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What's a good way to get better at writing?
I kind of suck at it, and this is troubling me. I'm a working academic, and sitting on a growing cache of results that I can't get out because (outside of some unpredictable periods where the chemical stars in my brain align just right or something) I tend to stare down the same paragraph for two hours and finally squeeze out, word by painful word, something that sounds like the ramblings of a schizophrenic with aphasia, and then feel so drained that I will viscerally fear opening vim again for a week or two. "Professional issues" is an easy sell as far as evidence that something must be done goes, but even outside that, there are so many things - posts, stories, explanations - that I wish I could write but can't. The circumstance that every so often, this problem briefly just goes away and I can in fact vomit out several pages that do in fact hold up even if I look at them again later, just makes my problem all the more frustrating - it feels like it's not like there is something I just lack (and therefore could obtain, making the problem go away), but rather that the necessary circuitry is there but defective.
In retrospect, one of the biggest problems I had in school was that I would always write sequentially; I would start at the beginning of whatever I was writing and pound through it until I was finished. In the meantime, I had all these great ideas about what I wanted to write, I just never seemed to get to them, and when I did I had trouble phrasing them correctly because the preceding text didn't set things up the way I wanted. As a result, writing was like banging my head against the wall where I had 500 things I wanted to say but couldn't figure out how to say them because I was handcuffed by what I had already written. Then later I realized that if I just wrote out the substance of what I wanted to say and tacked on the intro, transitions, etc. in "post-production", so to speak, things went much smoother.
So my advice is to simply write down whatever is on your mind. You know what you want to say, the problem it stating things coherently so that other people will understand them. Don't stress out over whether what initially comes out sounds like a schizophrenic with aphasia; that's just the first step. Then you can edit what you've written so that it's actually coherent. I've never noticed any issues with your writing here so it's obvious that you have it in you, so I wouldn't worry about lack of ability. A big part of the problem is that pressure and stress can become overwhelming and prevent us from doing what we need to do. For example, I do a lot of mineral titles for work, and most people with my job complete their files in a certain sequence. At some stages in the sequence, complicated issues can arise, and these issues can make it difficult to meet deadlines. If I run into an issue that I can't resolve in a reasonable amount of time, I usually just skip it and move on to the next part of the sequence. That way, if I'm about to miss a deadline I can tell the client that everything's done except this one issue that I need to resolve, as opposed to having to tell the client that the file's nowhere near completion because I spent the past several days spinning my wheels on a difficult-to resolve issue. It gives the client at least some peace of mind that this isn't some money pit project that they're being charged billable hours for; after all, if I spend all that time on one issue there's no guarantee that other issues won't pop up later that will take even more time. And even if the deadline isn't an issue, it's still easier for me to know that I have 2 days at the end of a project to resolve a difficult issue than to spend all my time working on one thing and having 2 days to complete the rest of the file.
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