Writers: Your Skills May Need Time to Catch Up to Your Vision

theliteraryarchitect:

Are you endlessly frustrated with most things you write? Do you find writing difficult, nay, impossible? Do you get the most fabulous ideas, only to find that executing them is incredibly challenging? That’s actually a good sign.

If you’re a new writer, and you have good taste, ambition, and originality, it’s going to take a while for your skill set to catch up to your vision.

If your story is difficult to write, it’s not a sign that you should quit or change your idea. Keep writing, keep reading, keep practicing, keep studying, keep learning, keep writing, keep writing, keep writing.

I repeat: If writing is hard for you, it does NOT mean you are a bad writer. If your story is difficult to write, it does NOT mean your idea is bad.

It means you have a complex vision and you haven’t developed the skills you need to pull it off yet.

Many times, you’ll gain those skills in the very process of writing your story. Other times, you’ll have to put down that story for a few weeks, months, or even years until your skills catch up.

The process can be slow, but your abilities will catch up with your ambition if you keep writing. So keep going forward. It’s cool if you get discouraged: That’s part of the process, too. But please don’t quit.

One more thing: Don’t throw away or delete anything. Keep all your writing, including ideas and first drafts that went nowhere. I have stories I started five years ago that I’m just now able to carry out as I had originally intended. If you get that you didn’t have a bad idea, just a skill you haven’t developed yet, then you’ll be less tempted to throw away your writing in frustration or shame. And in the future when you develop the skills you need, you’ll be really glad you have them to go back to.