When you start doing something from scratch, something that you never did before, everything will be difficult at the beginning, mainly if you don’t have the right textbook that can guide you through steps and processes. You have to cling yourself tightly to this thing that you want to achieve with love, determination, patience, and diligence, and you have to do your best to understand what you are really doing so as to be able to train the muscles of your mind to get to the automatic level, that is, how I call it, the ‘instinct superpower’… but for that you have to practice a lot, all day, every day, and this with total focus.

Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better.

Maya Angelou

Writing is a gigantic realm whose pathways lead to many roads and crossroads, and if at first I really didn’t know what I was really doing when I started my first blog ‘lovelyricism’, or even started to write Darcocyte, well, I came to understand why other bloggers and e-writers wrote about the importance of finding your ‘niche’, or even to find your writing style, because like that you can fully dedicate yourself at practicing ameliorating your skills one step at a time. It’s crucial to know if whether you’re going into journalism, essay writing, poetry, fiction, or any other non-fiction, so as to be able to dedicate your time and love to the craft you’ve chosen, then, afterwards, when you’ve acquired enough knowledge in that field, you can permit yourself to venture into those other writing territories filled of metaphors and flowery languages, experience, and have more fun along the way; but for that, we all have to know what we really want to do or achieve, then start from there.

After all of these years of trying to level up my writing skills online, I recently came to the conclusion that I should have taken a course in creative writing, like that I would have learned from professional teachers, have the right manuals to exercise my writing skills, connect to a network of writers, and perhaps even get help and good job placements; it would have been a lot easier than that of choosing the autodidact route where you have to learn everything on your own. But I did my best, and I sincerely hope that I now know better, so that I can continue my way with the greatest of serenity, and even share on this blog what I’ve learned along the writing way, with hope that someone that’s in need of answers find these posts. 

I still write very slowly, and I think that I’ll continue to do so because I have to pause and think a lot between each sentences, or even look for the proper words in the dictionary, or do some researches online — the Achilles’ heel of the non-native English speaker. But that doesn’t stop me from wanting to do better… I have to do better, because I have chosen to make a living through online creative writing, that is through blogging and selling e-books, thus I need to ameliorate my writing, photography, editing, marketing, and analytic skills, and never stop learning and practicing so as to get better and better.

Do the best you can, and never ever turn your back to the practice of getting better at your craft, for this road is a long one, without the clock to show you the time, but with little indicators and clues that point to places where you need to ameliorate, or where you can do better.