Anonymous asked:
So, everyone and their grandma seems to say “Write garbage, you’re improving, even if it doesn’t look like it.” But if you don’t know what improvement looks like, how do you know there’s any at all?
Here are some ways you can recognize improvement in your writing…
1) You feel more confident about what you’ve written.
Most of the time, if we trust out gut instinct, we have some idea about the quality of our work. We tend to know when what we’re writing isn’t our best work, and we tend to know when we’ve just written something solid.
2) Improved feedback from others.
Gut instinct aside, it can be pretty difficult to truly judge the quality of our work without feedback from others. That’s just part of being a writer. The quality of your work will be reflected in the comments you get from beta readers, critique partners, critique groups, and editors.
3) Knowledge is power!
Really, though, it is. If you spend time learning about writing, and then applying that knowledge to your writing, you’ll know you’re improving because you’ve honed your writing skills. And, since you know more about writing, you’ll be better prepared to recognize what’s good and bad in your own writing.
4) Read a lot if you want to write well.
If you read a lot of books, you’ll learn to understand what great writing looks like and what not-so-great writing looks like. Once you have a basis for comparison, it’s easier to look at your own writing and judge where it falls. It’s also easier to know when you’re writing more like the great stuff and less like the not-so-great stuff.
I hope that helps!
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