Yzabel / August 18, 2005

Following my ponderings about whether reading “books about writing” can be useful or not, here’s a short article on Ezine: Are Writing Exercises Effective?.There’s really a middle-ground to be found here.On the one hand, one cannot spend their time on such exercises, nor focus continuously on writing tips and “doing it like the Masters did”: when it comes to fiction, to novels, to imagination, creativity must remain on the foreground no matter what, else we may simply end up losing ourselves in too many attempts to reach perfection. We need to retain some spontaneity, as well as develop a “voice”.On the other hand, I’m standing my ground here: it’s not true that if we don’t produce THE perfect novel on the first attempt, then we’re failure as writers and should never touch a pen (a keyboard…) ever again.That’s where I place “writing exercises”—both reading and practicing them.In the past two weeks, I must say that I’ve learnt a lot already. Now, this is probably due in part to the language barrier: the books I’ve laid my hands on were written by US people for US people (I assume), and when it comes to words, expressions and the likes, I just can’t apply this to French language without any tweaking. However, since I also write in English, I think that keeping such advice in mind can indeed help me. Many people think that my English is good, but the truth is, most of it was practiced over forums, chat-rooms, ICQ… you guess the rest: these are seldom the best examples. As a result, my writing isn’t very good. Decent enough for blogs, for posts, for idle chatting, but certainly not for short stories and novels.An example: I won’t admit how many “-ly” adverbs and other hacks I’ve found in my own texts (I’m too ashamed for this), but I can’t look at my works the same way now, not until I’ve finished editing them. Come to think of it, if I were to put the French equivalent of these adverbs into the text I’ve written in my own language, they’d sound horrible.This is worth for French as well, of course. I can still learn, even though I have more practice, more experience, more references, in this language.So it happened that I swallowed my pride, gathered advice from a few books and online texts, and put what I’ve learnt to the service of my writing, careful not to forget what was my primary path here. Time only will tell whether this was useful or not, of course. I however have the clear feeling that by keeping a few of these tips in mind, the writing I perform these days is already of better quality.Amazing, how getting rid of the “-ly” adverbs placed every two lines makes a text look different.Y Tags: writing