Hey everyone! Here we are with another post for another week. I’m glad that I was able to get this post written on time. This post is more about general ideas that specific pieces of advice, but I hope that you still find it useful anyway. I hope it makes it easier to explain what I mean. So, without further ado…
Develop As A Writer: Practice Skills
This week’s post is about practicing writing skills. This is not a new concept for those who are trying to improve their writing and develop as a writer. Improving your writing skills is a pretty typical things for a writer to work on when they feel like they’re stuck in the metaphorical rut. Because of this in this post I don’t want to talk about the skills you could improve on – this is too variable for each writer – but I want to talk about things you can do to figure out or practice those skills you need to improve.
Get Advice From Writing Groups
One of the best ways to develop your skills is to listen to the advice from writing groups. This does not have to be a writing group that you meet with in person. Especially during these last two years of the COVID-19 pandemic, meeting together in person was hard and sometimes risky for different people. Sometimes it’s better for people to meet with writers in online groups or zoom sessions. The last two years of writing I spent a lot of time in Discord chat rooms and zoom writing sessions with other writers to feel that sense of comradery.
If you aren’t comfortable sharing your writing with a large group of other writers, find someone in the writing group who you like, think is nice, and (preferably) who has a different writing style and genre than you. That way you can share your writing with each other and help each other improve little bits. I once shared my writing with a writer who had a similar writing style and genre as me. We didn’t really know how to help each other because it turned out that we had the same writing problems. But once I began showing my writing to my friend who wrote romance novels, she was able to help me find the parts of my novel where the romance seemed incomplete or not totally described well. I also had a writer friend who wrote mysteries help me work on my foreshadowing.
In this way my different writing friends were able to help me develop different types of writing skills than I would have been able to use before.
Analyze Your Book Next To A Book Of The Same Genre
One of a writer’s best resources for learning new writing skills is other writer’s published writing. Not all published books are amazing (all debut authors need to start somewhere) but even an author’s debut novel or the worst novel you’ve ever read was published for a reason. Perhaps the story is subjective. Perhaps the character development was amazingly done. Perhaps the world building was phenomenal. Whatever made the book amazing or unique is what made it publishable.
Find these amazing books in your own genre. Compare your writing style to the writing style of the book. Could you work on developing character better? Is your world building not quite complete? Did you leave a few unresolved plot strings that could pull into plot holes? Compare books in a similar genre to your own and decide what skills they use that you could still develop better.
This does not mean that you should copy other people’s books. This does not mean you should negatively compare your own writing. Comparing your book to other people’s writing is simply a way of noticing things about your own book that might need to be better that you might not have noticed without comparing it to something already published.
Read Your Own Book
This seems like something that would be self-explanatory. But you would be amazed by the number of writers that I have talked to who have never actually read their own writing all the way through once they have written it. Writing the book once is all well and good but if you haven’t double checked your writing to make sure you aren’t missing something you might have left out something important. Reading your own book can help you to see what your reader will see when they read it, rather than what you as a writer see as the creator of this new world.
Reading your book out loud will also help you to catch any writing mistakes you might make frequently. I have a writing problem still to this day that I see commonly among young writers. I always make the mistake of repeating a word more frequently than I intended. I often don’t notice this mistake until I read something out loud. For example, I could write something that says, “He quickly moved his hand to the left side and gripped his sword. He pulled the sword quickly from the sheath and adjusted it to point the tip of his sword at his opponent.” When trying to write quickly I might not notice this mistake but when reading it out loud I always catch it and rework the sentences to avoid this type of redundancy.
Talk To Non-Writers/Readers
One of the last pieces of advice I have for practicing your writing skills is to talk to non-writers/readers. Sometimes writers (including myself) get so caught up in the dos and don’ts of writing and the things that other writers say that we sometimes forget that the ones who really matter when it comes to our writing is our readers. You could write a book that breaks all of the writing conventions and follows a list of don’ts but if you find a group of readers who like you’re book it will still sell a few, or maybe even more than a few, copies.
Because readers are the real group that matters when it comes to writing, asking readers for advice or having them try and help you come up with interesting plot points is certainly possible. Talking through a writer’s block with a reader or having them read something you’ve written can give you some of the best motivation as a writer. They always also have some of the best ideas for plot twists as well. Some of my best plot twists have come from my friends or relatives who don’t write.
Whatever kinds of tools you decide to use for practicing more skills make sure you find the ones that work for you in the way that you find useful. This is just a few examples of ways you can practice better skills. There are all sorts of information out there. I hope that this little bit was able to help.
That’s it for this week’s post. I hope that you all found it to be useful. Next week we will be talking about reading books on writing. I hope you all are able to stop by next week. Don’t forget to like, subscribe, become a blog page member, share, or follow me on social media at the links below. And remember,
Get Up, Get Writing, and Get Published. See you next week!
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