How do you continue believing you have a message worth telling, when no one seems to want to listen?
How do you justify all the hours spent alone working on your craft, when the rapidly slamming doors all seem to say, “Keep your day job!”
I’ve wrestled with these doubts for years. If you have too, I’m honored that I have the opportunity to help you ease this frustration and amplify your message.
If you critique other writers work, your own writing improves. Everyone knows that.
But can critiquing make you a better person?
In my experience, it can!
I recently read a novel that bugged me. It took me about a hundred pages to realize why.
Many of the scenes were no longer than a few paragraphs. They felt rushed and not fully imagined by the author. Worse, most of the shortest scenes were flashbacks which added to the jumpy, disconnected feel to the story.
How long should scenes be in a novel or memoir?
A few days ago, I got an email from a Write Practice regular who said she had recently gotten a job writing a weekly column and was expanding her freelance writing business. “The Write Practice, and it’s great community, have been a big part of that,” she said. “I’ve learned skills and gained confidence that have been invaluable.”
It’s good to hear feedback like this. Sometimes I wonder, “Does The Write Practice really work? Are we making a difference?”
Writers are in constant struggle to come up with the new and unique. Keeping our long history and language boundaries in mind, this is no easy task and only adds more to the daily doses of writers’ anxiety. It’s especially true in moments when you’ve just had “the idea” – the one you were convinced was radically new – and after a quick research you realized it’s as old as your town square.
Thankfully, there are many ways to be ‘new’. Form, style, topic, voice – all these matter; however, sometimes only one of them will do.
