5 Ways to Be a Better Writer

I've been surfing the internet for potential blog ideas and one of the ones I came across was to "write what you know." It may seem obvious, but I liked the idea of blogging about the one thing I like and do pretty well (if I do say so myself) - writing. So here's my list of five ways to improve your own writing, geared towards my fellow fiction/creative writers and bloggers.

1. Research your topic. This isn't your high school English course, where you can make things up as you go along. If it sounds like crap to you, it sounds like crap to me. Honestly, I can tell you made it up. Do your research!

2. Reread. And then reread it again. And then, just for fun, reread it again... Out loud. While there is nothing greater to hear than the sound of your own voice (heh), this also helps you to eliminate small mistakes. No one is perfect, of course, but missing simple mistakes is pretty much equivalent to telling me you don't care about what you're writing. So why should I?

3. Draft ideas ahead of time to avoid writer's block. Keep a journal for inspiration, or a draft post on your blog with potential post topics. This is probably my favorite advice, because there have been many times where thinking of a post under the pressures of writing about it was awful. Now, I keep a draft post constantly going on blogger, so that anytime I come across some thing on the internet that I think would be interesting I can just add it to the draft post and it will be saved for me to write about at a later time.

4. Give out props and write to make a point, not a word count. For this one, I give props to www.lifehack.org who gave me the idea to add to my list of writing tips. I like this one especially because so many students write in college to meet minimum page requirements, without considering if the content they are typing is actually valuable or pertinent to the subject. I'd like to think that I keep things fairly to the point. Or at least make it interesting to keep reading along!

5. Show, don't tell. Instead of simply stating a fact, surround it with a background so that your readers can connect to your writing. Make it into a story, and show them why they should be interested in such a fact instead of just laying it all out there. This may seem to contradict number four, but you can keep things to the point while letting your creativity give your writing some flair.

That's it for tonight, folks. Until tomorrow!

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