Writer's Block: Writing: Makes Me A Better Writer

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Latin.

To be fair, Latin has perhaps not made me a better writer, but it's certainly made me a more interesting one. Because when you study Latin for more than a couple of years you wind up studying speeches, and studying speeches means studying cadence and all manner of rhetorical tricks. Alliteration may often be over-used, but it's also almost always undervalued. If you can write with cadence, you make your material a pleasure to read. And being able to vary cadence means you have the tools to iluminate worlds that may have different habits and graces than our own, as surely as you have the tools to pen a call to arms. It is those two things are what form stories over and over again. What is this place like? and I challenge you to be here! Characters examine and change their worlds as surely as the author, and it all trickles down through the layers of the story the wirter means to tell and the stories then accidentally revealed within.

Comments

Bad writing has made me better.

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I watch a lot of television and movies, and any time a scene is particularly annouing or lame, esp in the area of dialog or plot, I challenge myself to rewrite it better. In order to rewrite it, I start artilulating to myself with why it sucks in the first place. Sometimes, if a seen has disappointmed me (like the end of a scene or esp, the end of a mive), I try very hard to pull out where I'd wanted it to go, and write out an alternative ending. This part sometimes shows me thatthe eding I thought I would have liked more actually looks cliche on the page, sometimes it doesn't

With dialog, if anything on any show, movie, or book doesn't ring genuine or true to me, I work out in my head what I would have liked better, before moving on.

Just a few things that have made a big difference over the years.