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rynlingI think "being a good writer" is...
33% practice. The more you write, the better you get at writing.
33% life experience. The more stories you're exposed to, the better you get at telling stories.
33% editing. Unlike practice or life experience, editing is a skill that can be taught and learned. It can also be outsourced, but watch out. There's a serious Dunning-Kruger effect when it comes to editing, in that the people who are the worst editors are often the least aware that they're bad at it. This cognitive bias also applies to self-editing, unfortunately, but practice and experience will help the skill develop.
You may be thinking that the extra 1% is talent, but no. The extra 1% involves being broken in a very specific way that makes you feel compelled to write instead of doing literally anything else with your time. Alas.
This is another story for another time, but I'm starting to understand that there's no such thing as talent when it comes to writing. The specific incident that sparked this realization was me reading something published (well, "published" in scare quotes) by someone I used to think was immensely talented. The quality of this guy's writing that I saw as "talent" when we were both in college was really just good third-party editing. His actual writing, after more than a decade of not writing anything, is genuinely kind of shit. When it comes to writing, talent isn't real; it's all practice and experience and good editing.
33% practice. The more you write, the better you get at writing.
33% life experience. The more stories you're exposed to, the better you get at telling stories.
33% editing. Unlike practice or life experience, editing is a skill that can be taught and learned. It can also be outsourced, but watch out. There's a serious Dunning-Kruger effect when it comes to editing, in that the people who are the worst editors are often the least aware that they're bad at it. This cognitive bias also applies to self-editing, unfortunately, but practice and experience will help the skill develop.
You may be thinking that the extra 1% is talent, but no. The extra 1% involves being broken in a very specific way that makes you feel compelled to write instead of doing literally anything else with your time. Alas.
This is another story for another time, but I'm starting to understand that there's no such thing as talent when it comes to writing. The specific incident that sparked this realization was me reading something published (well, "published" in scare quotes) by someone I used to think was immensely talented. The quality of this guy's writing that I saw as "talent" when we were both in college was really just good third-party editing. His actual writing, after more than a decade of not writing anything, is genuinely kind of shit. When it comes to writing, talent isn't real; it's all practice and experience and good editing.
