A Perfect Day for Bananafish

Tips On becoming a better writer of short stories

Read everyday, write everyday, foster a sense of curiosity, become a careful observer. There's no secret formula; diet and exercise are how you stay healthy, reading and writing regularly are how you become a skilled writer. Writing is about recombining disparate parts, so read a wide variety of material. Learn to love what you do. Read short stories from different authors, genres, and styles. 'A Perfect Day for Bananafish' is a good example. A good place to start is Joyce Carol Oates' anthology.Specifically read anthologies of good authors, find the ones you really love, and get their collections. Write notes as in, pages of notes about how stories that you love work. Examine their mechanics, their technique and structure. Simultaneously write based on what you're learning. Ignore everything else and write. Then read what you have written. You can always add further detail as necessary after the fact. Keep it simple. Not the writing necessarily, but the plot. Most good short stories are good because the idea is a simple one but done very, very well. (I have a lot of ideas but lately I have no idea how to write my thoughts into fiction that don't wash over the points too quickly without necessary build up.)

Ten thousand hours

Does it really take 10 thousand hours of practice to become a good reader or writer?

The definition of "mastery" is 10,000 hours. You can certainly become good at something before that. Although by that logic and definition, most 18 year olds in the US today are masters at video games.

I'd say that there are different readers and writers, painters and politicians, roofers and cement masons, and that anybody who actually believes some catchall rule about an artistic endeavor is full of shit.

I don't know about being a "good reader," but I'd say it takes that much to develop a sophisticated sense of literature. Doesn't matter how many books 10,000 hours is, as long as the reading is close and not just skimming. Reader no (quality/diversity not quantity), but writer yes if /lit/'s output is anything to go by. I have probably spent 10,000 hours reading. Since i was a kid my mom had me reading anything i can get my hands on and forced me to join the library and to borrow 2 books every time i exchanged the old ones.

People are different. They have different brains that are good for different things. The amount of practice required to reach full potential differs from person to person. Sentence structure written across the Internet, Blogs, Forums, and comments is no accurate reflection of one understanding of literature or other academic fields he/she may have studied. I imagine very few people proofread their posts let alone write them in a formal manner. Personally I couldn't care less for one need to inform us about his/her erudition. I never understood why so many people have to provide useless information on Internet.

One thing that is absolutely true is that if you want to be good at something you need to practice. There might be people that write amazing stories the first time they write but that is only because they got lucky and happened to write in a style that happened to appeal to others. So either practice or pray to god you where born with amazing taste.

You write a book. It gets published. It gets decent reviews. People come up to you and tell you they like your book. You can buy some food with money earned from your book. You are a good author.

For those who casually bragging about an intuitive understanding of plot, not prose. One could have checked out dozens and dozens of trashy pulp novels. Plot is not nearly as difficult to comprehend as prose is. 

Schopenhauer

There are, first of all, two kinds of authors: those who write for the subject’s sake, and those who write for writing’s sake. The first kind have had thoughts or experiences which seem to them worth communicating, while the second kind need money and consequently write for money. They think in order to write, and they may be recognised by their spinning out their thoughts to the greatest possible length, and also by the way they work out their thoughts, which are half-true, perverse, forced, and vacillating; then also by their love of evasion, so that they may seem what they are not; and this is why their writing is lacking in definiteness and clearness.

- Schopenhauer, On Authorship and Style


I now realize that the ability to fully concentrate on a task for a long period of time is one of the hardest skills to acquire in the modern age. Nike's "Just Do It" is really apt here. Don't think so hard about doing it. Just do what needs to get done. Right now I'm so frustrated by my inability to sit through one project. Every time I'm about to latch onto something, I think "Wait, what if this isn't a good enough peoject?" and then I start writing other stuff, or just stop writing altogether.

As far as my frustration is now concerned, last year I wrote a novel by writing aimlessly and without pressure for 30 pages, then the whole thing got more and more of a direction and I eventually finished at some 200+ in book format pages. It's not a perfect or well planned-out product, but I can always edit afterwards.