This evening, I stopped by the BN bookstore just for an after dinner relax. While my son was busying himself about all sorts of bionicle and other legend books, I walked around the bookstore and randomly read some books. In the English writing corner, I picked up a book with a catchy title “Writing Alone and With Others” by Pat Schneider.

A quick browse revealed that it is a good book. But the book is quite heavy with tiny letters printed on 400 pages. I didn’t buy it.

The first major claim in this book is very appealing to me—“writers are people who write.”  Since I write, though not very well, I am a writer too, literally.

Surely, This is just an encouraging statement.  But in the following pages, Pat pointed out that most of us just write alone, and to improve your writing, you have to conquer the fear of writing, to sit down, to be self-disciplined, and to keep on writing.

I fully agree with Pat’s ideas. If you love writing and want to write better and better, you have to write all the time. Just like the principle of gaining self-efficacy, you have to master the skills to enjoy the writing.

In the internet era, even though many write-manias have blogs, most of them are still writing alone with almost no feed back on writing. Probably very few visitors will read their blogs anyway, considering there are millions of blogs now.

So how can you improve your writing when you struggle alone. I don’t have much experience, for I am still a learner. But I do have one example in mind.

Benjamin Franklin was a proficient writer but he didn’t have much education. He was a self-learning master writer. The way he approach the writing is like this:

You find an exemplary writing pieces, for example, good essays from newspapers or magazines, read them carefully, close the magazines, and then try to argue against or agree with the author by mimicking the original writing style and even the sentence structure and phrases (A note, in modern days, you probably want to rewrite the sentence to avoid plagiarism accusation. Besides, rewriting is a very important technique in writing too). Then you compare your piece with the original writing to learn the new writing techniques.

This is a very good method to learn writing, but unfortunately, I have never tried. Maybe I should do that in the next writing.