Complex Numbers

Room for Improvement

Regarding your craft of writing, is there something specific you want to improve on or give more attention? What steps will you take to motivate yourself?

The best drummer in the world is commonly accepted to be Neil Peart from Rush. Word is that there was a magazine about drummers that, every year, picked a "Best Drummer" kind of like Time's Person of the Year, and every year for some time, Peart was selected. This got boring, so they changed the award to something like "Best Drummer, Apart From Neil Peart."

I mention this because a few years back, I heard that Neil Peart was taking drumming lessons.

Writing is like that. I don't care if you're JK Rowling, Stephen King, or William fucking Shakespeare, there is always room for improvement, and one should always take that opportunity. But to do that, it helps to know what aspects of writing are your weak points - and there are always weak points. Plotting, characterization, word choice, pacing, whatever.

Most of us, I think, suck at knowing what our actual weak points are - that's where reviewing comes in - but even if you end up working on something you're already good at, you can still become better. The problem with reviews, by the way - or, well, one of the problems - is that we are all subject to the cognitive bias that I forget the name of, the one where criticism or facts can't change your mind about things. So the first thing to do is to work to overcome that particular bias.

For me, one thing I keep seeing in reviews is that I repeat certain words and phrases. It's annoying, because I make a conscious effort not to, but the redundancy creeps in anyway. The worst thing about it is that I don't catch it myself. I can usually - but not always - catch point of view problems, tense issues, spelling and grammar flubs, etc., on a re-reading, but for some reason I have a blind spot when it comes to repetition.

So that's what I want to work on. If anyone reading this ends up reviewing one of my thingies, now you'll be more aware of repetition when you see it.

My other problem, though, goes back to the second question in today's prompt: motivation. I can barely motivate myself to write, most days, and while I have a near-constant desire to improve many things, not just writing, it's harder outside of, say, a video game. There, you know when you level up. In real life, you have to guess at it.

Maybe if I treat it like I do exercise - but even in that activity, I can kind of tell when I've leveled up. My running resistance level becomes too easy, so I kick it up a notch. I do 15 reps at, say, 60 pounds, no problem, so next time I do 10 reps at 65 and work my way back up to 15 at that weight. That sort of thing. With writing, it's not so easy. I feel like I'm decent at it, and yet I still write some things that are obviously just throwaway, phoned-in pieces, amateur-level. And that doesn't even take into account my examples of purposely silly output.

The motivation thing harks back to something I wrote here yesterday, about being complacent. Thing is, I'm not complacent about my writing the way I am about other things in life. I want to get better. I think I know how to get better. The only thing left to do is the practice, and that's where I lack motivation. What to do about that? Well, just write anyway, I think - motivated or not.