What should improvement look like?

spikeman4444 said:

What are your opinions on how improvement should be measured?

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Individually. Nobody's going to write pure gold every time he or she sits down at the computer. Knowing the fool's gold from the real thing is probably the most important improvement there is.

Well, improvement doesn't mean perfection for a start. Hopefully, the reason you aren't getting it absolutely right every time is because you're stretching yourself a little more than you used to.

I think we can't tell the difference between good and bad when we're in the actively-writing phase is because that critical-thinking side and the creation side don;t really function well at the same time. It's like the kids trick where you try to pat your head and rub your tummy at the same time - both your hands end up doing the same thing.

As for what improvement looks like - it looks like improvement. My first drafts are cleaner than they were three years ago. Other people will pay for my work now, sometimes. I can now spot when I did something wrong, and I know roughly what to do to fix it.

It might be best to ask yourself what improvement would mean for you - and let go of the idea that you should be perfect at this, because there isn't anyone who is ever 'perfect' at anything.

My thought is that writing is a creative activity. You are busy using your imagination to lay down the framework of the story, whereas editing is more logical and analytical and that's where you can spot errors your creative side left behind.

Very few writers strike gold with their first draft (some might with short stories, but very few with novels). The majority need the editing process to polish. That's why, if you've been here long enough, there is the expression that when writing the first draft you should turn off your internal editor and allow yourself to write crap.

Another vote for individual improvement.

That being said, I've reached points where I felt like I'd leveled off-- and was frustrated by the lack of improvement. Ultimately this always leads to more reading, more writing, more teeth pulling agony of working hard to push myself places I haven't been....

and then suddenly, I'm improving.

It's very cyclic.

I think improvement should be measured by you. You can let us help you define it but you're the writer that makes the decision to take our suggestions. To me, if it's better then before it's an improvement.

Well, I know exactly how you feel, being disappointed in my writing quality after so many years of practice.

Maybe you need to get some distance from writing and let the fields lie fallow for a while. Rest can make a big difference for me. I realized that I can hammer away at a problem for weeks, months, years...WAY longer than other people take to work out the kinks of something. Pushing through doesn't work for me. But if I step away, and come back, I will have magically progressed during the rest period. (Or maybe it's just my mindset that's changed.)

Or maybe your initial drafts just tend to be messy...writing is messy. Nothing wrong with that! Most great writing is REwriting anyway. Challenge yourself to address problems in revision, really go hard at edits when the time comes, and I think those experiences of problem solving will start to influence your initial drafts. But I'd be careful not to be too hard on yourself for what the page says right now. The words aren't a judgment of your writing value and it's probably much better than you think.

Perhaps the improvement takes longer to happen in our heads than it does on the page.

spikeman4444 said:

I've been writing my entire life and writing seriously since about 2009. I've arrived at a place where I know what good writing is. I recognize it and can know why writing is good, what works and what doesn't, and I know what elements are not working when I read something that I don't like.

With that said, why is it that when I write, I'm not churning out golden eggs every time?

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Gosh, wouldn't we all give a lot to know the answer to that.

Sometimes it all comes together. Sometimes it doesn't. If you don't feel something you've written is up to par, or isn't as good as what you've written previously, figure out what's wrong and fix it. It's that easy, and that hard.

With more and more experience, we can expect that our first drafts should look more and more like our final drafts. But this is not a linear relationship, and it doesn't apply to every word, paragraph, scene or chapter of a given story. Also, if we experiment or try new areas of writing, we might not expect the same smooth incline.

More important, what we as authors see as our golden gems within a story may not be so viewed by critters or readers, so we have to concentrate on the overall story and how our perceived gems fit into that larger context.

Also, just as your baseball player will have good and bad days at the plate, so will writers have good and bad days at the keyboard.

So, what should improvement look like? It should look like you are getting closer and closer to writing damn good stories, or the damn good stories are becoming easier and easier to write, edit and polish. But beware--the golden segments of a story are useless unless the overall story is one of those damn good ones.

I think it's more like a baseball player who both improves his home run record and makes minute improvements that average out to an overall better game, instead of one that strikes out more.

A bad chapter may still be better than a bad chapter you wrote, if not 5 years ago, maybe 10.

Any improvement is good improvement, even if it is 1/10th of a second faster to first base.

MookyMcD said:

Individually. Nobody's going to write pure gold every time he or she sits down at the computer. Knowing the fool's gold from the real thing is probably the most important improvement there is.

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Speak for yourself. I write absolute, pure, 24k gold each and every time I. . .oh, wait, I was thinking of someone else. Never mind.

spikeman4444 said:

I've been writing my entire life and writing seriously since about 2009. I've arrived at a place where I know what good writing is. I recognize it and can know why writing is good, what works and what doesn't, and I know what elements are not working when I read something that I don't like.

With that said, why is it that when I write, I'm not churning out golden eggs every time? How come I can have a few chapters in an ms that are awesome, and then six or seven chapters in between that are no better than what I wrote five years ago? Is it normal to see improvement only coming along in segments rather than in entire works at once? I mean, does improving as a writer simply mean improving as an editor? If I know what works and what doesn't and can spot it and fix it, is that what I've really improved at? Can I never just sit down and write the whole story well the first time around? Is it about slowly breaking myself of old habits?

I guess the analogy that comes to mind is a baseball player. He may know how to hit a fastball and bat .300, but two thirds of the time he will still strike out. As a writer, is it expected that after five years I'm still making the same mistakes and striking out for 3/4 of the novel and only noticing improvement in that other quarter? Why can I only notice the bad in my writing after it's written and not WHILE I'm actually writing it???

What are your opinions on how improvement should be measured?

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Well, first, are you sure you recognize good writing, or do you simply recognize what you like, and what you don't like? After fifty-seven years of reading, and thirty-five years of writing, I'm still never sure I know the difference. They're very seldom the same thing, which is why we all have our favorites writers, and why our favorite writers are often hated by other readers.

Second, what do you mean by good writing? Prose is easy. I can write a page of really good prose at a moment's notice. Sometimes I can write a page, or a bunch of pages, of brilliant prose. But prose isn't fiction. Go into any MFA class, and you'll find a bunch of writers who write great prose, but they can't write characters readers want to spend time with and editors haven't met a hundred times, they can't make those characters speak good, realistic, meaningful dialogue, and they can't tell a story anyone wants to read. But, man, can they write good prose.

I think it's easy to see improvement in prose, but prose really isn't what sells fiction. If you have good story, good character, and good dialogue, all the prose has to do is be competent. It's tough to see or measure improvement in these areas, especially with your own writing.

Most of what I write sells. If we use the baseball analogy, I'd be a great player because, even with short stories, I bat somewhere around.800. I could bat higher, but I don't swing at pitches outside the pay zone.

But now and then I write a story that doesn't sell, that no one, anywhere, wants at any price. I don't think these stories are any better or worse than the ones I do sell.

In fact, Stories I often think stink on ice sell the best. I;m never sure what works and what doesn't. What I think works is often what doesn't sell, and what I think doesn't work is often what sells first time out.

So I don't know what to say, except that, yes, we probably do have areas where we keep making the same mistakes over and over, and improvement may be no more than learning to spot and correct these mistakes. Or correcting them through experience without even knowing we are making them.

I do believe there's something else involved, something hard to name. One of the best sentences I've ever read was "The whole world has AIDS."

As a standalone sentence, it's mundane, at best. Simple words, simple statement, etc. It's even "meh". But in the context of the novel, when it was put on the page, where it was put in the novel, what the story said leading up to that sentence, it was stunning. It jumped off the page and slapped me because it was truer than anything I could remember reading.

How do you write a simple sentence like that, and make it have such impact. How do you measure a story, especially your own, in areas like this?

Anyway, I really don't know. If you haven't sold anything, selling is a clear indication of improvement. If you have sold something, bigger and better markets are a good indication of improvement. But objectively weighing improvement in your own writing? I have no idea.

Improvement is a "catch-22," at least for me. It is similar to a cat trying to catch its own tail ^..^

As I improve my standards go up. So things I would have been satisfied with before are no longer acceptable. I work just as hard at writing as when I started as such. Harder maybe.

And I suppose that's how it'll always be, for me. Some find their stride really early on and writing becomes a settled matter.

Pretty cool.

Improvement is going to be personal when it comes to creative outlets. Sure there are some metrics you can measure such as how many grammatical errors you have per certain number of words.

However, I think improvement is somewhat subjective. When you look at your old work do you feel like you've learned new things? Do you feel like you see how you would have done something differently? That in mind, you also need to consider that your style may have changed rather than improved.

Another thing, you might have gotten better at one aspect of writing but not others. Frex, it's pretty common for folks to get pretty good at most types of scenes, but still suck at writing fights or love scenes or whatever. Cuz it's not just learning to write well; it's also learning to write well in different gears.

What should improvement look like?

An unseen tree falling in the woods upon one clapping hand. Only more bluish-purple.

Seriously, as others have said, it's hard to definitively quantify. Writing well is a journey, not a destination. So long as you're moving forward more than you're sliding back, you're on the right path. Ultimately, though, one should be gaining confidence in one's skills, if at an infinitesimal pace.