How do you learn to write?

[Anonymous No.13274381]

>Just write a lot
Just to be clear, I have no problem actually sitting at the desk and typing away. I have rather clear ideas about what I want to do. The problem is that I hate trial and error. Is there really no structured learning process for writing? With any other craft you start with a set of foundation skills and then build your experience by practicing those skills.
Writing, on the other hand, feels like throwing things at a wall until something sticks, and it's incredibly frustrating. It takes forever to produce a serviceable scene. I understand the concept of working big to small, but I constantly have to reiterate by pure trial and error. There has to be a better way to produce good writing without all this struggle.

[Anonymous No.13274400]

>>13274381
Read a lot. Try emulating other writers. Pay attention to the syntax of your favorite authors, understand how they use punctuation, build up your vocabulary, etc.

[Anonymous No.13274483]

>>13274400
I do read and take notes, but it's hard to reverse engineer a writing process from that. I should have pointed out that I want to write for visual mediums, I don't mean to write novels. Screenplays are rather bare-bones and very visual in nature, my issue with writing is more about the structure of the plot than actual prose.

[Anonymous No.13275539]

There's a lot that goes into being a good writer. But specifically on craft: You have to understand narrative.
If a painter or photographer is 'inventing' a new way of seeing, so is the writer. The writer understands that the whole world is narrative. You could go further if you subscribed to the view that the medium is the message; the medium is language. This would lead you towards being a prose stylist, I think.
Even this exposition teaching you something about writing is merely narrative. Even in other crafts, what lies beyond foundational skills is merely trial and error. In order to be better thatn 90% of writers you must tread in the not very well known territory.
What seems to trip you up is the identification of what are the foundational skills in writing. Any purportedly comprehensive extensional list is guaranteed to be wrong by being incomplete.
You must understand language. You must understand narrative. You must understand the artistic dialectic.
It's unlikely that any writer who actually understands how to write, who is "good", will ever be interested in writing an instructional book, for they understand the futility of that endeavor, and there are far more interesting things to write.

[Anonymous No.13275943]

[Anonymous No.13276108]

>>13275943

[Anonymous No.13276248]

>>13274381
>How do you learn to write
I'm currently trying to figure this out myself. Are there sites from universities that I can use as a homepage to get tips from? Like a creative writing guide page. I see a lot for essays but not for writing stories.

[Anonymous No.13276358]

>>13274483
For screenplays the book "Story" by Mckee is very good. It covers all the rudiments of structure (which is what you're looking for) within the context of movies.

However if you hate trial and error, writing may not be for you. No one gets it right the first time. You have to relentlessly generate more than you're ever going to use, 3 to 1 sometimes even 10 to 1. And this goes doubly for screenwriters for whom selection and economy is of absolute importance. The mark of a pro is also in the rewrite, not the draft. But the good news is that writing is the most forgiving medium. You lose nothing (except time) by starting over. If you ruin a sculpture or a piece of furniture, more often than not you have not only wasted time but you must to return to the uncut stone or wood. In writing you just have the blank page again.

McKee's "Story" describes a nice method (common among screenwriters) using index cards to lay out scenes before you write them. This doesn't eliminate the trial and error process but lessens the degree of revision you have to do.

[Anonymous No.13276801]

OP here
>>13275539
>Even in other crafts, what lies beyond foundational skills is merely trial and error.
I disagree with this. I used to play an instrument and I paint, even art - which is rather vague as a subject - is actually rather structured and all aspects of it can be learned by study: anatomy, how light works, how paint works, perspective, composition etc. can all be studied and figured out. Of course there is much that is unspoken and it's not just a technical exercise, but this framework seems to be completely lacking in writing, or at least way too flimsy.
>>13276358
Thanks, I'll read that.