I’ve improved most dramatically at writing by getting very specific feedback from people who are clearly better than me. I consider myself lucky to have had a small handful of teachers and professors willing to put in the time to critique my writing on the sentence- and word-level.
Recently I had a work of fiction of mine minutely critiqued by a professional author and experienced a similar sense of “leveling up”. For example, I’ve thought for years that I understood what “show don’t tell” means. But my gracious editor in this case was able to point out multiple instances in my story where I was “telling” when I could be “showing”. Once he pointed these out, I understood on a deeper level what to pay attention to.
One interesting thing about getting feedback on writing is that someone who is truly better than you can usually provide suggestions that you immediately recognize as correct. You may think your writing is fine, even great, but you’ll recognize true improvements as being obviously correct and better, once pointed out. The process of becoming better at writing is the accumulation of such individual corrections.
I’ve improved most dramatically at writing by getting very specific feedback from people who are clearly better than me. I consider myself lucky to have had a small handful of teachers and professors willing to put in the time to critique my writing on the sentence- and word-level.
Recently I had a work of fiction of mine minutely critiqued by a professional author and experienced a similar sense of “leveling up”. For example, I’ve thought for years that I understood what “show don’t tell” means. But my gracious editor in this case was able to point out multiple instances in my story where I was “telling” when I could be “showing”. Once he pointed these out, I understood on a deeper level what to pay attention to.
One interesting thing about getting feedback on writing is that someone who is truly better than you can usually provide suggestions that you immediately recognize as correct. You may think your writing is fine, even great, but you’ll recognize true improvements as being obviously correct and better, once pointed out. The process of becoming better at writing is the accumulation of such individual corrections.