Pros Practice their Prose, and everything else, too.

[InkFinger]

I really want to be a storyteller. Like many of you, I work at it almost every day. One of the ways I do that is watching YouTube interviews and listening to podcasts with successful authors. I hear over and over, "Writers write." Everyone needs practice. Professional athletes spend most of their career on the practice field. Great pianists, spend thousands of hours at the piano, alone. Painters paint paintings one after the next, always striving for the next secret to make the great works. We are no different.

You may or may not be aware that we run a practice thread, two this year, in ESYW that posts a prompt for you to work on and post to get feedback. I invite you once again to join us. You don't have to do every practice and you don't have to work them on the prescribed timeline. Everyone who plays, gets feedback. And sometimes, that's really good feedback.

I've run the practices since May 2020. I post my work to every practice - sometimes a little late. Please, come out and play along.

Practice makes perfect, or at the least, better.

 

[InkFinger]

 

[Unimportant]

Ink, you're the master of the double entendre this week! (Pro being an old slang abbreviation for prostitute/professional sex worker)

 

[Fi Webster]

I just watched the video, and my reaction is "Hmm..." She makes an excellent point about not letting your brain get trained to respond to fear with avoidance or shut-down. You do have to push through the fear.

But other parts of her message are inconsistent. A third of the way through, she's saying, "It's not always going to be fun. It's mostly going to be boring. It's going to be tedious." Then two-thirds of the way through, she switches to "Be like a little kid. You should love writing. You should enjoy it." Aren't boredom and pleasure sort of opposites?

At any rate, I disagree that one should always enjoy writing. If I only wrote when I love what I'm doing, if I couldn't grit my way through the times when it's not enjoyable, I'd never write anything of substance, anything worth being rewritten and edited into final form. I'm also allergic to should statements. I don't think there are any shoulds in creativity.

Thanks for the heads up about the ESYW thread, InkFinger. I don't know what the E stands for, but I'll check that out.

ETA: I poked around just now and discovered the E stands for Erotica. So the only practice thread like this is for Erotica? I have nothing against Erotica, but it seems like it would be nice to have a practice thread that's open to writing in any genre.

 

[InkFinger]

Thanks for the heads up about the ESYW thread, InkFinger. I don't know what the E stands for, but I'll check that out.

ETA: I poked around just now and discovered the E stands for Erotica. So the only practice thread like this is for Erotica? I have nothing against Erotica, but it seems like it would be nice to have a practice thread that's open to writing in any genre.

FI Webster - you are welcome to play. If you're not uncomfortable with the erotica part of the of erotica forum, there is no requirement that your contributions are that. Others will be though. It's kind of a mixed bag. Most of our writers consider themselves something else, first.

In terms of the threads, it goes back to the essence of the thread - we should all be practicing our craft.

 

[Fi Webster]

FI Webster - you are welcome to play.

Thanks for the invite, but since what I write is nonfiction & poetry (both of which include storytelling, for sure), I wouldn't know how to comment on other folks' erotica prose . So I don't think it would be fair to post mine. Were it a litfic thread, I could roll with that, but I've only read a few works of erotica (e.g., Pauline Réage & Anaïs Nin) in my whole life.

In terms of the threads, it goes back to the essence of the thread - we should all be practicing our craft.

Definitely agree with that!

 

[Maryn]

Since we are not behind the password, I'll simply say I've been practicing the heck out of mine this morning. The heck, I tell you!

Maryn, past the halfway mark on book four

 

[Unimportant]

ETA: I poked around just now and discovered the E stands for Erotica. So the only practice thread like this is for Erotica? I have nothing against Erotica, but it seems like it would be nice to have a practice thread that's open to writing in any genre.

Inkfinger doesn't restrict the genre(s) we write in, but most people there do write erotica so folks who participate need to be willing to have that be part of the mix.

You could contact the mod of the relevant SYW section for your preferred genre and ask if they'd let you do what Ink does here: set up weekly threads, comment on every single author's practice piece, encourage people to participate, post articles and videos to help people, etc. It's a butt-tonne of work, admittedly.

 

[InkFinger]

It is a butt-ton of work, but in all fairness, it's what I am doing for myself. I'm just doing it publicly because I figure it might help someone. I intend to be a good writer, that means a lot of reps in the practice field, no?