Write! There’s no other way to get better at your writing.

I can make this sentence the whole post, and I would have passed my message across, but I’ll expand on this idea a bit.  

You’ve read Stephen King’s On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft. You’ve marked the pages with pink and green highlighters, so the lessons stick. You’ve ticked the boxes on your Coursera or Udemy writing courses. If you’re a fiction writer, you’ve read Chimamanda Adichie, Khaled Hosseini, and Shakespeare to learn their techniques, but there’s one thing you haven’t done. You’ve failed to put pen to paper, or blown off the dust from your keyboard to write.

If all you do is pile up resources like Joseph piled up grains, you’re wasting your sweet time if you don’t write. What are my telling you to do? Put aside those resources because you’ve gotten all you need from them. Joseph needed to pile grains, but you don’t need to stockpile materials. Get yourself on a chair, on the floor, or whatever is comfortable for you; grab a pen and a book, or a laptop; block out the distractions and WRITE. If you end up with only a paragraph, you’ve made good use of your time, and you’re on your way to writing well.

Let me go personal to drive the point home.

I’m undertaking my master’s programme in Creative Writing, and you know what that means. I read a lot of primary and secondary texts. So you see, I’m not against reading texts or taking courses. But each week, I write in response to what I’ve read and give and receive feedback. If all I do is read, read, read, the course will be a waste, but because I write often there have been improvements in my writing.

Another example. I took a writing course on Coursera some months ago and learned new techniques. The point is not taking the course but practising what I learned. I’ll let you in on something. This post is a means of practising one of the techniques I learned—The Power of Three.

Finally, I read Khaled Hosseini’s A Thousand Splendid Suns some months back, and it was a page-turner. I recommend it. Every character, event, choice of words, action and inaction got me thinking. The cherry on the cake is that I fell in love with his narrative style. I’d learned something from the way he told stories. It’s not enough to read but to practice. I wrote my dissertation using his narrative style. Remember my post on how to steal with style? Yeah, I did that.

To be as clear as day, I’m not against reading or taking courses. By all means, do if you have to. I read a lot, and I take courses. But as much as you can, take out time to practice, even if it’s a paragraph. The time you spend describing how the different shades of blue clouds glide over the full moon at night is better than reading about it.

I’ve said before and I’ll say again, Write. Write. Write.

Oluwakemi.