No writer is born perfect, improving your writing takes time and dedication, so, to help you become a great writer, I’ve provided some general tricks to help you become a confident in your skills while working to become a better writer.
1. Read
The most obvious and perhaps the easiest way to work on improving your writing is to read- whether it’s a magazine, a manual, a novel, or even a poem, reading other’s works can expose you to words and language you haven’t yet experienced before. If you stumble across something you particularly like in a piece of writing, jot it down or mark it so you can come back to it later, whether it’s to use it in your own writing or figure out what it means, it can’t hurt.
2. Write
This is a no-brainer- in order to improve your writing, you have to write. It can be about anything- write about your location in great detail, begin a short story, write a review for something. These simple acts allow the cogs in your brain to start turning and you might just find yourself using language you had picked up over the week.
3. Roleplay
Roleplaying might not seem like the most obvious thing to work on your writing skills, but it greatly helped me expand my horizons as a writer. Roleplaying combines both reading and writing into one great literary adventure. On one hand, you are actively writing, improving your skills while also learning from your partner. Not to mention roleplaying takes off a pressure of planning a whole story as it’s essentially joint-storytelling, so you can spend less time planning and more time writing.
4. Share Your Work
Sharing your work with close friends and family can be a great way to work on your skills. You are often your own harshest critic, so what seems horrible to you might be great to a friend of yours, and what seemed good to you could be seen as not the best by your friend. Sharing offers a different viewpoint on your writing, and it can really help you find your strong points and flaws while also building confidence in your skills as a writer.
5. Relax
As a writer, you have to accept that you are always going to judge your work more than the others around you, and while sometimes this is good, other times this will drag you down and you will find yourself unable to improve because you’re stuck thinking you can never get better. Mind games are half the effort here, if you believe you can get better and you put the work in, you will get better. So just relax, don’t think too hard, and write to your heart’s content. Some of what you churn out is going to be better than others, but don’t let the worse of your works discourage you.
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