Ben Scofield

@benscofield.com

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I think you're never not learning. I mean, I've said this many times jokingly, but it's true. The last 20 percent of every book that I write, I buy a book on how to write a book in a panic. It's so true. And then I will read it and I'll be like, I think I might be doing this. I think I may have almost written a book and it's very comforting. But you're never going to feel like an expert no matter how many times you've done this, but you do sort of get secure in your process.
So artists who actually work in words are trying to say with words what cannot be said in words. I think that is the most beautiful definition for what art and fiction is really trying to do. We're trying to say with words what cannot be said in words. And so that requires us to invent new words, new ways of putting words together, new languages, as I mentioned, to say something that cannot yet be said.
But this writing group that I joined is really focused on the craft skills of writing, less or more so than the marketing and like selling yourself side of things. And I think that just being exposed to an environment where I could start to see some of the pieces in writing really helped a lot. So now I'm a little more experienced, and I'm thinking more about structural beats and a chapter's role within the story, how to maintain tension, all of those things, and it's basically the same stuff I was focusing on 20 months ago, except I've got a vocabulary set now and a skill set now to understand what goes into making a story cohesive, or what goes into making a character interesting, that I didn't have before.
A visualization of the following quote from Louise Antony: "I mean, the practice is the doing. It's not like I'm going to work on philosophy of mind for a while so that I'm better at philosophy of language. You don't do that. You sometimes realize that there are deficits and maybe there are some tricky argument patterns that you need to rehearse a little bit so you remember them, or you have to think hard about exactly how that argument worked, but that's all part of the actual doing of philosophy, too."