Receiving Writing Feedback

Photo by Chris Liverani on Unsplash

Driving home from the rink recently, my son begrudgingly shared—and I thank the heavens daily he feels safe to share with me—how during practice, a team member made a viscous comment about a mistake he made on the ice. Doing my best not to slam on the brakes and one-eighty-it to drive over the little bastard, I forced myself to reflect on the resilience it will build in my son to take this hard knock and learn from it.

Heaven knows, it sure isn’t easy.

As a writer in the query trenches, rejections are a constant reality. After I pick myself up, and dust myself off, the next step is to search out advice to improve my writing. I, as well, have had to develop a thicker skin and tune into my inner voice to further understand what advice is best to listen to. Read more

Lessons Learned

Bernice - EditorAs a newbie to writing, and related editing and publishing processes, I recently experienced an eye-opening, roller coaster ride of a learning curve as the Ascribe writers prepared a collection of short stories with plans to publish.

It was an ambitious project. Several group members served as editors, for each other and for the rest of us, in order to ensure our work was the best it could be. Each story was reviewed by four editors. In our scramble to meet deadlines, we created quite the log-jam at the end, making for extremely short turn-around times for writing changes and submitting stories to the next editor. Read more

word!

Word Good

word!
GOOD!

It may seem obvious to say this, but the basic building blocks of writing … are words.

It may also seem obvious to say that among the differences between a good writer and a great one, is the choice of words they employ.

And yet, many writers don’t pay as much attention to their word choice as they might.

Wait, don’t get angry

That statement is perfectly Read more

How I Became a Freelance Writer

I’m writing to offer you …

Yes, I’m working on a novel. And it’s coming along fine. But there’s still a long way to go until it is written, edited, published, and receiving splendid reviews and whopping cash advances from publishing houses.

Speaking of cash, I needed to generate some. I wanted to do it by writing something shorter than a great long novel. My friend suggested freelance writing. Editors are often looking for well-written articles for their magazines, he said.

Write about what interests you

OK, but what could I write about? I asked myself. I love research, I love the outdoors, and I love history. OK. My first step was coming up with an idea I thought would be fairly unique and interesting to people who also love those subjects. Once I had the idea, I fleshed out points that I wanted to cover in that article. I would return to those points later. Read more