Today’s Friday, and that means it’s time to, “Face Your Fear.”
Every Friday, you’ll be given three days to meet a personal goal, and report back on what you learned, even if you don’t complete your goal as planned, do you best to learn at least one thing that will help your writing process in the long run. If abundant success comes from countless failures, you will learn something worth learning, even if you didn’t meet the goal as intended.
Be kind to yourself. Pick a goal that you know won’t require more you can give in three days, something you know your writing lacks, and won’t inherently require a certain kind of study or focus you know you can’t achieve in that short a time frame.
For example, most writers can’t draft a book or even short story in a day or two, however bad, but we can study up on craft and catch up on some market or story research.
Here are the rules (Only 3)
1. Pick a challenge that will aid in honing a weak point in your writing process. Small enough to finish over three days (Friday, Saturday and Sunday before Midnight)
2. Comment on this post before Midnight about the writing challenge you’re giving yourself and why.
3. Report back here again in the comments on Monday before 1:00 AM Tuesday, EST. What was your weekend challenge? Did you complete complete the challenge, and if not, what did you learn from your challenge that will help your writing in the long run?
To all those who join me in this challenge, I wish you all luck.
So go and face that fear!
Category Archives: Revision
How Does Critiquing Make YOU A Better Writer?
I’m not back regularly, and will be busy with NaNoWriMo in particular for the next two weeks, but I wanted to have a discussion about something many writers will have to face once their story has been written, whether it takes a month or not, getting feedback to make it better.
I can’t count how many articles I’ve read and interviews I’ve seen, heard or read where it’s said at some point “Get second eyes on your writing.” Not just for the technical stuff, which as important as it is, I really find it a pain sometimes, but also for things that don’t work or should be removed, and often the case for me, doesn’t make sense as currently written.
But how can you help others when you barely can help your own craft quirks and missteps ?
While many have told me you just have to say what I like and what I don’t if I can’t be technically helpful, I’m not simply talking about reading tastes and other subjective things like that. I just really don’t feel I can help to the extent I was helped. It’s one of the key reasons I had to leave my first critique group.
I was, and sadly still am, weak in the areas they excelled, so often I felt like if they had issues I’d never had or understood, how could I be helpful?
People can say “What X character did isn’t convincing” until the cows come home, but knowing that, and even agreeing that is the case, doesn’t mean finding a better way to do it just comes to you, and that’s for critiquing others work and trying to edit and/or revise your own.
So in the comments I urge you to answer the following-
What’s ONE did you learn from critiquing others writing that made your writing better?
Only one to really zero in on what the greatest takeaway for you is.
Together, let’s try to take crisis out of critiquing others writing, and our own.
Ciao For Now,
Taurean