Best to build rituals (out of formal training or fucking around) that foster some space for working regularly.

Definitely. My father was big on the fucking around part. He would sit and listen to what came out musically.

Two of my brother's three kids are world-class musicians, and their parents offered them the choice. Marisa (the niece, Eastman, violin) opted formal, early, because she has no desire to be a composer; she's a brilliant improvisationist but she loves primarily playing other peoples' work. The younger nephew Mark (piano, Oberlin) waited until his teens and spent the first chunk of his life messing on piano and guitar. He wants to write music and in fact, he does.

It's looking like I need to give up either embroidery or typing.

I'm going to vote No on embroidery, otherwise I'll never see you on the boards.

Betsy, what David said.

This will undoubtedly get me blasted from several sides of the arena, but it's why I never took a writing class.

My two cents:

You can do things on instinct, sure...

But you'll do them better when you're conscious of what you're doing.

Rules are made to be bent and stretched... but you have to master the rules first.

Okay, so that's three cents. I'm a writer, not a mathmetician, dammit!

But you'll do them better when you're conscious of what you're doing.

Oh, completely. But it isn't about instinct. The question, or idea, was in the matter of timing: know what you want to do first. If it's what you want to do and it's something that requires a "voice" (creation rather than pure interpretation, whether its music or litcrit or whatever), see if you have said voice, identify it, nurture it, then go listen to someone who very possibly has tried and failed to identify their own voice tell how what's all wrong with yours. Alternately, listen to someone who is completely wonderful tell you mysteries.

My father's idea was that taking a possible prodigy and handing them over to a structure freak at age seven ought to be punished by flogging. He was a musician, though, and he did think taking the formal stuff later on down the line was not only a good idea, but vital, if you hadn't already picked it up (I certainly hadn't - it was math, damnit).

When it comes to writing, I keep hearing horror stories (and having audited a few creative writing classes from the tutor's perspective, I know they weren't isolated) about formative-stage writers winding up either questioning every damned word they wrote, or falling into the grip of some yutz who disliked anything that didn't read like Crime & Punishment or To The Lighthouse.

As said earlier, mileage is so individual on this one that there are no specs to be found.

Oddly enough, the biggest formal help I found for my writing was an Intro to Theatre class, where the professor started in on Aristotle's Poetics. We went into structures of plots, types of characters, how a story builds etc. And I realized, "Wait, I know this! This is obvious!" And, in a new collegiate spurt of pompousness: "I am in touch with Aristotle's brain!" It was a heady moment.

That was when I knew I knew how to write. Every book I've bought since then, every website, etc., I've scanned for some new nugget to attach to what I already know, or is the teacher/guru just off on a new philosophical model? Most books out there are to encourage people who are inhibited to get words on paper, or at least find a paradigm in which to think of writing. I get the feeling, though, that most such books are aimed at journal-type writing, or writing for self-expression, rather than plot-based writing.

I've finally admitted to myself that nothing in any of the books is going to help me find the perfect plot/character/resolution to a tangle, that it's only goign to be solved by my butt in a chair and my fingers on the keys.

And, in a new collegiate spurt of pompousness: "I am in touch with Aristotle's brain!"

Heh. I had a similar moment with both Plato and Aristotle, except my formulation was, "Shit. All that stuff I thought was my view of the world is really just the hand-me-down ideas that Plato and Aristotle generated and have been informing Western culture for thousands of years."

Heh. I had that experience with the Utilitarians. "My God, I've been one all my life!" Americans tend to make Utilitarian arguments reflexively.

I've been lucky in my writing teachers, but I still have to remind myself that when it comes down to it, I have to write what I have to write, not what they would expect or like.edited for WTF?

Connie speaks for me. Though it took me reading enough books to realize there's more than one Right Way to realize it. Many of the books I read early on were big on outlines, systems, and the idea that if you're not driven to write every single day, you're obviously not cut out for this.

The two things that have helped me persist to the point where I'm pretty sure I'm over half finished with my novel are: 1) Diana Gabaldon's website and Outlandish Companion book, which taught me to adopt an "outline, schmoutline" attitude and work on whatever scene is in my head that day, regardless of how out of order I'm working, and 2) hearing on a documentary that Tolkien would put LotR aside for months on end, and that sometimes it took CS Lewis nagging him to get him going again.