Becoming A Better Writer

I've been thinking about the beginning days of my writing journey. I was interviewed yesterday morning by a young reporter from our local newspaper. He asked some good questions and I came up with the answers. The article about me and my writing world was in last night's newspaper. Read it here, if you like. Many of the interview questions took me back to my beginning days of writing.

I've been writing for well over 20 years now and I know that my writing is much better today than back in the mid-nineties. That's not bragging. It's a fact. Spiral back to the first years you were writing and then think about what you are writing today. It's almost surely better than those early efforts.

There is no elevator to zip you from beginning writing status to experienced, and possibly published, writer. It might be nice but I think you'd miss a lot. Taking it step by step, learning and growing in your ability is worth the time and effort involved.

How did you accomplish that learning and growing? Most of us did it by reading about our craft, and I mean reading a lot. One book isn't going to do it. Even rereading the ones you like best will help you cement what you learned in the first reading.

We did it by doing writing exercises. Athletes practice regularly and so should we. The more we write, the better we write. That will happen if you practice what you've read in books about writing. Writing exercises aren't just to limber our writing muscles before we begin the 'real' writing of the day. They are meant to teach us something, just like those books.

Some will improve their writing by attending conferences with workshops and speakers who can open myriad doors into the writing world. We sit and listen but must then go home and apply what we've heard.

We improve our writing by writing frequently. Write something once a month and you'll never catch your fellow writer who writes daily.

We become better writers if we join a critique group of some kind. Getting the eyes of others who write on your own work can be akin to taking a college course. Let me qualify that by saying that we will improve our writing if we are open to the constructive criticism the critiquers give us if we're willing to admit our mistakes and work on making our writing better.

No elevator for us, so we must move step by step to becoming a better writer. It won't happen in a flash. Instead, you'll grow slowly until the day comes and you can look at a piece of your early writing and compare it to what you've written recently. That's when you'll see how the steps you've taken have benefited.