Rampant Games - The Craft of Writing

Jay is providing us with his learnings about writing and how his skills improved over time.

It feels like there are a humongous number of rules / guidelines / techniques for writing a good story. Some are pretty iron-clad and universal (like spelling and grammar rules). Some are pretty loose guidelines and may vary by genre, audience, time, or even our personal process. So guess what? Nobody knows all of these rules, guidelines, and techniques. Any of them can be broken by an author who knows what he or she is doing, but not out of ignorance. Which… is tough, because starting out, ignorance is high, in spite of best efforts.

When a writers are first starting out, they probably don’t know most of these rules. Of the ones they think they know, they have forgotten many of them or don’t think about them while writing, and aren’t sure how to apply many of the rest. And then they allow themselves to violate some others because they think they are special snowflakes for whom exceptions can be made. Eventually this may be true, but beginning writers, in spite of sometimes considerable raw talent, often fall prey to Dunning-Kruger bias.

A new author can find themselves screwing up on accident a lot. They think, “Oh, man, I’d never do that!” and then later discover (or have it pointed out to them) that they managed to do exactly that.

With lots of reading (which trains the brain to recognize certain structures and rules), studying, practice, and maybe formal training, things get better. A lot more of concepts are not only learned, but internalized. That’s a big deal. A writer quits making so many newbie mistakes to begin with, and moves on to a plethora of other mistakes.