@NO1SEY
All these things that I thought I'd never use ever again after throwing my poetry anthology in the recylcing when I went off to Sixth Form College, never to study English again. Well, it bloody well turns out that they are actually bloody useful if you want to bloody write stuff... who knew!?
I really shot myself in the foot there as well, I never thought I would end up actually wanting to write in my later life. I wish I could give my young self a slap and say "learn all you can in everything, it'll all be useful"
Even if you are going to be writing a graphic novel, at the very least this all applies to the dialogue you write, but it should also apply to the scripts and story-boards you provide to publishers and artists.
Yeah, this totally caught me off guard recently (last month!)
Even several years ago when I thought I wanted to write manga comics, even for a living, it never crossed my mind how much writing, and elements of writing that that would involve. Especially as you say dialogue, which I am massively suffering on at the moment.
To be honest, I don't know how I really ended up improving in this regard over the past five years
Same with my art to be honest, it's a combination of a lot of elements, but basically if you are doing work in the area you want to be skilled at, you will gain skill. Maybe not at the rate you want, or the specific skill area you want, but you will definitely gain skill.
Funny you should mention language barriers because I'm in a funny boat, in that some lines for characters I think in Japanese first, despite Japanese being a secondary language that I mostly learnt off anime. And then I have to translate the sentence back into English and it never sounds quite how I imagined it lol
@Coryn
Regarding taking breaks, I have quite a different take on that. I do definitely have down time all the time for basically no reason, and I do agree a planned break is a good thing. But for dealing with writer's block, I'm much more of an aggressive active problem solver than passive thinking on a hike problem solving. But that might just be what works for me personally, or I'm still nooby with my writing and haven't hit a "true" writer's block yet, so I dont know if I'll always think that way.
But a nice country walk is good for you nonetheless, so writer's block or not, it's good to do it anyway :P
Read history, read theology, read science! Broaden your understanding of the world, and it will give you more building blocks to play with in story telling. Real world knowledge and experience are super important when it comes to world building. Imagine that.
So massively important, in my fantasy stories I've been using a lot of medieval research to write my characters and backstories. For instance, medicine is typically not very advanced, so life expectancy is much lower. Older people are therefore basically a rarity. So one of my characters who is very old (with magic) now stands out more and might more likely lead to people asking how she's managed to stay healthy etc. Just a random example. Or knowing manufacture techniques and materials available helps to design the clothing and how it looks as an artist.
But not only are you helping others, you're helping yourself.
Again as a nooby writer I'm only just coming round to understanding this and how useful it is, and for the exact reasons you say. Not only can you learn from others but you train your analytical ability which is so useful for quality control, as I like to call it, and being able to improve your work to the next level.