Getting into Writing
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I've always written. It's where I excelled, and I enjoyed it. I mean...my early writing is trash, but that's true of 99.999999% of mere mortals who take on a new pursuit, because you have to start somewhere, right?
And I still write trash. All the time. It's a better class of trash than it used to be, but you never stop writing garbage. Photographers take hundreds of photos and might pluck one golden image out of the lot. Fine artists draw and paint a lot of studies and sketches they'd never show anyone, in and around their finished works.
I think some people find different aspects of the creative process easier than others, and it can come more naturally for some, but I get uncomfortable with phrases like 'can creativity be taught,' because a lot of what people call 'creativity' is actually just 'work.' Like...the head down, butt-in-chair, wringing-blood-from-a-stone, frustrating, self-doubting, out-of-love-with-everything slog that you can't even objectively evaluate for yourself because all you know is that you're not satisfied with it and it isn't singing for you.
Muses aren't real. If you only ever produce work on days when you're feeling inspired, you won't get very far.
That is the scenic route to get to what I want to say, which is that I think anybody can get into anything. The limiting factor is how much of the work they're willing to do. Somebody for whom writing comes naturally can be paralyzed by their own dissatisfaction with their work, and never finish anything; their neighbor might struggle to put one word after another, but invest enough butt-in-chair time to be published first. Prolific, even. They say 90% of writing is editing, anyway, but if you never get the first draft down, it doesn't matter.
And as @GreenFlashlight said above (and other people probably said elsewhere in the thread), getting the work down means being able to accept failure. Which is, in turn, partly because there are more Slog Work days than inspired ones.
As an RP-related side note, I don't think much anymore about how RP helps or hinders my writing. I try not to think about RP at all when I write outside of it. What matters infinitely more than that is what I'm reading. If I'm not reading, and I mean reading widely, outside of specific genres and voices, my writing gets cramped. My language stagnates. I don't have ideas, because I'm not putting fresh, diverse thoughts into my head and letting them roll around in there and bump into each other in unexpected ways.
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@Derp said in Getting into Writing:
I mean, given that there are no small number of criticisms about our distinct lack of ability to do this, I sometimes wonder. You'd think that it would be a way to learn, but many of us seem to be lacking in some essential element.
RP, like many writing exercises, is a way to practice. Practice is geared towards refining skills you already know. It's generally not the best way to learn new skills or advance to the next level.
It's like playing softball in a bar league. Sure you'll probably get slightly better over time just by showing up and having a few at-bats every week, but it's a far cry from actually training seriously in a sport.
Writing is a craft, and doing it well is going to require some kind of learning. Different people learn in different ways, though, so I wouldn't place value on one style over another.
You also want to train for the sport you want to play. As others have mentioned, RP and prose are different. They're both forms of creative writing with certain skills in common, but like baseball and softball they have different styles and different rules. You can become good at both, but you want to make sure you're conscious of the differences as you practice and 'play'.
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I hated writing as a child. I absolutely despised it - my penmanship is terrible and there is likely fundamentally something wrong with the very process in how I write that remains uncorrected, but my hand cramping, the ink or graphite smears, the tedium of the whole process and how much slower it was to put my words to paper than simply think them infuriated me. Every time I had to write, I would look tor an excuse to get out of it, and check after every sentence to see if I had done enough to satisfy my mother's demands.
That changed with the introduction of the internet into my life. As a young teenager, I was in Germany and isolated away from any native speakers of English. I grew desperate for communication, and while I was learning the language, the first real reprieve I got was discovering roleplaying chatrooms on my cousin's computer.
I was hooked. I started writing and writing and really haven't gone back since. The faster speed of typing, and the social interaction element of it, those were the two things that won me over. I've, of course, written my share of essays, opinion pieces, etc., and it's something I need to find the discipline to do more of, but these days, I'm rarely not writing.
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@Selira I can definitely relate. I never let my hatred of hand writing stop me as a kid and teenager, but after computers -- forget it. I can barely write a shopping list by hand. Handwriting worthy of an MD, cramps from fingertips to ears, smearing. I have no idea how I coped before computers were a thing -- I vaguely recall my parents' mechanical typewriter.
http://keys.aresmush.com -- Come to Chincoteague, we have ponies.
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