Connecting to Learn

One thing I am committed to is learning. I never want to stop learning, though my focus shifts from time to time. For example, years ago I was asked to write a mystery novel for grown-ups. Though I had read hundreds of them I’d never written one, so I became really committed to learning more about mystery novels for adults. I’ve thrown myself into a similar focused commitment to learning about writing for educational markets (when I’d only written for magazines), writing for children (when I’d only written adult nonfiction), and writing good query letters (when I’d really only worked with editors giving assignments). Whenever I run across some place where my lack of learning is impeding my drive to succeed, I refocus again. And during the learning time, I can be obsessive, devouring everything I can find on the subject. It’s the kind of obsessive focus I turn on research sometimes as well. It always represents a merging of interest, commitment, and need. But before beginning on any learning journey, it helps to know where you need to grow. This is where connecting to learn comes into play.

Research suggests that in order to properly access the quality of something, you need a level of skill and understanding in that area. For instance, people often tell me I should illustrate my own writing. That’s a kind suggestion, and I take it as such, but it also shows that most people do not understand what is needed to be an illustration. Professional illustrators (and I know quite a few) never tell me my level of art is sufficient to illustrate, though they say other encouraging things to me about it. Because of this need for skill to judge strengths and weaknesses, it can be hard to sort out where learning choices would be best focused, especially at the beginning of the writing journey.

Weakness and Struggle

If you ask most new writers where their greatest writing weakness lies, they’ll generally tell you what they find hard. The assumption is that anything you find hard is probably your greatest weakness. But that’s not always a good metric for finding weakness. Neither is enjoyment. For example, I’ve had students who enjoyed writing dialogue, but did not enjoy writing action. So they would pen “stories” made up entirely of disembodied voices with no immediate action at all. If asked, they would say their weakness was in writing action. But when pushed to actually do it, many times they wrote action quite well in a clear and evocative way. But their dialogue would continue to be overly wordy and too full of exposition. So where their real weakness lay was in dialogue, the things they thought they were good at. And not action, the thing they thought they were bad at. They merely avoided action because it “felt” hard. Now, that resistance to writing action was a problem, but it was one that was easily solved with practice. The more the writer wrote a balance of action and dialogue, the less the action felt hard. But the quality of action writing stayed consistently good. That wasn’t where the writer needed actual education and actual learning.

In reality, simple practice can help you overcome many places that feel hard and that you tend to resist or try to “write around.” The places where you need education can sometimes take a little more sleuthing to find.

Fearless Self-Evaluation

One really helpful way to evaluate your weaknesses yourself is by writing a several page scene between two characters in conflict and setting it aside, not peeking at it again for several weeks (a month if you can stand to wait that long.) This will help you divorce yourself from a couple things that get in the way of self-evaluation of your craft: (1) memories of what was hard and what was easy, and (2) the background knowledge you carried into the scene. After a month, you’ll forget many of the little things you “knew” about these characters you created for the exercise, and you’ll be forced to evaluate what is on the page itself.

This cold reading of your work will help to give you some perspective. Look for things like clear flow of sentences and paragraph transitions. Look at clarity, in general. Were there any sentences you had to read more than once? Why was that? Look at sentence length and the balance of dialogue and action. Look at the characters. Do they sound very different? If you removed all the dialogue tags, would you still know which character is making each statement? In well-crafted characters, you should be able to do so. Read the exercise aloud and listen for the flow of the language and spots where you struggled to read smoothly.

Imagine that you are reading this scene from the perspective of helping someone who really wants to improve. What weaknesses would you note for this other person. Consider writing up an evaluation telling this mythical writer what strengths and weaknesses you saw in the piece. Then set that evaluation aside for several days before returning to it to see what truths might be in there. When you had a chance to step back emotionally from your writing, what were you able to see in it?

Connecting to Learn

Self-evaluation can only go so far. You can only get just so much distance between your feelings and your writing. This is why it can be helpful to get an outside evaluation by connecting to learn how to improve your writing skills. But choosing someone to do the evaluation can be tough. You want someone who knows something about good writing. This can mean a published writer, but it could equally mean someone who is an avid reader but who thinks critically about what is read. A reader who generally evaluates books using surface level words like good, bad, dull, or stupid will not be helpful. You want someone who really digs in and talks about books with remarks such as “I fell in love with the character” or “I am still thinking about the story” or “it made me feel like I was actually in that place.” People who put that level of thought into describing what they read will be the most useful when describing your work as well.

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