You Always Have Room For Improvement

Every writer has that wincing experience of opening an old notebook, and seeing what a past iteration of them put down on the page. And if you stick with things long enough, you may even get to have that experience by picking up an old book you wrote, or an older collection you contributed to.

It's important to remember that no matter how good you think you are, there's always room for you to perfect your craft. The flip side of that is that no matter how bad you think your writing is, you can always use that last attempt as a ladder to climb a little higher.

Trust me, nobody's perfect.

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Now then, let's get to it!

Get Those Gains!

One of my favorite metaphors to describe writing, as my regular readers know, is to compare it to weightlifting. Because while your natural strength (talent) matters, it's only one component. There's also your discipline, the particular routine you do, your form, advice from more experienced lifters (mentors and other writers), your diet (what you read), and a hundred other factors!

Bro, do you even know Dostoyevsky?

Another similarity between writing and weightlifting, though, is that it can feel like you make a lot of progress when you start, but after a while you slow down. Even if you're still adding plates to the bar, it may not be as significant as the difference between your first month and your first quarter check in.

Because of that it's easy to get complacent. To go in and do the same routine, getting similar results every time. And even if what you're doing is good, you can still actively choose to make yourself better!

This doesn't mean you have to utterly change up your writing and do something completely different, though; as with the weight room, you can alter any number of factors as you see fit. Maybe you want to take a break from longer projects, and work on short stories for a bit to tighten up your plots and word choices. Perhaps you want to swap genres, switching out your blood and scares for some heartfelt romance. Or maybe you just change the media you consume and study, examining how other creators do things so you can take apart their tales and add useful tools to your box.

Sometimes these changes are going to go poorly. After all, just because you're a strong power lifter doesn't mean you're going to be good at endurance exercises. But no one is good at everything on their first try. Learning from your failures and mistakes is key, and all the lessons those previous attempts teach you will come in handy down the line.

Because if you never challenge yourself, and you never try anything different, then just like in the weight room you're going to plateau... and nobody wants that.

A Project That Put This On My Mind

The subject of learning and growing as a creator trying to do different things is on my mind because I've been working on making short audio dramas based on some of the fiction inside my various RPG supplements that have come out over the past few years. While my fledgling efforts could be called fine under the most generous of measures, I'm genuinely impressed by how much improvement has gone into the project in a relatively short period of time. They're still not perfect, of course, and I have a lot of improving still to do, but I find it encouraging to see things get a little better every time.

More on that process in Making Improvements Over Time (Progress on My RPG-Inspired Audio Stories) if that's something you'd like to take a closer look at!

Like, Follow, and Come Back Again!

That's all for this week's Craft of Writing! For more of my work, check out my Vocal archive, or at My Amazon Author Page where you can find books like my cat noir novel Marked Territory, its sequel Painted Cats, my sword and sorcery novel Crier's Knife, or my most recent short story collection The Rejects!

 

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