Salvete!
While I am feeling confident, that my reading skills are slowly but steadily improving, I am a bit unsure how to tackle my written style. It seems to me, that the traditional approach would be to work through a prose composition book like North and Hillard, but I am still a bit reluctant since doing that would seem to me on the one hand incredilby boring and on the other - I got the impression that basically all traditional prose composition books aim at translating. And while improving on translation should certainly have a positive carry over to free composition, it is not the same thing at all, and I got the impression modern language education is for this reason moving away from translation in favor of free composition.
So, I would like to ask you, what seems to the right course of action:
- Just work through North and Hillard (or parts of it) and stop complaining
- I have noticed that Milena Minkova, who is a part of the latinitas viva, has also written a prose composition book ‘Introduction to Latin Prose Composition’. Has anyone worked through it? If so, do you know if it has a stronger focus at getting you to write free style?
- Just write with with people online, a greater active vocabulary and a better style will come with time
(This probably what I would do in Spanish, but I am here again reluctant, since I do not feel competent to judge how good someones Latin is. I certainly would not try to improve my spanish by writing with other language learners at my level. What do you think?)
- Just continue writing free composition and getting some feedback on it
For reference: This is the level I am at the moment (with kind corrections from Shenoute)
http://discourse.textkit.com/t/de-mythologia-aegyptiorum/17447/1
I’ll greatly apreciate any recommondations, suggestions or advice.
(If it makes any difference: I can understand resources written in English, German and depending on the difficulty in Spanish and well Latin 
)
Curate, ut maxime valeatis!
PS: I am aware that prose composition was discussed several time already in this forum. However, I found mostly discussions of the merits of various traditional prose composition text books and since in the last years there has been a steady rise of new latin resources mayhaps new answers arose to my old question. If you feel that my question has already been partially or fully answered in a different thread, I would be glad if you could point me in the right direction.
You can read a favourable review of Milena Minkova’s “Introduction to Latin Prose Composition” here https://bmcr.brynmawr.edu/2008/2008.08.35. I have not used it but it looks interesting.
The review concludes: "Minkova’s book, if carefully followed, can equip the reader to begin writing Latin with good grammar and mostly classical vocabulary and idiom. The Latin that Minkova writes and wants to teach, to be sure, is not the nervously circumscribed, “pure” classical Latin à la Menge but the richer and more eclectic variety cultivated by Erasmus and others who, like Seneca’s bee, feel free to hop around in the whole variegated range of Latin literature, from Plautus to Caesar to St. Jerome and Lorenzo Valla. By acquiring facility in this kind of classicizing Latin,1 the student may be enabled to read rapidly and with enjoyment not only the classical authors but also the copious, influential but recently much neglected corpus of post-classical (but still classicizing) Latin literature which has continued to accumulate without a break to this day. The absence of simpler composition exercises makes Minkova’s book perhaps more suited for those who have already dealt with Latin for some time and now wish to rapidly review the basic rules of writing and go on to extended, free prose composition. Thus graduate students and professional scholars may find it more useful than undergraduates, but the more motivated of the latter can profit from it as well. This book is also cross-referenced in the Readings and Exercises in Latin Prose Composition by Minkova and Tunberg,2 which has tons of (fairly challenging) exercises and is its logical complement or continuation.
Notes
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See e.g. Tunberg, T. 1997. “Ciceronian Latin: Logolius and Others”, HumLov 46: 13-61.
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Reviewed in BMCR 2004.06.28."
Prose composition books are useful because they review grammar and assist in reading texts by making what is passively known more a part of your active knowledge. The problem with free composition is that your approach is not going to be structured and you will probably be using only constructions with which you are already familiar.
The kind of free composition I think you are interested in is an end goal and you shouldn’t confuse the means with the ends. North and Hillard and Bradley are a means to get to a place where you can write better Latin not an end in themselves.
By way of analogy as a musician I play scales and bowing exercises as well as studies as part of my daily routine of practice. I will never perform any of this material but it forms an essential part of my preparation for those pieces I am going to play with others and in public. Is it boring? On some days it is hard to be motivated but I just have to remember what happens when I dont do it. Once I start I find the process fascinating and enjoyable but at times when my motivation and enthusiasm flags it is boring.
Much the same could be said of working at prose composition. It’s a necessity if you want to improve your knowledge of Latin and have a secure basis on which you can base your more creative and free compositions. But sure on some days you will find it dull. So much relies on your motivation.
Thank you very much for your well-reasonded reply. I’ve got Minkova’s composition book, and will start working through it.