Things You Can Do to Improve Your Writing Now

Some Common Easy Fixes

About my editing chapters on Wattpad: I spent a bit of time editing for Freya's Bower and spent a lot of time editing and analyzing my own work. To help other writers, I've thrown together some writing tips based on experience and personal observation. The best way to become a better writer is to learn to edit your own work: to become aware of your writing habits and be able to analyze and fix your prose. Big hint: a real editor does not edit your work for you. A real editor from a real publishing house gives revision recommendations, and a real writer fixes their shoddy prose. Critiquing is useful to some writers, but ultimately the most useful thing a writer can do is learn to analyze and fix their own work. If you think an editor should fix your work for you, to the point of changing most sentences or even re-arranging the paragraphs and so on, then you're pretty much asking for a form of ghost-writing and should expect to pay for the intensive labour. But really, learn to do it yourself. Might take years, but it's worth it if your passion is writing.

Note: Most of the tips work best with an editing program that can search, highlight and replace text. Anyone serious about improving their writing is going to study grammar and punctuation, so unless I have a specific example, I will not discuss either.

Spell check, spell check, spell check. I can't stress this enough. If you edit your work after a spell check, select the new sections and spell check again. Writing is one of the most unforgiving art forms because our set of tools--the words of our language--have an exact form, which is spelling.

Avoid stating the obvious. Phrases like 'stood up' and 'sat down'. Do you need up? Do you need down? Unless your characters have the habit of seating themselves sideways or upside down, don't add a direction to sitting or standing.

He/she turned and walked to... Do you need the 'turned and'? It's already obvious someone turned if they walked anywhere from a given position. Weed combinations of 'turned/turning and' from your story.

Avoid unnecessary repetition of the obvious. Example: 'He offered the cards to him.' Do you need 'to him'? Look at your work as a whole. Highlight 'to him', 'to her', 'at him', etc. Remove any obvious repetitions wherever the removal doesn't ruin the meaning of the sentence or the flow of the words. You will find most 'to him/her' doesn't need to be there.

Avoid overuse of possessive pronouns while writing in third person if those pronouns emphasize personal awareness too often. Example: He ran his hand through his thick black hair that fell past his collar. If it is obvious that the hand is his and the hair is his, don't use his. Fixed example: He ran a hand through the thick black hair that fell past his collar. Reason for this fix? Look up Mary Sue in writing. Though Mary Sue (Gary Stu) is considered a first person flaw, the same mechanism can sour third person prose. The more you make it seem as if your character is conscious of his external features every time he does something with his own body, the less realistic he becomes and the more aware your reader becomes of reading. You never want your reader to pull out of the story because of obvious and fake vanity on the part of a character. The articles (a, the) give more distance from character POV.

I can add more advice to this list if Wattpad writers are interested.