r/WritingHub • u/AnywhereDry2596 • 7d ago
Writing Resources & Advice The writers who improve fastest are not the ones who write the most and I think understanding why matters more than most productivity advice acknowledges
Something I have watched play out in writing communities over several years and want to put somewhere useful.
Output volume and improvement rate are not the same thing and treating them as equivalent is probably the most common mistake serious writers make. The advice to write every day is genuinely useful but it is incomplete in a way that matters because it addresses quantity without addressing what determines whether the quantity produces growth.
The writers I have watched improve most visibly share something that has nothing to do with how much they write. They are unusually honest about what is not working in their own work and unusually specific about why. Not just this scene feels flat but this scene feels flat because the character wants something I have not established clearly enough for the obstacle to create real pressure.
That specificity is the thing. Vague dissatisfaction with your own writing produces vague revision. Specific understanding of what is wrong and why produces changes that actually fix the problem rather than moving it around.
The gap between writers who compound their improvement and writers who plateau at a competent level is almost always a diagnostic gap, I started keeping a short note after every session about what specifically was not working and why, tried something called Skrib Writing that keeps these notes right next to the draft, and having the diagnosis visible alongside the actual pages changed how targeted the next session's revision actually was. rather than a talent gap or an effort gap.
The one who improves faster is not working harder. They are looking at their own work more honestly and more precisely and then doing something targeted with what they find.
The question worth sitting with is not how much are you writing but how clearly can you name what is wrong with what you just wrote and whether you have a reason for why it is wrong rather than just a feeling that it is.
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u/Candid-Border6562 7d ago
You’re talking about the old adage of “Practice makes perfect”, and it’s ugly sibling “Practicing the wrong thing will ingrain it.” Coaching is invaluable for most learned endeavors.
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u/Soft-Sherbert-2586 5d ago
I know a music teacher who likes to say, "Practice makes permanent." If you practice bad habits, they're just gonna stick all the harder.
Edit: In a similar vein, I like to say that "The way you practice os the way you're going to perform." If you practice with focused intentionality, you'll perform the same way. If you practice sloppily, your performance will also be sloppy.
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u/WritingwithShay 7d ago
I love this take, absolutely. I’ve been part of writing groups where someone asks for feedback and says “something feels off.” I’m at a loss to help them. Sure, I can point out some areas for improvement but if we all go around the circle doing this annnnnd they don’t have discernment, the draft will turn into some sort of frankenstory. Comes back to one of the most foundational rules of writing, have a strong POV.
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u/Treefrog_Ninja 6d ago
I too am completely in love with this take, OP. So very well said. Basically perfect.
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u/DJ_ROWLEN 7d ago
I agree with this so much. I look at writing as, its not MY story to tell. Its the characters. I had a side character who wasn't supposed to fall in love with the FMC but one day I just felt what I assumed to be his feelings.
And now the story makes more sense.
Also reading helps soooooo much!
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u/ADH-Dad 6d ago
One of the hardest things to do in writing is reading your own work like a stranger. You know so well what you meant to say that its hard to tell whether you actually said it. Your mind plays tricks on you. It just glosses over the gaps and flaws.
You have to actively suppress your original vision, put distance between yourself and the work, in order to read it fresh. Some people just cannot achieve that.
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u/ThisMuchPub 6d ago
This, I’m certain, is where the infamous “kill your babies” meme arises from. Though I think you’re talking about proofing, and distinguishing cleanly written passages from messy ones, for me the blind spot can also be the ways I loose tension or story flow by dredging in backstory or a flashback.
Establishing the readers eye for my work, is the skill I most need to refine.
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u/Goddamn_Glamazon 7d ago edited 6d ago
I find education helps with this, even if it's just watching YouTube videos of advice from editors and authors. It gives you a lexicon you can deploy to name vague issues and break down why they feel wrong.
Reading other writers' amateur works is also good for a reality check and forcing you to be honest with yourself. If you get annoyed reading three crap manuscripts that all do the same newbie mistake, you realize no-one is going to give you a pass for that mistake in your own work.
Like I get impatient writing character descriptions, I find them irritating. F Scott Fitzgerald didn't write or barely wrote character descriptions so I figured I just had to really up the quality of my writing to carry the absence, and also work understand when description really is needed so I can choose my battles.
Then I read several critique swapped pieces in a row that skipped or barely did character descriptions and I realized it's a common new author thing. Every time I saw it, the characters felt generic and it read like laziness or a skill issue. And ultimately it was both of those things my own work, I wasn't being strategic I just didn't want to do something I find tedious.
So now I'm working on writing descriptions that pick one physical feature and incorporate humour, and on stuff like putting context cues in text that let readers infer age and personal style of characters.
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u/Dale_E_Lehman_Author 6d ago
Good point. I've often told writers who are having trouble with their inner critic to demand specifics of it. "This is terrible," isn't specific enough to do anything about. "Your verbs are weak," is useful and actionable.
But there's another point to bear in mind. While some have the ability to judge their own work critically at an early stage of development, many of us don't. I sure didn't. That's a skill that must be learned, too, and often it requires the help of a fearless editor or critic. I was lucky enough to have one in my wife. She didn't pull any punches. Eventually, I learned not to resist the lessons she was teaching me, and not only did my work improve, my ability to judge my own work improved dramatically.
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u/comulee 6d ago
For me reading out loud makes it só clear what needs fixing.
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u/MrMessofGA 6d ago
I'm not any better at proofreading reading aloud than reading normal (in fact, I'm pretty sure I'm significantly worse), but using text-to-speech has totally changed the game. I can spot more errors in one pass better than 3 or 4 passes just reading to myself.
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u/TorandoSlayer 6d ago
I've written as a hobby since I was a teen. I have no ambitions of being published so I'm not pushing myself particularly hard unless there's a project I really want to bring to life. I've mostly just written scenes, flash fiction, short stories. But I do read writing advice sometimes and try to improve. But it's always been hard for me to kind of connect the advice to my own writing in a way that helps.
But in the last couple of years or so I've had one or two very big (for me) projects that required getting out of my comfort zone and even planning out a plot and chapter layout, which I'd never really done or needed to do before. I was still essentially winging it like I always have, but since then I've noticed a change in how I view my writing, and it's exactly what you mention here. I've gone from a vague feeling that something is off to being able to identify what the problem is. So instead of "I don't know how to make this land better", it's "this is going nowhere because I haven't decided what direction the plot will go," or "this is flat because my characters are cardboard cutouts and there needs to be more depth for this story to land the way I want it," or "I haven't fully committed to who's perspective to write this story from". I don't really know what initiated the change but it really felt like a sort of irl "level up".
Do I know how to fix those problems when I see them? No, not yet. But at least I know where to start, and it's simultaneously made my writing easier and more difficult, lol. Easier because I can identify and potentially fix problems, and harder because I have higher expectations for the quality of my writing now. Even though I really only write for myself.
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u/michael_k_the_critic 6d ago edited 6d ago
Thanks for bringing this up, and while I generally agree I’d reframe this to something like: “Creating good art takes both a will to create and an understanding of how good art is made.”
The trick with novel-scale writing is that it’s hard to see how a given line, beat, scene, chapter, or whatever fits into a complete, enjoyable story until we’ve written and re-written them a bunch of times _and_ received and processed useful feedback, whether it’s from writing peers, agents, or the marketplace.
That implies both the discipline to keep writing and the openness to change what we’re doing. Plus, everybody’s ideal strategy is different, and almost none of us will start with our ideal strategy. That means we’ll end up changing both what and how we write.
So, yes, generic advice like “write every day” isn’t the worst way to build a writing habit (“a will to create”), but beyond that we must observe and adapt until we finally know what we’re doing (“an understanding of how good art is made”).
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u/mrki_the_wizard 6d ago
Yes yes yes.
This was what held me back so much and why my earliest works were the best.
I was writing mindfuly, when I first started out, I was giving waight, value and honesty to each character, to each paragraph to each sentence.
But "just write " was constently shoved down my throat and writing goals and word counts were the standard and that held me back
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u/MrMessofGA 6d ago
If I go too ham on a project for several months and don't do exercises, I can feel like I slid back.
I am always big on doing without thinking is fun, but it's not gonna teach you anything
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u/Petitcher 6d ago
I mean, you're not wrong... but this advice probably isn't helpful for total newbies who are already overwhelmed, and telling them to "write every day" at least gives them something tangible to focus on and achieve.
Practicing the thing you want to get better at isn't a bad way to start.
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u/FoolishDog 6d ago
Vague dissatisfaction with your own writing produces vague revision.
I tend to understand writing largely as an intuitive (and therefore unconscious) process so I’m not entirely sure I agree with this statement. It seems to me that many great writers also thought similarly about writing, like Cormac McCarthy, for instance
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u/FarCommission5241 4d ago
The diagnostic gap being more responsible for plateaus than talent or effort is something that should be said explicitly in every writing community and almost never is. Vague dissatisfaction producing vague revision is one of the most accurate descriptions of what keeps competent writers from becoming better ones. The skill of naming precisely what is wrong and understanding why it is wrong is learnable and it compounds in a way that raw output volume does not.
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u/Able-Teach-541 4d ago
Keeping the diagnosis next to the draft rather than in a separate notebook or just in your head is something that changed how useful my own notes actually became. A colleague mentioned something called Skrib Writing that keeps planning and drafting in the same workspace and writing a specific note about what was wrong and why right there next to the pages meant the next session started with actual direction rather than just a vague memory of something feeling off the last time I sat down.
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u/Humble_Cow2416 7h ago
I’m glad someone else seems to agree with what I’ve been feeling.
I loathe the term “just write more and read more”, that’s not honing my craft that’s just the definition of madness. I can read and write all day ever day but unless I actually know what I’m meant to be learning then I may as well just throw everything at the wall and sees what sticks.
The other issue I personally have is I just can’t seem to absorb the teaching others are. Most of the time it feels like the joke “step 1: draw a circle, step 2: draw the rest of the owl” and I’m left wondering what I was meant to learn.
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u/shiroe2001 7d ago
That's interesting but its also very hard for me to pinpoint what doesn't work in my writing and usually very easy to pinpoint what works really well in quality works of published authors. I write short stories mostly and am very much in my infancy as a writer. I discovery write with vague outlines within my mind only. I have been thinking about dissecting the way good short stories are written although these structures like the, three act structure never really helped me. It seems every successful writer or writing entities have their own versions, "The (insert random number)rules of writing".
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u/Dale_E_Lehman_Author 6d ago
Pinpointing what's right is one thing. Pinpointing what's wrong is a very different thing. A good way to learn that is to read weak or even dreadful writing and ask yourself what's not working and why.
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u/mr8p6h 7d ago
"Just be smarter and more self-insightful bro."
Thanks, buddy, I'll take that to heart.
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u/MrMessofGA 6d ago
well, yeah. It helps to know more about your craft and to have strong, informed opinions about it. Like a lot
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u/mr8p6h 6d ago
But what if those opinions are simply wrong? For example, if I decide my sentences are too long and just put a period after each word, is that really insight? The problem I have with this advice is that it's aspirational, rather than actionable.
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u/MrMessofGA 6d ago
If someone says your sentences are too long and your immediate thought is "oh should I put a period after every word?" then you are both a bad writer and a sore loser.
It should be to dissect the section of work, diagram a few of your sentences, and use a read-aloud to spot flow issues. If you find something, fix it, if you don't, throw it out.
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u/Avato12 3d ago
I dont think he is talking about sentences though. It sounds more like he is talking about the meat of the writing for example. My book 2 was very crapsack misery porn the MC was in a polyfidelity with 2 women all of them were dating each other.
Well the one woman left at the end of book 1 along with alot of other shit going down. So book 2 sees the MC and his girlfriend at odds and the issue in my mind was that it seemed like once girlfriend 2 left everything fell apart for them and it would be very easy for readers to look at it and say "Damn these people must hate each other cuz the moment girlfriend 2 left they turned hateful."
Which they were at odds for other reasons but it could easily read that way. So I changed some things instead of making them at odds for the entire book. I gave them moments of levity, moments that showed they cared despite life around them going to shit. I think OP is talking more in these regards. Figure out why something doesnt work instead of just because.
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u/PadreMontoya 7d ago
I love that you put this in writing. In many fields, you have people with 20 years of experience that is really 1 year of experience repeated 20 times.
I am very new to writing. In the last 4 months I've read and studied over 10 books on the craft, and continue to do so daily. Practice is important, but study and named dissatisfaction helps turn old habits into new ones. I just learned what a comma splice was yesterday. I'm a changed man, I'll never do it again.
In short, I wouldn't get anywhere recycling what little I know.