I'm writing this because I have advice for another writer and I don't want to clog up the wrong thread, so I'm making a new one.
My question is, if you are dedicated to becoming a better writer, how much of your writing time should you spend writing?
Well, what else is important?
Free writing: Spend at least ten minutes before you start writing just to free write as much as you can. No pausing, no editing. Write about anything and everything, it could be the events of that day or your deepest fears. Free Writing is how you learn to take the thoughts in your head and express them through words, and it's also essential in finding your own natural style.
Playing games: You should dedicate some of your writing time to playing creativity games, like a word association web until you fill a whle page, or making up a story hased on a set of random words. The Writing Activities forum is a good place to play - but remember! - it's about exploring things you wouldn't normally think of, not adding to the things you already know.
Hone your craft: This is all about practice, not writing. It could be taking some critisism and learning to fix it. For example if someone says 'you use too much dialogue in your work' then you would try writing a 500 word scene in which two characters communicate something without using any dialogue at all.
Or, it could be taking one of your favourite novels, picking it apart to figure out why it's so amazing, and deciding which parts of it you want to adopt as your own. (Note: You're always going to be influenced by everything around you, don't be scare to adopt other people's techniques, at least that way you're aware of what your influences are and you're controlling them.)
Thinking time: this is the thing that a lot of writers don't do even though it makes an enormous improvement to their work. I usually say that for every fifteen minutes you spend writing, you should spend five minutes thinking. Don't think in words. Take whatever scene you are about to write and put yourself in it. See the light and shading, smell the air, feel the atmosphere and emotion of your characters. In those five minutes you can completely lose yourself in your work and the product will be much better and much more fluent than if you were to just sit down writing.
Observe the world: Be aware of it. How people walk, what they dress like. How shops are laid out. What different parts of your local area smell like. Where different people hang out. What happens to someones voice when they get angry? How does this differ to someone else's. Learning to observe the world will teach you how to make your own imaginary world develop and grow.
And other stuff: You know, the planning, world building, character designing, e.c.t, whatever works for you to get your story rolling.
Getting better isn't just about being better at putting fingers to keyboard and stringing sentences together. It all happens in your mind. The actual writing is only the tip of the iceberg.
I say this mainly because if you sit yourself down to write for an hour and just hammer out words you're only going to stress yourself out and never really reach your maximum potential.
If you sit down to write for an hour a day and spend ten minutes free writing, five minutes practicing, and another two blocks of five minutes thinking. You'll get more and better quality writing done in the remaining thirty five minutes than you would get done trying to churn out words for an hour.
Feel free to add comments based on your own experience (but please don't disagree until you actually try it.)
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