.  Nevertheless I loved that class and greatly admired the teacher, who receives a mention in the Author's message of the book.

12. The yellow card is a set of instructions that came with the new water pump for my 1968 Buick convertible-- as if any water-pump replacement on an American car of that vintage needs instructions!  The card is appropriately garnished in grime and gasket sealant, not from having been used for guidance (for really I do not think I read it at all, except to know what it was about) but from dirty tools at the bottom of my toolbox where it stayed (with the car's original registration) for about 20 years.

13. The black-and-white photo is of Badfinger, from a page that keeps falling out of my copy of The Longest Cocktail Party by Richard DiLello, a book I wholly recommend for anyone interested in The Beatles, Apple Records or the recording and music business of that period.  This book, which I got whilst in 12th year, became a major inspiration for writing Love Me Do in the first place and especially how it was organised, its narrative style and what details about the music industry it contains.

14. The green pencil came from the bank at which my mother worked during the 1970s or 1980s.  It is privately meant to represent the green draughtsman's pencil I borrowed from the girl who first inspired the character of Jeanne when she and I were in seventh year.  It was her father's.  I kept forgetting to return it and she started teasing me and calling me 'Pencil-Stealer' in the corridors.  I had such a crush on her that I was loathe to return what was then the only tactile proof of knowing her; but then my brother borrowed it, characteristically without asking me, and I never saw it after that.

15. I do not know the origin of the yellow flowery greeting card.  I used it only to cover up bits of the manila folder because the same folder appears on the back.   But Jeanne's favourite colour is yellow and that's why I chose it.

The entire collage was made up on the scanner glass and rearranged about 17 times till I got a satisfactory layout.  Colin liked it from the first, saying it was both relevant to the book and personally meaningful; and so we did not even solicit help from Gene or Atari on this.  The font is Courier, to resemble a 1970s typewriter (although way too big!).

The binding graphic was made up in AppleWorks to resemble the turquoise-blue lines of ruled school paper; but on the back we used an actual piece of paper (perhaps anachronistically spiral-bound) because the text would not show well against the body of the folder itself.  The text was organised about the red margin line of the background.  The folder is not really my English folder-- I do not think any of my well-decorated and well-worn folders have survived from that period-- only one I had from an old job.  But the inclusion of the peace sign within the letter G is typical of what I would have done then.  We all drew peace signs on everything, even if we came from families who voted for Nixon.  Someone has suggested that the diagonal hatching in the Chevrolet logo looks like it was done by a right-hander, not a lefty; but I did it vertically, only upside-down from how it appears on the book.

Now that you have read about the dirty little secrets of the book's cover (which you don't get with the e-text editions!) I hope you'll venture a bit of precious cash on the book itself!

This text and these images are part of the copyright held by Jonnie Comet Productions Ltd and may not be used, downloaded, stored or distributed through any means without express written permission.  Thanks for your respect, support & co-operation.

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