Comment on Effective Writing

Fri, 18 Jul 2014 22:16:52 GMT

Unfortunately, there aren't too many ways to cheat the learning curve. "Write a lot" really is the first-order answer, and it's usually the one given by professionals that don't stand to make any money from their answer. Writing workshops and other 'accelerants' seem to be very questionable.

A friend who was recently signed as a science fiction author at Tor suggests that you could try compressing things that you have already written. Take something like a blog post, and express the same ideas and content using half the words. This will help with clarity and concision, as you get better at the exercise- one of the telltale signs of an amateur writer is that they use words inefficiently.

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