This was a question in "The Writer's Nook" section of Quora.
As usual, my answer slides off the point, but it sets down a number of things about writing that I believe.
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Writers’ courses and groups focus too much on creativity.
That got your attention, but it wasn’t creative.
Forced creativity is like a foreign accent: you can’t hide it.
If you are a writer, you will find both a voice and something to say. Brilliant writers with nothing to say become historians - and there is always a need and market for readable history.
The alternative is to be like E M Forster who dried up in 1927 but was hailed as the century’s greatest novelist when he died fifty years later.
Reading widely is the cure for many faults in writing. Study the masters, just like aspiring artists and learn the craft of writing. Many can learn the craft; few can learn the art - arguably, it can’t be learned.
Aim to be readable. Read the masters out loud. Read your own work out loud.
Previous generations had the benefit of good music that varied its rhythms and its shading. They knew how to dance; how to FEEL the movement. Without that in our daily lives, we lose (or don’t develop) any real sense of rhythm, and it affects our prose.
Here’s another approach, try writing with a fountain pen on decent paper (hard to find in America). It stops the flood of words that can be spewed onto a computer monitor. Writing by hand at least means that what you are writing spends a little more time in the brain.
[I always thought there was a good PhD topic in studying the effect on prose that moving from using dip pens to fountain pens had on writing styles. With computers, this should now be possible.]
Focus on learning the craft first. Give your ideas and characters the freedom to evolve; let them determine the plot.
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