Common Critiquing Courtesy

Uncategorized
As promised, today I'm going to talk to you about common critiquing courtesy: how to deal with a harsh critique, and how to give a tactful critique. If you really do want to turn writing from a hobby into a career, it's important to know how to deal with harsh critics. When your book is out in the real world, it will face criticism. No matter how popular your novel is, there will always be at least one person who will absolutely hate your work. When it's a critiquer in a private forum, it's rude to send them angry responses telling them how awesome your work REALLY is. When it's a book reviewer online, it's not just rude--it can end your career. Remember that the first, and most important, rule…
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Getting Feedback

Writing
Feedback is crucial to any serious writer's progress. It's nice to have someone read your work and tell you it's awesome, but that's not really why feedback is important. In fact, if somebody's looking at your first draft and telling you it's awesome, odds are they're just trying to flatter you. The reason why feedback is so important to a writer's progress is because we're often too close to our writing to see what's wrong with it. We love those pretty sentences that just don't belong. We're so deeply in love with our world that we forget our readers don't know anything about it. We already know the story, so we tend to skim instead of slowing down to find the spelling mistakes. A second pair of eyes helps us…
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Creating your Editing Watch List

Editing, Editing: The Hard Part, Inspirational, Writing
Some of us are instinctively better with grammar than others, but none of us are perfect. We all have to edit our work to make it into something awesome. Every writer makes different mistakes, but individually, we tend to make the same ones over and over again. This is why it's a good idea to create an editing watch list. There are a few things that pretty much every writer does in the first draft that, while not necessarily wrong, don't make the story better. Your editing watch list will contain words and punctuation that you use too often. We all have crutch words and behaviours, words and behaviours that we force on our novels and our characters because we can't think of anything else and we know they need…
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