: Re: Writing as a hobby, where do you learn the basics and go further? Sorry if I use the wrong terms or make a wrong assumption. I consider myself a beginner, and I know that I still have to

@Ravi5107385

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I don't want to discourage you from learning anything you feel you should have learned, but I want to distinguish writing advice from process descriptions.

Let's understand where generalisations about writing processes come from. Take first drafts, for example. We'll get to the bottom of that through a process of elimination:

It's not because anyone made it a rule, without which your writing is automatically rejected or at least loses points.
It's not because English or any form of it, such as the novel or poem, was designed backwards to make first drafts necessary.
And it's not because any scientific study has found first drafts are either inevitable or useful.

It's because, among writers and their colleagues in the business, a subset have tried to observe what the process looks like in practice, and first drafts have frequently, if not invariably, been found to arise.

This is also where we get ideas like the monomyth and a handful of basic story types, or protagonists wanting something, or stories coming in three arcs. If you've written a story that apparently doesn't fit such ideas, (i) that wouldn't make your story bad and (ii) there's a surprisingly good chance you only think your story didn't do it.

If you want to learn more specific details that seem to impact quality, such as the most common ways unpublished writers trip themselves up, or the things that bother readers (at least the ones who've bothered saying what, which is sadly an unrepresentative sample), there are any number of writing-guide books out there. Much of the content is available online, with or without copyright infringement. You'll find after reading a few such resources there's a lot of overlap in what they say.

So there are processes that seem to just happen because of the psychology of writers, and there are things for which a practical case can be made. In between there are practical recommendations on how to handle the process, such as including a song about what the protagonist wants if it's a musical, or doing this, that and the other when you're redrafting the first version of the story you right. You'll find the aforementioned resources give a lot of advice on those too, though at times it can be more personal. There are writers who've described how they redraft in great detail, but everyone seems to do it a little differently, so you may find you borrow bits and pieces from such approaches and find some of them work better for you than others. Now that is an it-just-happens fact about processes.

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