Is writing only scenes a good way to earn writing skills?
I'm searching to improve the way I write, and so I started to create just scenes, for example a battle.
Is it a good idea as it is not integrated in a well-established story ?
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I think it's a great exercise to strengthen your writing skills. You can focus on one thing to improve — descriptions, or characterization, or pacing, or sentence structure — and just focus on that, instead of worrying about how it fits into the overall scheme of your book. There's no pressure to adhere to anything fore or aft in a story, so you have complete freedom to take the scene wherever you want.
In fact, I've recommended this technique elsewhere on this board to help work on learning your characters. Adapt it for anything you need. Or for the pleasure of writing short scenes. If you write enough with the same elements (same people, same setting), you might find a story emerging. Or not. No writing is wasted.
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I would be careful. Yes, there is much to be said for learning a complex skill by practicing in parts. But there is a real and pervasive danger of getting caught up in language when you should be focusing on story. As Robert McKee points out, it is easy for writers for fall in love with individual scenes and be unwilling to throw them away when they don't fit the story they are supposed to be telling.
The hardest skill to learn, and that thing that will make all the difference to your career as a writer, is story. To practice scenes apart from stories may therefore be to focus your effort in the place it is going to do the least good.
And there is another trap here as well. The best way to achieve any effect in a novel -- to produce any emotion or reaction in the reader -- is through story. If you work on scenes divorced from story, you deprive yourself of this means of producing an effect, and this may lead you to try to hard to produce the effect in other ways, such as by florid language or an over-emphasis on describing how people feel or react to things.
It is story that will make or break you. Figure our story and the scenes will come naturally enough.
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