What is your advice to new writers or aspiring one

[Jemini]

I have seen lots of advice from several sources on how to write. After now having about five years at the craft myself, here are the ones that struck me as the most important, and I am going to rank-order them in the order of how important they actually are, most important at the top and the ones further down are also important but just not as important as the ones higher up.

1. Give yourself permission to suck. It doesn't matter if you hate your writing, write it anyway. The simple act of writing is more important than it's quality.

2. Edit your work. A good writer does not just sit down and produce good work. A good writer produces crap work, and then edits the figurative and literal hell out of it until it actually becomes something presentable.

3. Learn to know when your work is "good enough" or "as good as you can get it with your current skill." It is always possible to improve your work further if you just hold onto it and keep editing it. If you keep going with this process though, you will never actually release it. You need to learn to just get over that and get the thing out there.

 

[BlackKnightX]

Learn to analyze and reflect on why something works when it does. Dig deep. That's how you learn. And don't forget to implement what you've learned in your writing right away. That's how you gain experience.

Also, be wary of any writing advice you receive. Most of them are bullshit, maybe even this one if it doesn't resonate with what you're trying to write.

That's the keyword right there: if it doesn't resonate with you, if it sounds like bullshit to you upon close inspection, it's Most likely bullshit; just ignore it and move on.

 

[LilRora]

I would say, don't be discouraged by setbacks. I've had more than one situation where I was well into writing a story and realized there were things I didn't like either at its beginning or in its entirety that wouldn't be possible to fix without a complete redraw. Those can be related to grammar, prose, characters, plot, worldbuilding, whatever.

I still can't exactly get to writing as if that didn't happen, but abandoning writing completely because of something like that seems like a bad move; we should rather learn from those mistakes when writing the next story.

Whether we finish the old one is not very important, but an important thing is to give the stories closure, if not in like, the plots of the stories themselves, then at least get them to a point where we don't feel like we're suddenly dumping another story into the unfinished trash - that's a great way of ruining self-esteem and our subconscious approach to writing in an insidious way that can really hurt even if we're aware what we're doing.