Conclusion
Congratulations! You’ve finished this course on Prose. Now go and write/read many more stories. It’s the only way to keep improving your prose.
Use the tips from the first chapters to get your thoughts onto the page. Eliminate self-doubt, or criticism, or forcing yourself to follow any rules while writing that first draft.
Once done, take some time off. Then come back and, using this guide as reference, sharpen that prose through rewriting and even more rewriting.
I have written millions of words for many different projects and purposes. (Dutch and English, fiction and non-fiction, websites and novels, etcetera.) But I still mess up my prose in the first draft. I still write clunky paragraphs and lines that are twice as long as they need to be. That’s a natural side-effect of trying to sort your thoughts and put them into coherent sentences.
With every book you write, you get better at delivering a clean first draft. But the issue never goes away—nobody gets things right the first time.
So, in short, how do you write great prose? Write terrible prose first, then improve it through hundreds of tips and techniques you learn over time.
As always, this course is part of a bigger category called Creative Writing. If you haven’t already, I recommend starting with the Storytelling course that teaches how to write books from start to finish. It links to related topics (such as plotting or developing characters) wherever needed.
With these courses, I really tried to distill everything I know and learned from years of writing into practical and interesting articles.
All writing courses combined have been the largest writing project I ever did. It was silly of me to think that it would just be “a few weekends of work”. And I still regularly think “I’m so stupid, I completely forgot to mention this one tip I learned, I need to add that!”
Hopefully, I succeeded and helped a few people out there!
Keep learning and keep writing,
Pandaqi