Learning to be good at writing

It’s a question that I am sure intrigues many of us who love to write: can you learn to be good at writing?

In many ways, it’s an impossible question to answer. The main reason for this is that it’s almost impossible to define exactly what we mean by ‘good’. For some people, good writing might only need to be grammatically correct and have a story without any whopping plot holes. For others, it might be those things, but more on top – a cracking plot, mesmerising characters, and the quality of the prose, which can be so hard to define and yet is undoubtedly so important.

So maybe the question needs to be re-written slightly. We shouldn’t wonder whether it’s possible to learn to be a good writer, but rather whether it’s possible to become a much better writer than when just starting out.

The answer to that must surely be yes. If you have been writing for any length of time – even just a few weeks – you will no doubt be aware of an improvement in your own work. Sometimes the improvement isn’t always immediately obvious, but eventually you will come to realise, that yes, you are better now than you once were.

That is one of the benefits of continuing to write over a long period of time – you should, more than likely, get better at the mechanics of writing. The process of it should, hopefully, become easier and you’ll find yourself writing readable, quality content on a regular basis.

The really hard bit is that ‘flair’ we associate with excellent writers. For some writers, it’s something that just comes naturally, and trying to explain what we mean by a flair for writing is hard. It’s just something that is. For other writers, it’s something that comes later, once the basics have been covered. An original voice starts to develop and a sense that the work is good quality emerges.

But for some, that magic quality that makes effective writing great never materialises. So perhaps the conclusion to the question is that you can sometimes learn to be a ‘good’ writer, but not always, and it depends on what we mean by ‘good’. What is true for everyone though, is that with enough effort and time, we can all learn to be the best writers we can possibly be.