The best writing advice anyone will ever give you is practice, practice, practice and read, read, read. I’ve got the reading part down, kind of, and one of the main reasons I created this blog was to practice my writing. Three posts in (including this one) and a couple of ideas in draft later, I don’t think I’m improving much.
Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t expect to see a miraculous improvement over three days, but I did expect to take extra time on my writing. Unfortunately, that’s not the reality of my life. For each of the last few days, I’ve rushed to put fingers to keyboard to get a few minutes of writing in. Although this is an improvement over not writing at all, I doubt rushing to write a blog post every day is going to help me improve my writing much. And I doubt it gets me closer to finishing one of the novels I started.
Obviously, there’s an easy solution to this problem. If I can manage to start writing earlier in the evening, I will. I’m not going to beat myself up over it or anything. Eventually, I’ll get the practice bit down as well as I have the reading bit down. I may have to ease myself into it, just like I have to ease myself into reading quality novels instead of poorly written chick lit. But that’s a topic for another day.
Here’s my modified writing advice for improving your writing: practice, but don’t rush; read as much as you can, but avoid the chick lit.