The Writer's Block

by Alyssa Ast

Practice makes perfect, right? Well, then it takes practice to become a great writer. The more you write, the greater your skills as a writer become. When you grow as a writer, you take time to strengthen your weak points. However, not everyone takes the time to do this or acknowledge that they have areas that need improvement. This is a problem. No one is perfect, and everyone has room for improvement, especially when it comes to your skills as a writer. You must improve your weak points in order to grow as a writer.

Looking Back
It's not easy to admit we have flaws in our writing, and we may not always see them. But, if you take the time to look back on some of the work you wrote one or two years ago, you'll clearly see which aspects of your writing have improved. This reinforces the fact, you have current areas you could be improving. When I look back at some of the work I wrote a couple of years ago, I cringe at it, but what's funny is I thought it was some of my best work at the time. I'm sure the same thing will happen when I look back again in a few months at my current work. Even though I cringe at my past work, I love the fact I can clearly see where my writing has improved and the fact that I'm growing as a writer.

Learn More
One way to help your writing skills grow, is to simply learn more. Take time periodically to read blogs or books about writing and grammar. Then, take what you have learned and put it to use. It's not that difficult. Sure, at first it may take a little bit of extra time while proofreading and writing to fix the mistakes you've made, but in a short time, it will become second nature to you, and you'll no longer be making those mistakes.

Read More
A great way to improve your writing is by reading. Since we are writers, we love reading. So you can learn to improve your writing by doing a task you love. Reading anything will help you improve your week areas. Whether you notice it or not, as you read you learn more about maintaining a certain tone or voice, you learn about building engaging characters and much more. If you pay a little more attention, you'll learn more about sentence structure, punctuation and grammar.

Learn from Friends
You can also improve your writing by learning from your friends. Find some friends you know who aren't afraid to be brutally honest. Have them read your work and evaluate the areas of your writing that they liked and didn't like. Do this with a few friends, and then you can create a list of areas that need improvement.

If you have writer friends, read some of their work. By doing so, you can see where their strong and weak points are, then take a look at your work to see if you're doing some of the same things.

So, here's my challenge for you:

Evaluate your work. Find a weak point you want to improve and work on it for the remainder of the month. At the end of the month, I want a report on your experience-- how you decided on what area to improve, how you did it, and if you're happy about the change.

For the remainder of the month, I'm going to work on that pesty comma a little bit more.

Happy Writing!

Growing as a Writer