Should writers focus on art or craft?

Hello friends.

After a long time, there is a writing-related video. I thought I would occasionally make a video about writing because, you know, I am writing. This channel is a channel by a writer, so there should at least be some writing-related content on it.

I put out a post in my posts tab—it used to be called a community tab, and things are confusing now. In the posts tab, you will find a post where I have asked people to send me their writing-related doubts, and I will do my best to answer them. I should warn you beforehand that a lot of what I'm about to say is how I do things. There is no one-size-fits-all solution to anything in life, and therefore you should take all of this with a pinch of salt. This is how I do things. This is what I think. This is not a universal, "do this and you will get X result" kind of thing.

So, having gotten that out of the way, let's look at the first question that I'm going to address. The topic of this video is a question from Johnny Walker, one, two, three, four. And it goes like this:

Some say the only way to learn writing is to just write. Others say it's a proper craft to be learned. So how do you learn writing? Or rather, I think what they want to ask is how to go about writing. How much attention should you pay to people who say the only way to learn writing is to learn writing, or that the only way to learn writing is to just write?

First of all, you should be slightly suspicious of anyone who starts any piece of advice by saying "the only way," because it's probably the only way they have used, and it worked for them. I'm happy for them. But people should not give advice by saying, "This is the only way to do X," because life is a little more complicated than that. Art definitely is a lot more complicated than that.

So let us focus on the two elements of this question. One is craft—the craft of learning how to write—and then there is just writing. Obviously, you have to do both of these things. You have to learn the craft of writing, and you have to just write the way a writer does. But perhaps it would be good if I started with the difference between art and craft.

What is more important for you as a writer to focus on? Should you focus on the craft of writing, or should you focus on your art? Before I start, let me put it this way. If you announce that your intention is to go to Bhagalpur and you are going to do this on a bicycle, and you tell people, "Look here, I'm about to pick up this bicycle and go all the way to Bhagalpur," then people will come and check you out. People will come and see if you can do it.

Craft is the ability to ride the bicycle. Art is making the journey and getting to Bhagalpur. If you pick up the bicycle and you pedal, and they see you go at least a few meters, then they know that you can get to Bhagalpur. They know that you have the ability to get to Bhagalpur. They know that you have the skills required to get all the way to Bhagalpur. If you pick up the bicycle and you cannot pedal and you fall down, it doesn't matter if you have the map to Bhagalpur. It doesn't matter if you know how to get to Bhagalpur. It doesn't matter if you have the strength to get to Bhagalpur. You are not going to get to Bhagalpur because you can't cycle.

Craft is the first step. Art is the rest of the journey. So when someone says that you need to know the craft to create your art, they're not wrong. You do need to know how to ride a bicycle in order to get to Bhagalpur. But getting to Bhagalpur is going to require much more than simply cycling because everyone can get to Bhagalpur.

There are other people who will walk to Bhagalpur, there are people who will take the bus—and by bus, I mean AI writing, that infernal thing that is going around right now. And some people are naturally, you know, they live in Bhagalpur. They don't have to cycle to Bhagalpur. So when someone says that the craft of writing is important, what they're really telling you is that the ability to frame your art using the traditions of writing is important, and they're not wrong.

But when they say that the only way to write is by being a good craftsman, then they're probably not right because there have been many great writers who were not great craftsmen, and they have still left great works of art. They created their own craft. There have been writers who created their own ways of writing, who created their own genres. There are writers whose work cannot be classified into a genre. There have been writers who have deliberately broken the rules of craft. There have been writers who have invented new ways of exercising the craft. That’s all possible.

But for the most part, if you're a professional writer and you want to send your manuscript to a publisher, one of the first things the publisher will look at is if you know the craft. When your manuscript gets to a publisher, the editor picks it up, reads