As writers, a good portion of our time seems to be dedicated to waiting. You wait to hear back from agents, you wait for contest results, you wait on e-mail replies, you wait for your critique partners to read your projects, etc. And if you’re like me and aren’t the most patient person, the waiting can be hard.
One of the best ways to writing a good descriptive piece is to think about the five senses. Sight is a commonly used one, as it’s usually the one we rely on most, but what about sound? What about touch or taste or smell? Here are three exercises you can use to explore the other senses.
What is beautiful writing? What kind of sentence (or paragraph, or page), makes us pull out a pencil and underline? When we see a quote on Pinterest or Twitter, what makes us pin or retweet it? There are many different kinds of writing styles, and we all have different tastes. But I think there are four things in particular that makes us all read a passage over and over again.
If you subscribe to as many writing websites as I do, I’m sure you’re constantly bombarded by the same advice: Just write, write every day, push through writer’s block, don’t wait for inspiration, etc. And while that’s all great advice, and most of the time very necessary to follow, there’s something to be said for taking a break.
No matter how thick our skin is, it’s always tough to hear something negative about our work. We’ve worked so hard on it for so long, made so many edits, and now there’s even more to change. How does our manuscript even remotely resemble the original idea?
Luckily, there are a few things you can do to handle critiques in a more positive way. Here are four of my tips.
