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goobster  ·  2638 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Ramblings: get gud

I can recount the story of how I went from drawing like a 3-year old to drawing almost photo-realistic pencil drawings of purses I was designing, but ... I was at an art school, learning Fashion Design, and taking an art class. A fellow student sat me down and - while we both held our own pencils - I copied his technique and found out it worked for me, too.

That one time.

But words are my thing, not drawing. So I had the problem with words, stories, writing, discipline, etc.

And here is what works for me every single time: Stephen King's book "On Writing".

Yes, that Stephen King.

This book is weird - it started off as a "How to become a writer" book, and then he got hit by a car and it became an autobiography. Sort of.

The important thing is that he has a system for writing, and it just works.

The basic premise is that creativity is a muscle like any other, and you need to exercise it to make it work. What he does is set aside a specific time every single day to do this one thing (in his case, Writing), and he does that one thing at that specific time every single day.

Eventually, he finds that "creativity" is a faucet your can turn on and off with regular training. Repeat this pattern for an amount of time, and your mind learns that this is your Creative Time, and therefore turns on the creativity at that time when you sit down to do that work.

So read the book. It is much better than all that. But the premise of "how to get gud" is basically to train your brain to be "in the right mode" when you go to learn that thing you want to do better.