Writers, Don’t Endlessly Revise. Practice.

As a writer who talks to other writers, and reads a lot about writing, I don’t hear that much about practicing writing. I hear a lot about revising your work, and at what point it’s “good enough,” and when you should put it out there for other people to read. But, practice? Not so much.

I think this is because many (all?) writers revise their work, myself included, and it can feel that if you just revise enough you will get that story or book into perfect shape, no matter where you are in your writing journey.

But as I’ve gone along on my own journey, I’ve realized that there is no such thing as a perfect story, no matter how much I revise.

What I didn’t understand as well when I first started writing was the concept of practicing writing, which is pretty weird because I’ve practiced a lot of things in my life.

As a teenager, I played basketball, and when it was basketball season, we practiced almost every day. Currently, I’m learning to play the piano (or the keyboard, in my case, because that’s what I have), and I practice regularly (a great break from being in my head writing by the way!). When I first began cooking, I had to practice to make consistently good meals. I wasn’t just whipping up a great dinner from things I found in the fridge right away.

And in my 11 years of writing fiction, I’ve been practicing all that time, even if I didn’t see it that way at first.

To make this very simple, if you write five stories you are going to be a better writer on the fifth story than you were on the first, no matter how much revising you are doing. The simple concept of repetition will help you improve your writing whether you are thinking of it consciously or not.

Writers can get stuck in revision, and in many cases, this is due to fear of moving on and not for story reasons. It may be that in order to improve your writing, you need to let a story go at a certain point and move on to new stories. That’s how you get better. By doing it over and over again, instead of revising the shit out of your current manuscript.

But I also know it’s not that easy. It can be hard to let go of something you feel isn’t perfect, or close to perfect, because what might someone say if they read it?

What I also like about the idea of practicing writing is that no writing is ever wasted–and writers can worry about that a lot–because it’s all practice.

Even this blog post. 🙂

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Amanda Linehan is the author of North, about a young woman on the run from her past, the law and an old adversary out to get her. Her newest release is Bored To Death: A Vampire Thriller, about a 300-year-old vampire trying to restore the balance between life and death. She has published five novels. Get a free short story every month when you sign up for her newsletter.