How Can We Learn and Improve Our Writing Skills?
Want to improve your writing? Here are the strengths and weaknesses of 5 common ways to learn and improve our writing craft.
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Professional Beta Readers: What to Expect — Guest: CeCe Downs
If the usual beta-reading exchange doesn’t work for us, would a professional professional beta reader be good? What should we look for?
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Recognizing Quality Writing: Can We Tell If We’re Any Good?
What makes writing “good” takes more than just learning writing craft. That gap between tangible skills and enjoyable stories means it’s always difficult to define what makes for good writing—especially our own.
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Editing Processes: How Do We Improve?
No matter our publishing path, our work always needs to go through an editing process, but when are we ready for editing? How will we know? If we start too soon, we’re likely to struggle and waste time and/or money.
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Help! What If I Can’t Find Beta Readers?
Every writer struggles to get their thoughts on the page and make their ideas make sense to others. The typical advice for how to resolve that issue is to use beta readers, but what if we can’t find beta readers? What can we do?
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Writing Feedback: Reaching Our Potential
Whenever we send our work out into the world for feedback, we’re taking a risk. Depending on our levels of self-doubt, the feedback might roll off our back, inspire us to work harder and fix issues, or convince us that we should quit writing. How can we avoid destructive feedback and the temptation to quit?
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Four Tips for Beta Reading Outside Our Genre
During our search for beta readers, we might come across other writers willing to exchange–but they write in a different genre. Should we try a critique partnership anyway? Here are 4 tips for beta reading outside our genre.
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How to Make Beta Reading Work for Us
As writers, we’re so close to our stories it’s impossible to know how readers will interpret our words. That’s just one reason why we often need beta readers.
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Writing Diversity: How Can We Avoid Issues?
The real world is filled with diversity, and our stories should be the same way. There’s no “one right way” to portray diverse characters, but there are wrong ways to portray diversity. However, there are steps we can take to minimize—as much as possible—the potential of “getting it wrong.”
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Should Authors on the Traditional Path Pay an Editor? — Guest: Sharon Hughson
Writers pursuing traditional publishing are often told not to pay for editing before submitting to agents or publishers. But the landscape has changed and we’ve had to change our opinion and attitude about many old-school advice “rules.” Should this advice should be next on the chopping block?
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