How to tell if your writing is improving?
Learning to write well takes time and practice. That’s why I always encourage anyone who wants to write a family history or historical novel to make sure they write as much as they research. As I wrote in an earlier blog about balancing research and writing, the early drafts can be considered skills practice until you have enough research to get your story straight.
There are many great ways to build your writing skills including read craft books, reading novels like a writer, taking writing classes, and practicing. Sometimes it can surprise writers at how challenging it can be to take the knowledge they gain from classes and books and put it into action. You might have read about showing versus telling, or point of view and perspective, but getting them right on the page can be surprisingly challenging.
Once you have started drafting your book it often takes a long time before you have a finished manuscript ready for an editor’s feedback. You might wonder what is going well and what needs work before you keep going. Getting feedback on your writing early not only helps you improve your craft it can also help you identify what is working and what needs improvement. Knowing what works is just as important as knowing where you need to level-up your skills.
One way to accomplish this is to join a writer’s group or critique group. This can be an invaluable way to gain skills as you go. It also has the added benefit of helping you build a writing community which is so important when most of our writing lives are solitary. If you regularly get the same feedback on your writing, you will know it is an area where you need to develop more skills. Sometimes, though, you might get feedback from your group but aren’t sure how to fix the problem. That is where an editor or writing instructor can help.
The right kind of feedback at the right time
You would never send an editor your first draft of your historical fiction novel for a full developmental edit, and definitely not your zero draft (notes, outlines, exploratory drafts). It would be a waste of your time and money to work with an editor before you have done as much as you possibly can to improve it first. But many writers need help with the basics and that is where a partial edit, or as I like to think of it, a guiding edit, or even a manuscript critique can be useful. A partial edit can help build confidence in your writing and shorten the time it takes to deepen your understanding of writing craft.
Getting feedback on successive early drafts or pieces of writing can give you valuable insight on how to improve your craft before getting too far into the story. While it may not be great at helping you identify big picture issues with plot, it can certainly give insights into a number of craft elements such as dialogue, use of backstory, world building techniques, point of view, and creating tension at the scene level. Learning these skills will greatly improve the quality of your writing and reduce the number of revisions needed in subseqent drafts. It can even lower the cost of developmental editing because the focus will be on big picture issues instead of writing technique.
Editorial feedback versus coaching
You might wonder about the difference between feedback on early drafts and book coaching. This can be a bit tricky to sort out because many professionals use the terms interchangeably. I take a craft-focused approach to coaching. I see coaching as supporting the experience of planning researching and writing in addition to giving feedback on the writing itself. In other words, helping you with motivation, accountability, finding ideas, or working out tricky problems together. Editorial feedback aims to improve the writing on the page without much interaction between editor and writer. Some writing coaches will combine these and others will not. Just make sure you know which you are getting and make sure it is the right sort of support for you.
