Writers are told to focus on a lot of things: Plot, character, structure, style. But primarily they are taught as craftspeople to perfect their writing on a small scale. Word by word. Sentence by sentence. Enough good sentences and you have a great story.
Right?
When I do my courses with my students, I teach things that I don’t particularly like or enjoy. I tell the kids “Read as widely as you can. Get as much inside you as you possibly can. Don’t judge it too quickly. Learn why it interests you and why you get mad at something, why you get bored.”
For example, Philip K. Dick is a terrible writer, sentence by sentence. Something like that can be useful for students to see. We look at the sentence and we say, “Don’t do that.” But then we look at the whole story and think, Yeah, but it works…
Does that mean you have license to not care about your work? Of course not. Just be aware that if your writing is poorly crafted, unless you have a concept like A Scanner Darkly up your sleeve, nobody is going to bother with what you’ve made.
Chris Barsanti 