I have joined an online writing group recently and one of the members asked for advice on how to put his many ideas to writing. Since I took the effort to craft a reply, I thought I will post it to this my main writing blog as well.
I find that it is good to start writing, keep writing, to aim to release your work regularly and to keep refining your work.
To share my experience, I have been writing local fiction for a few years, first posting them to a local BBS and eventually to my own blog. Some readers like them, some don't. The comments from some readers have been most encouraging, and so I continue posting them because they are well-received. I write anonymously because criticism is less painful when received online. Perhaps one day I will be good enough to publish in my own name. What I am doing now is to train until I reach that level.
When I start on a new story, there is pressure to continue with it and to finish it. This is good for me because as others have said, writing is a craft, your work needs to be polished and refined, and this needs discipline. You know how hard it is for most people to motivate themselves to go for a run unless there is external pressure (IPPT, lose weight, etc)?
Ideas come in as I write and I just write down what I can, with lousy structure when I am just recording the ideas, paying little heed to the quality of the writing until I start editing it. I plan out the rough plot before I start, type out what I can and edit it more times than I can count, adding in descriptions, changing the phrasing, move entire sentences and paragraphs around as I go along. It is a lot of work to polish it up and improve the quality of the writing.
So what I'm trying to say is to start writing and to aim to post your writings regularly. Perhaps if you are not a fiction writer, you might also find it useful to post a short article a week, on any topic that come to mind. Spend the whole week (a few nights?) writing and editing and polishing it, and post it on a fixed day of the week. You can post to a blog if you like. Even if nobody reads it, you can feel yourself improving as you go along. Writing is a skill to be perfected as much as a musician or a painter practice his skill and gets better.
