Once you’ve got good feedback, you still have to figure out what to do with it. Luckily, those who have gone before have provided an answer. What you need, they teach us, is a tool to convert wrong words into right words, a working model that you can test your story against. It’s super useful, and it’s got a name: The Ideal Reader.
This year, I participated in the first annual Conscious Me Pre-Writing Challenge. Not only did I participate…I won it. This challenge is all about Writing it Early, which I talked about at the start of the challenge. That’s something you need to work on, whether you’re a blogger, a novelist, or anyone else who has to do serious writing from time to time. It always feels like a hassle, a necessary evil — or maybe you see it as a luxury you can’t afford — but it’s one of the best things you can do to make your work better (and, ultimately, to make it easier and less stressful).
I’ve mentioned it a couple times, and even devoted a whole page to a detailed description, but I’m participating in the Conscious Me Pre-Writing Challenge.
It’s all about Writing it Early, which I talked about a couple weeks ago, just as I was getting started. I thought it might be beneficial to you guys, my readers, to know a little bit more about the challenge, and about my experience with it.
Your assignment this week is to provide me detailed feedback and practice borrowing others’ inspiration, all at one go. I want you to pick an article on UnstressedSyllables.com and critique it on your blog. Write 300-900 words analyzing the presentation, the content, the readability, the skimmability, the applicability, even the statistical distribution of non-E vowels. Go back to my advice in “What Should You Write About?” and figure out what you should write about, when you’re describing my blog.
Today’s post is more a story than a lecture, but it’s a story rich with writing advice. It harkens back to a creative writing exercise from January, and foreshadows a worthwhile topic for future discussion. It’s also a pretty sweet story, when it comes right down to it.
My dad is in his first Creative Writing class, as I’ve mentioned before. His first assignment was to write something for the class to review. The assignment was vague, but its destiny was clear: the whole class would pass judgment on whatever it was he wrote.
That’s the biggest challenge of any blogging project: keeping up with the blog’s posting schedule. Really, it’s just a regularly recurring version of what is the biggest challenge for every writer: writing to a deadline.
There are techniques for handling that last minute writing, skills you can learn to make it as good as possible, but in the end that’s all just damage control. You cannot write your best quality work unless you write it early.
You’ve heard it before, in any writing class you’ve ever taken. You’ve heard it from Nathan Bransford and Writer’s Digest and from me. You know it, you’ve always known it, but you’ve never really been able to follow through. Still, the fact remains: if you want to get better at writing, you need to practice writing every day.
Sit down and think about what it is you want your writing to do, and then make a list — ask your readers if you’ve succeeded. Make your questions open-ended, encouraging longer and thought-out answers, but make them specific, too. Some of my favorites are, “What was your favorite scene? What’s something from the story that you’ve found yourself thinking about even when you weren’t reading? Which character did you find the most engaging, and why?”
As a new writer ready to start on revision, it’s difficult to know what’s wrong with your story, and sometimes even more difficult to know why it’s wrong. A good mark-up will reveal both of those things, but then it’s still up to you to figure out what to do with them.
