: Re: What kinds of skill does writing require? I legitimately don't know the answer. Background I said something a little silly today, and was told I was incorrect: Writing requires no skill.

@Carla500

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"Write what you see in your head"? That first takes observational skills. What are you seeing? Are you seeing all of it? Are you also listening, smelling, tasting, feeling? Are you observing your (or the character's) heart rate, blood pressure, nausea, backache, muscle fatigue, excitement?

That all takes descriptive skills. Can you use words to capture all those observations and sensations in a way which reproduces them for your reader? "I was cold and sad" is a description, but so is "The raw December wind blew through the Arthur-shaped hole in my soul and left me numb, only a dull ache remaining where my heart used to be."

The words need semantic skills. Grammar, vocabulary, punctuation, turns of phrase. If you can't form a coherent sentence, nobody will understand you.

Above all, you need a story to tell, so you need plotting skills. "The cat sat on the mat" is not a story. "The cat sat on the other cat's mat" is.

Your plots need people (loosely — anything sentient, so intelligent animals, machines, nonhumans, et cetera), so you need characterizing skills. Are the characters rounded, real, believable, flawed, interesting? Do we root for them? Do we care?

Once everything is down on paper, you have to make sure that other people are getting the effect you want. That requires editing skills. You have to be willing to accept and use criticism to make your work better.

So basically, your correspondent is absolutely right.

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