Learning From Others
The easy way and the hard way...
Lesson No. Four
I don’t know about you, but I came to creative writing later in life. That’s not to say I didn’t enjoy using words to express myself, and hopefully engage others in the mission. Perhaps like you, I quickly discovered that there were so many articles and pieces of advice on the internet. And every time I saw something worthwhile, I wanted to capture it. So I started copying the relevant bits of the better articles I read, and pasting them into a Word document (see the tip below on how best to do this).
Over time I have built up a really useful set of notes, organised by subject heading. For example ‘Story Structure’, ‘Plot’, ‘Characters’ etc. You get the idea. I now have a single Word document containing over three hundred pages and many sections. And I’m still adding to it, editing and re-reading it. It’s my curated bible of the best bits of advice I’ve read. Just be sure to note the source of the material, so you can find the original stuff again if you need to. I’m unsure how else I could easily capture and access these nuggets of wisdom, experience and success.
And then I realised that what I was doing was basically replicating what I had done in my previous career. Over time, I built up my own manual of how to do the various elements of my work properly. Everything I had learned, but distilled into a set of notes and processes that equipped me with the knowledge and skills needed to succeed in my chosen field. And now I’m doing it again, although I’m well aware that without talent, it’s very hard to be a good creative writer. I may not get there, but I can be certain that I have approached the goal in a structured and disciplined way.
Here’s the tip: When you highlight text and copy it to the clipboard, you may be picking up pictures, ads etc that you don’t want in your document. So when you want to paste the content into your Word doc, click on the little drop-down arrow next to paste. Then select ‘keep text only’. You then have much less editing to do. Try it!