: Re: What is the best approach to balancing reading and writing for improving my writing skill? A while ago, I would casually read and and casually write, and I was satisfied with what I achieved.

@Debbie451

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What's your goal?

If your goal is to write, and reading what you "should" be doing made you stop writing, then stop reading that shit. Avoid whatever is an obstacle to your goal.

That doesn't mean you can't learn the craft of writing, or study techniques or develop methods or use tools. But if you "let the perfect become the enemy of the good," then you aren't writing.

Put the "should" books aside and go write. Write for fun. Write knowing it will suck, and that it's perfectly okay to suck. Editing is the round where you polish off the suckage. But you can't edit a blank page.

Put down the book and go write.

ETA There is no One Best Way to go about improving your writing. You improve by identifying your mistakes and fixing them.

Some people do well with doing a lot of research beforehand, which is what you tried to do. Obviously it didn't work for you; you got blocked.

Some people let it all pour out on the page and fix everything afterward, including plot and structure; this is called discovery writing. In this process, you find the mistakes after your entire first draft is written, and it may involve tearing the whole book apart and reassembling it.

Some people are in-between: a little research beforehand, writing the draft according to a loose structure, and then editing afterwards. For this method, you write a rough draft and polish it a few times, and then it's in good enough shape to hand it to an editor for more fine-tuning.

I think researching is useful, and I also think you get better at the craft the more that you write after you learn what "good writing" looks and feels like. So I think you need to do both. You're done the research for now. Start writing, get your words on paper, and then work with someone else to hone it into "good writing." Then you practice writing well, and once you're comfortable with writing well on your own, then you can go back and do more research.

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