Thanks for sharing—I think this adds an interesting dimension to the issue.
In my case, trying to level up my craft actually made my life harder. After reading the style guides I mentioned, each sentence I put down would sound awful. I would iterate on it, but that would create a cascade of changes in the surrounding paragraph. What this looked like was that a simple, 500-word blog post would take 12000 words of revisions—and multiple weeks of work.
But perhaps that’s a newbie mistake, a result of exploring a vast cave alone in the dark. I say this because, at one point, I began rewriting others’ essays (by hand) and I suspect this helped me internalize some of these rules that I was trying to memorize and apply mechanically. And when that happened, the words began flowing and I found a lot of peace and fun in the exercise.
Out of curiosity, what’s your go-to activity/resource for practicing craft?
Thanks for sharing—I think this adds an interesting dimension to the issue.
In my case, trying to level up my craft actually made my life harder. After reading the style guides I mentioned, each sentence I put down would sound awful. I would iterate on it, but that would create a cascade of changes in the surrounding paragraph. What this looked like was that a simple, 500-word blog post would take 12000 words of revisions—and multiple weeks of work.
But perhaps that’s a newbie mistake, a result of exploring a vast cave alone in the dark. I say this because, at one point, I began rewriting others’ essays (by hand) and I suspect this helped me internalize some of these rules that I was trying to memorize and apply mechanically. And when that happened, the words began flowing and I found a lot of peace and fun in the exercise.
Out of curiosity, what’s your go-to activity/resource for practicing craft?