>>7795943
10,000 hours

While you won't get any better at drawing simply by having spent your life looking at things with your eyes before you put pencil to paper, if you spend a significant amount of your life reading (preferably a broad variety of books), you'll have a huge head start on writing. While it also depends on your level of emotional maturity, by applying yourself with a little critical thinking, you can write competently pretty much straight away.
The artist needs to learn how hard to press, what pencil stokes to make, how to mix colours, how to arrange composition, thickness of line, colour balance, perspective and so many things that aren't generally innate.
Everybody already knows how to communicate as you speak and write in daily life. Somebody who is well read knows what makes a good sentence, what makes a good character, what makes a good story. It's already in there. You just have to start typing.

>>7795943

it took me 4 years of studying literature to start thinking I had some sense of a skill

>>7795982
This guy has the right idea.

Grammar can be a bitch. Try reading your stuff out loud and run it through some online grammar checks to outline your weak and strong areas and practice on editing your own work accordingly.

You're being vague on your use of 'competent'. If you just want to be good enough to communicate effectively with people through email or to hone your skills for a job, a few months of meticulous practicing and editing should do the job.

However, if you're looking to become a published writer, that could take a while. A year if you're naturally inclined to written word. Besides that, anywhere from two to five years before you're writing is at the professional level, and that's writing, ideally, 5000 words a week. Publishing, even if you're writing level is there, could take longer, depending on your technological abilities and connections, as well as what genre you're writing.

Of course, you could speed this up by reading, as the above guy said, diverse works of literature. Since you're looking to improve your style by reading. I would stay away from translations, as the style is often clunky and overly academic. Books written originally in English will not only give you a great variety of unique styles, but also a sampling of different voices. Take Thomas Pynchon, for example. His style is very specific to himself, and was in many ways, i believe, imitated by later Post-Modern author. I myself have gone through many phases where i write like other authors, giving myself a deeper understanding of the style and widening my control of language. Eventually you'll stop imitating other writer's styles and invent your own. It takes a while though.

Another way to improve is to read books on how to write. I hear Stephan King's on writing is a good place to start. Though i say that, i, personally, have tried to stay away from those types of books completely because of my belief that they sterilize the writing styles of improving authors, turning out author after author whose prose is indiscernible from another's. But that's just my opinion.

As far as ideas go, get into your own habits. Coffee, comfortable clothes. Just start writing down random sentences that occur to you in your head. If they go somewhere, fine. If not, try again. It's okay to leave stories unfinished. Any practice is good practice as long as it gets you writing. Another tip is to start with a character and build the world around them instead of the other way around.

>>7796169
>Though i say that, i, personally, have tried to stay away from those types of books completely because of my belief that they sterilize the writing styles of improving authors, turning out author after author whose prose is indiscernible from another's. But that's just my opinion.

Thats only true if you're reading bottom of the barrel type of shit, John Gardner's book for example goes nowhere near that and encourages you to develop your own style through trying different exercises and study

one

million

words

>>7795943
Start writing and find out