I've recently (last 3 years) begun writing fantasy novels and I'm now working on my sixth. What inspired me wasn't a beautifully written novel but a terrible one. The author had written many works and published them, all of which were trash. I thought, if this shmuck can do it then surely I can too. Turns out it was true. I now make it a habit of occasionally reading terrible writing. It's a great motivator!
I don't have to be the best writer in the world. I just want to be better than THAT guy.
I had a very similar experience that gave me permission to pursue hobby-level writing. I read a very long series of books (Defiance of the Fall) that starts with frankly terrible writing (sorry Jeff if you somehow read this) but also contained some genuinely good concepts.
Not only is this a pretty successful series but it’s 16 books long! The writing gets progressively better and the strong concepts (heavily borrowed or otherwise) carry it through. The latest books are not legendary or anything like that but I really do enjoy them and the writing no longer gets in the way of that.
This sort of progression is way more inspirational to me than reading Hemingway’s best or listening to a Ted Talk. It’s objective clear evidence that you can just start writing, even releasing the weak stuff, and both succeed and improve simultaneously.
Mind giving some examples of works you've experienced as 'bad'? I've been looking into hobby writing myself and I know my beginning work is going to be atrocious but it would be helpful to have some examples of what not to do too to hasten the improvement process.
Bad writing examples here in separate comment, lots of recency bias with them, they’re almost all litrpgs, but they’re cheap! And bad is a strong word. It’s probably more fair to say they have notable faults to me.
——
Bad prose with good ideas and flow:
-defiance of the fall 1
-the primal hunter 1
Bad structural flow and immersion breaking:
-bibliomancer 1
Polarizing characterization with strong Voice:
-he who fights with monsters 1
Most improved book to book:
-The cradle series. First book is intentionally stilted, but just difficult to read. Author quickly adjusts away from this.
This was my process. The outline is very long but fairly simple and hopefully it will at least give you some ideas. It also presumes you will not have an editor or friend that will give real critical feedback for at least 6 months.
——
Write your first complete story, ideally one that is under 2000 words. Something basic, short, and familiar without being a ripoff of anything in particular.
Then keep writing stories that way until you’ve forgotten most of the details of the first story. read it now from an outsider perspective and note the things that don’t work.
The most common offenders early on will almost certainly be phrases or modifiers that are repeated too often(“to be quite honest”, “suddenly, x happened”) as well as sentence structures that do not flow well or require re-reading to parse. This is all easy to fix; simplify the complex sentences and substitute common phrases to expand your prose.
After quick and dirty adjustments, keep writing new short stories. Then reread again and adjust, again. Eventually you’ll have a “library” of like 10-20 stories that you’ll either know way too well to acquire the easy outsider perspective, or have hammered into an acceptable quality.
At this point writing ~specific~ short stories is a good idea. For me, I focused on methods. So it looked like this:
-Start with a strong visual and go
-Start with an ending and go
-Start with a strong emotional event and go
-Start with one well defined character and go
-Start with a writing style/intention, mimic a real author
-Start with an intended audience reaction
generally the later attempts should be more difficult and more specific. For example, write the same story twice from radically different perspectives. Force out a story in iambic pentameter. Things like that.
Batch 2 does 2 things fairly organically. One, it implicitly teaches you what KIND of writing you enjoy while helping you hone your own voice. Secondly, it forces you to examine the actual structure and components of a story and how configurable they are without diving into anything formal or educational. That last part was important to me because it’s VERY easy to absorb too much of an authors style by listening to them talk about writing, and formal education takes all the fun out of writing.
Worth noting; this second batch of stories will probably suck. hard. Worse than the first. They are handicapped and probably very difficult to complete well. That’s okay. Examine them the same way you did with the first batch.
Offenders you might start to notice now: -pacing. It’s one of the more complex problems because it’s really hard to examine and there’s no real rules. But you’ll see it with that outsiders perspective; sometimes you just spend way too long on some things and way too little on others.
-description. This is super personal, some authors rarely describe more than the literal events of the story, and occasionally mannerism. Some authors go super super hard on describing environments, what characters look like, how things make characters feel. What’s more important here is feeling out a ceiling and floor. Fall below the floor and you can’t imagine the scene or setting at all. Rise over the ceiling and the pacing and flow will tank, the audience will be bored to death.
-consistency and flow. Inconsistencies between sections of the story and sudden jumps that don’t feel precipitated will immediately yank the audience out of the story, and they can be tricky to avoid because ~you~ know where the story is going but the audience won’t.
At this stage, the trick you’ll probably want to learn is to summon the outsider perspective on demand. regularly. At different stages of writing. Honestly this worked out best for me by literally inventing a character in my head named Joe Averageguy. He has a dopey voice. And I “ask” him what he thinks frequently while I’m writing. This has many downsides that you can probably guess but it does solve the problem I had with summoning that audience perspective.
After this? Well, you’ve probably been writing for like a year, hopefully with some consistency. Push yourself out of the nest however you see fit. Pursue a significantly longer story, have someone you know read some of your stuff, shut you could realistically publish something with how open that process is now.
Also: consider having an LLM critically examine a story or two (if you can get it in the context window) KNOWING FIRST that your story now belongs to OpenAI or whoever. This approach still has real value; it’s one of the only things those LLMs are consistently good at and it is nearly immediate reasonable feedback. And that is going to be HARD to find. Don’t just say “critically examine this”, process, and bail. Probe it with many questions like similar authors or target audience information. When possible, modify the LLM to not be a sycophantic worm. Just never let it feed you direct phrases or sentences. All LLMs have a firstly distinct voice, and that voice sucks. Don’t let it inject your writing or your brain with its bland corporate filth.
Im self taught of many things and this sounds like real proper way of a good start for writing. Saving this golden advice for right time. Did you consider sharing this to more people?
This is great. One of the things I say to my wife all the time, which is taken from a Kurt Vonnegut quote, is that "I don't have to be good at my hobbies".
"On the other hand, if we can’t accept failure in our hearts, we’ve already lost. Not only do we deny ourselves the possibility of succeeding (and what is success in art but a chance to enjoy ourselves and connect with people?), but from experiencing the process and all that it has to teach us. We have to embrace it all or embrace nothing."
I started to see them on IG a few years ago when I used it a lot more than I do now
the "positive power electronics" music thing is a take I don't think I had seen before (though it must be more uncommon than rare), and it's delightful
I think a lot about the "it's easier to destroy than create" thing, to paint a dystopia than a eutopia, n the Let's Paint work is an interesting reflection on that
Love this. I feel this narrative is woefully under-appreciated. I think there’s something beautiful about watching people who aren’t near the top of their field, “normal” people who are just trying to have fun. But that doesn’t make a good story usually. I’ve tried writing some fiction along these lines, and it requires quite a bit more narrative to convey.
I really needed to read this today. I have been avoiding tasks that I know will challenge me lately. I will be hopping on the treadmill to make bad art metaphorically speaking. Its hard to accept failure as a valid option, but I think it is something that I need to practice currently. I really need to stop taking myself so seriously.
Mr Let's Paint is also featured on WFMU 91.1FM / wfmu.org morning show "Wake n Bake" . On friday he does a "radio theater " version of his run paint cook inspiration thing. its amazing to hear .
The writer mentions Kilduff is a 'trained comedian'. Is that really something you can go to school and study? To me it came off as implying that was superior to being an untrained comedian.
> He also trained with famed sketch comedy troupe the Groundlings (past alumni include Will Ferrell and Kristen Wiig) and studied improv at Los Angeles City College.
The "Groundlings" homepage [2] describes them as a "non-profit organization that offers shows, classes, and corporate events in improvisation and sketch comedy*, while LACC offers some courses through the Rodney Dangerfield Institute [3].
So while there doesn't seem to be an "M.Sc. in comedy" you can learn it at some institutions, as long as you're willing to move to LA.
> The writer mentions Kilduff is a 'trained comedian'.
This is the foundation that somewhat undercuts the message that failure is OK if not requisite.
That is, the latest YouTube episode of Let’s Paint TV, “Come to the promiseland”, is a chaotic performance piece that doesn’t “succeed” at painting (none is attempted), there are no actors other than Kilduff (except in digital post), the speech is improvisatory and halting, and the “music” is discordant. [0]
According to criteria of elite artistic production, “Come to the promiseland” is a “failure”. But judged as a spoken word performance piece that takes a wry look at the disappointments experienced by people who look to a “promiseland”, the performance is pure comedy gold, all the more successful due to its low-fi glitch-art aesthetics.
I do believe that humor and being funny can be learned, and thus taught. Everything from language structure, pacing, expectations (eg the listener builds an expectation or belief of what the comedian talks about, but in the last few words, it is revealed that you were completely wrong). Hm. I find I have a hard time expressing myself, I lack the words and terminology and frameworks I think...
This is just another way of pampering and making people insensitive or oblivious to what is desirable and what is not, what is progress and what is not. Saying whatever you do is right or no need to strive for improvement etc just for the sake of keeping them happy, is more harmful than telling them that they are doing it bad. People should learn to accept correct feedback, not expect total lack of it.
There is nothing called absolute success or failure, but there is a direction for improvement. You need to make sure to know which direction is improvement and which is not, and move in right direction. Correct feedback is important, just like what this my comment is doing.
> Saying whatever you do is right or no need to strive for improvement etc just for the sake of keeping them happy, is more harmful than telling them that they are doing it bad.
I notice you don’t say why this should be true. It’s easy to see why one might consider it true for someone’s profession - but when it comes to hobbies, or people trying something they’ve never done before, your perspective is less obviously correct.
I've recently (last 3 years) begun writing fantasy novels and I'm now working on my sixth. What inspired me wasn't a beautifully written novel but a terrible one. The author had written many works and published them, all of which were trash. I thought, if this shmuck can do it then surely I can too. Turns out it was true. I now make it a habit of occasionally reading terrible writing. It's a great motivator!
I don't have to be the best writer in the world. I just want to be better than THAT guy.
I had a very similar experience that gave me permission to pursue hobby-level writing. I read a very long series of books (Defiance of the Fall) that starts with frankly terrible writing (sorry Jeff if you somehow read this) but also contained some genuinely good concepts.
Not only is this a pretty successful series but it’s 16 books long! The writing gets progressively better and the strong concepts (heavily borrowed or otherwise) carry it through. The latest books are not legendary or anything like that but I really do enjoy them and the writing no longer gets in the way of that.
This sort of progression is way more inspirational to me than reading Hemingway’s best or listening to a Ted Talk. It’s objective clear evidence that you can just start writing, even releasing the weak stuff, and both succeed and improve simultaneously.
Mind giving some examples of works you've experienced as 'bad'? I've been looking into hobby writing myself and I know my beginning work is going to be atrocious but it would be helpful to have some examples of what not to do too to hasten the improvement process.
Bad writing examples here in separate comment, lots of recency bias with them, they’re almost all litrpgs, but they’re cheap! And bad is a strong word. It’s probably more fair to say they have notable faults to me.
——
Bad prose with good ideas and flow: -defiance of the fall 1 -the primal hunter 1
Bad structural flow and immersion breaking: -bibliomancer 1
Polarizing characterization with strong Voice: -he who fights with monsters 1
Most improved book to book: -The cradle series. First book is intentionally stilted, but just difficult to read. Author quickly adjusts away from this.
This was my process. The outline is very long but fairly simple and hopefully it will at least give you some ideas. It also presumes you will not have an editor or friend that will give real critical feedback for at least 6 months.
——
Write your first complete story, ideally one that is under 2000 words. Something basic, short, and familiar without being a ripoff of anything in particular.
Then keep writing stories that way until you’ve forgotten most of the details of the first story. read it now from an outsider perspective and note the things that don’t work.
The most common offenders early on will almost certainly be phrases or modifiers that are repeated too often(“to be quite honest”, “suddenly, x happened”) as well as sentence structures that do not flow well or require re-reading to parse. This is all easy to fix; simplify the complex sentences and substitute common phrases to expand your prose.
After quick and dirty adjustments, keep writing new short stories. Then reread again and adjust, again. Eventually you’ll have a “library” of like 10-20 stories that you’ll either know way too well to acquire the easy outsider perspective, or have hammered into an acceptable quality.
At this point writing ~specific~ short stories is a good idea. For me, I focused on methods. So it looked like this: -Start with a strong visual and go -Start with an ending and go -Start with a strong emotional event and go -Start with one well defined character and go -Start with a writing style/intention, mimic a real author -Start with an intended audience reaction
generally the later attempts should be more difficult and more specific. For example, write the same story twice from radically different perspectives. Force out a story in iambic pentameter. Things like that.
Batch 2 does 2 things fairly organically. One, it implicitly teaches you what KIND of writing you enjoy while helping you hone your own voice. Secondly, it forces you to examine the actual structure and components of a story and how configurable they are without diving into anything formal or educational. That last part was important to me because it’s VERY easy to absorb too much of an authors style by listening to them talk about writing, and formal education takes all the fun out of writing.
Worth noting; this second batch of stories will probably suck. hard. Worse than the first. They are handicapped and probably very difficult to complete well. That’s okay. Examine them the same way you did with the first batch.
Offenders you might start to notice now: -pacing. It’s one of the more complex problems because it’s really hard to examine and there’s no real rules. But you’ll see it with that outsiders perspective; sometimes you just spend way too long on some things and way too little on others. -description. This is super personal, some authors rarely describe more than the literal events of the story, and occasionally mannerism. Some authors go super super hard on describing environments, what characters look like, how things make characters feel. What’s more important here is feeling out a ceiling and floor. Fall below the floor and you can’t imagine the scene or setting at all. Rise over the ceiling and the pacing and flow will tank, the audience will be bored to death. -consistency and flow. Inconsistencies between sections of the story and sudden jumps that don’t feel precipitated will immediately yank the audience out of the story, and they can be tricky to avoid because ~you~ know where the story is going but the audience won’t.
At this stage, the trick you’ll probably want to learn is to summon the outsider perspective on demand. regularly. At different stages of writing. Honestly this worked out best for me by literally inventing a character in my head named Joe Averageguy. He has a dopey voice. And I “ask” him what he thinks frequently while I’m writing. This has many downsides that you can probably guess but it does solve the problem I had with summoning that audience perspective.
After this? Well, you’ve probably been writing for like a year, hopefully with some consistency. Push yourself out of the nest however you see fit. Pursue a significantly longer story, have someone you know read some of your stuff, shut you could realistically publish something with how open that process is now.
Also: consider having an LLM critically examine a story or two (if you can get it in the context window) KNOWING FIRST that your story now belongs to OpenAI or whoever. This approach still has real value; it’s one of the only things those LLMs are consistently good at and it is nearly immediate reasonable feedback. And that is going to be HARD to find. Don’t just say “critically examine this”, process, and bail. Probe it with many questions like similar authors or target audience information. When possible, modify the LLM to not be a sycophantic worm. Just never let it feed you direct phrases or sentences. All LLMs have a firstly distinct voice, and that voice sucks. Don’t let it inject your writing or your brain with its bland corporate filth.
Im self taught of many things and this sounds like real proper way of a good start for writing. Saving this golden advice for right time. Did you consider sharing this to more people?
Thanks for the insights and great advice.
This is great. One of the things I say to my wife all the time, which is taken from a Kurt Vonnegut quote, is that "I don't have to be good at my hobbies".
You could head for Chesterton as well: "anything worth doing is worth doing poorly."
"On the other hand, if we can’t accept failure in our hearts, we’ve already lost. Not only do we deny ourselves the possibility of succeeding (and what is success in art but a chance to enjoy ourselves and connect with people?), but from experiencing the process and all that it has to teach us. We have to embrace it all or embrace nothing."
Words of wisdom and inspiration.
https://youtube.com/@letspainttv
beautiful art
I started to see them on IG a few years ago when I used it a lot more than I do now
the "positive power electronics" music thing is a take I don't think I had seen before (though it must be more uncommon than rare), and it's delightful
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_electronics_(music_genre...
positive, as in, compared to, say, big name UK act Whitehouse https://youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_m0wDEjccTkHXUG52Cz...
fwiw, not all of it is that harsh!
there's a fair netradio for that style; https://www.radio-browser.info/search?page=1&order=clickcoun...
I think a lot about the "it's easier to destroy than create" thing, to paint a dystopia than a eutopia, n the Let's Paint work is an interesting reflection on that
What's the positive power electronics thing? I think I missed it. Would love to see the take.
it's what one could refer to some of their music as being/being like;
https://instagram.com/reel/CwoglDsruki https://instagram.com/reel/DAeXcrguBA8 https://instagram.com/reel/C9qzoJRREBV
https://youtube.com/shorts/zsXnR401mjo https://youtube.com/shorts/m3uS_mRihO4 https://youtube.com/shorts/iHda5-pRdo4
Whitehouse; https://youtu.be/KjAF7D4l91M
on power electronics as a genre; https://youtu.be/u3-4BTEEpRY https://youtu.be/frQOtNw954M
longer Let's Paint TV ep
https://youtube.com/live/GfFxTDbHr0I?si=mU2V1kSOBc4N_zB-
Love this. I feel this narrative is woefully under-appreciated. I think there’s something beautiful about watching people who aren’t near the top of their field, “normal” people who are just trying to have fun. But that doesn’t make a good story usually. I’ve tried writing some fiction along these lines, and it requires quite a bit more narrative to convey.
The late potter and educator John Neely would often say to his students and others:
> “I don’t put too much stock in creativity. Creativity itself won’t get you very far, you can’t always rely on it. But you can rely on hard work”
Knowing John and the chaotic world of clay perhaps deepens the profundity here, but even on its own it’s advice I freely share with anyone.
I really needed to read this today. I have been avoiding tasks that I know will challenge me lately. I will be hopping on the treadmill to make bad art metaphorically speaking. Its hard to accept failure as a valid option, but I think it is something that I need to practice currently. I really need to stop taking myself so seriously.
Mr Let's Paint is also featured on WFMU 91.1FM / wfmu.org morning show "Wake n Bake" . On friday he does a "radio theater " version of his run paint cook inspiration thing. its amazing to hear .
The writer mentions Kilduff is a 'trained comedian'. Is that really something you can go to school and study? To me it came off as implying that was superior to being an untrained comedian.
From this interview [1] for Vice:
> He also trained with famed sketch comedy troupe the Groundlings (past alumni include Will Ferrell and Kristen Wiig) and studied improv at Los Angeles City College.
The "Groundlings" homepage [2] describes them as a "non-profit organization that offers shows, classes, and corporate events in improvisation and sketch comedy*, while LACC offers some courses through the Rodney Dangerfield Institute [3].
So while there doesn't seem to be an "M.Sc. in comedy" you can learn it at some institutions, as long as you're willing to move to LA.
[1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/mr-lets-paint-is-the-most-in...
[2] https://groundlings.com/
[3] https://www.lacc.edu/academic-programs/rodney-dangerfield-in...
> The writer mentions Kilduff is a 'trained comedian'.
This is the foundation that somewhat undercuts the message that failure is OK if not requisite.
That is, the latest YouTube episode of Let’s Paint TV, “Come to the promiseland”, is a chaotic performance piece that doesn’t “succeed” at painting (none is attempted), there are no actors other than Kilduff (except in digital post), the speech is improvisatory and halting, and the “music” is discordant. [0]
According to criteria of elite artistic production, “Come to the promiseland” is a “failure”. But judged as a spoken word performance piece that takes a wry look at the disappointments experienced by people who look to a “promiseland”, the performance is pure comedy gold, all the more successful due to its low-fi glitch-art aesthetics.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WYG0zxwjjRg
>>Is that really something you can go to school and study?
School can teach you a lot about how not to make big mistakes, that given, its up to you to figure out how to go up from there.
I wonder how the grading and assessment standards are for comedians.
I heard it's a joke.
Ha ha.
I do believe that humor and being funny can be learned, and thus taught. Everything from language structure, pacing, expectations (eg the listener builds an expectation or belief of what the comedian talks about, but in the last few words, it is revealed that you were completely wrong). Hm. I find I have a hard time expressing myself, I lack the words and terminology and frameworks I think...
I'll train you for $50
when reading that I couldn't help but think of how you could learn from failure from this early apple story:
https://www.folklore.org/Make_a_Mess,_Clean_it_Up!.html
(maybe not the same as not worrying about failure)
My wife commissioned a painting of my dog from John Kilduff after I made her watch some Lets Paint TV.
How is this from 2024 and I get a NRD (newly registered domain) block? Site was moved?
This is just another way of pampering and making people insensitive or oblivious to what is desirable and what is not, what is progress and what is not. Saying whatever you do is right or no need to strive for improvement etc just for the sake of keeping them happy, is more harmful than telling them that they are doing it bad. People should learn to accept correct feedback, not expect total lack of it.
There is nothing called absolute success or failure, but there is a direction for improvement. You need to make sure to know which direction is improvement and which is not, and move in right direction. Correct feedback is important, just like what this my comment is doing.
> Saying whatever you do is right or no need to strive for improvement etc just for the sake of keeping them happy, is more harmful than telling them that they are doing it bad.
I notice you don’t say why this should be true. It’s easy to see why one might consider it true for someone’s profession - but when it comes to hobbies, or people trying something they’ve never done before, your perspective is less obviously correct.
[flagged]