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So how do you write prose? Any good books you know on the subject? (lemmygrad.ml)

submitted 6 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I got made fun of as a child by a parent for doing art and just... never did any ever afterwards. I primarily hang around artists tho and would like to relate to them more, but none of them do creative writing. I've read numerous grammar books, so that won't be a problem, but none really go in to how to construct a sentence, paragraph, page, chapter, plot, etc. I'll happily take any advice on the subject, really anything you can think for someone with actually zero experience.

Good advice I've gotten so far is to just write basically whatever. Also, people who are visual artists and creative writers, which was "easier" for you to become fluent?

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 months ago

I second the person who recommended On Writing. Mostly for the idea of learning techniques and approaches as "tools in your toolbox", not as dogma. Beyond that, I'd take it with that mindset, as one writer's perspective on things.

Other than that, it's hard to know where to begin. There is a lot you could focus on, but I can tell from my experience, I would recommend:

Focus on storytelling over prose: Meaning, if you are hemming and hawing on wording and sentence structure, leave that for revision and editing. Prioritize getting out the gist of what you mean and how it relates to the story you want to tell. Which relates to...
A first draft you can edit is always worth more than something you never wrote because you were trying to perfect it first: This doesn't mean it's going to be easy to write drafts. The point is just that when you're considering where your priorities are, it's easier to get into an open mode and be creative first than to try to refine before you've written much. There's also a term for this in programming, premature optimization, where you can spend a bunch of time optimizing a feature that doesn't end up in the final product, or is modified later to such an extent the optimizations no longer matter.
Do spend some time reflecting, revising, editing, but when or on what is less important. Just in terms of skill building, you could write some random sentences and then write them differently. It doesn't have to be a part of a big draft for it to matter as practice.
Be wary of writing advice dogma: This is one I wish someone had been there to tell me years back. I already had perfectionist tendencies and then certain kinds of dogma got into my head and to this day, make it hard sometimes for me to just write. One of the worst of these, though it seems to have fallen out of favor a little bit as time has gone on, is "show, don't tell." Awful advice that will have people spending half an hour trying to explain what it means and how it's actually valuable advice, somehow, if you just look at it in the right way. Prose is storytelling. Film is storyshowing. Prose has the advantage of being able to go right into a character's thoughts. Film doesn't. Learn the advantages and disadvantages the medium has and use that knowledge to inform how you write.