4 Tips to Help You Improve Your Writing Skills

Collaborative Post

There’s no question that writing is a skill. It takes time and effort, especially if your goal is to write a long-form novel and publish it. As well as effectively communicating information through text, you also have to make that information interesting, logical, and entertaining. If you’re writing a novel, you essentially create a world, characters, and story.

So, here are a few ways that you can improve your writing skills over time.

Practice, Practice, Practice

The most important thing you can do is to practice. Anyone who has been writing for a long time is familiar with the moment when you read an old piece of writing of yours and absolutely hate it. That’s because you’ve improved. You can only get better through writing.

So, write everything. Write scenes, short stories, character descriptions of people you see in the street. Spend this time coming up with ideas, and they can be as crazy as you like. Writing prompts can be a surprising way to help you with this. Even if you don’t like a prompt, just write.

You will probably generate a lot of writing that you don’t love this way. But you never know what ideas might crop up while you’re practicing. Besides, you can’t write too much.

Read Other Authors

Another way to improve your skills is by looking at other authors and successful novelists. Why are their books so great? You aren’t stealing ideas by learning from successful authors, but you are picking up tips.

Reading more improves your English skills and helps you learn how to express yourself more effectively. It also helps you learn how to construct a story, as you can start to see the foundation that different authors have in common.

Certain authors are especially good at specific scenes or genres. For example, JD Barker provides a masterclass of suspense through his novels as he slowly builds the tension throughout the scenes.

Alpha and Beta Readers

As well as reading and practicing, try to get other people to read your work. While friends and family come in handy, they can sometimes be too nice.

The best, and bravest option can be to put your work online and ask complete strangers to read it. You might get some harsh criticism, but don’t take it personally. Instead, look for what the comments have in common and see if you can learn from them.

Online writing buddies are a middle ground for this, as they can provide constructive criticism. It takes courage to ask someone to read your writing, because you’re also sharing your goals with them. It’s also important to make sure your work is protected, so keep copies of drafts and outlines to prove that you wrote your book, just in case.

Publishing a Book

Finally, once you’ve improved your skills and finished a manuscript, it’s time to get ready for publishing. Editing rounds are very necessary here and turn your first draft into a polished and finished product.

From here, you might consider self publishing your novel or trying a traditional publisher. Most people find self publishing is more attainable, and you never know what kind of success you might achieve this way, but you will have to put a lot of the work in yourself.

—End of collaborative post—

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