The Critical Eye...

I’m always amazed immediately after reading a story from Workshop—all I can do is gush about how awesome the story was, how clever the plot, how well-written. But that doesn’t make for very helpful feedback in terms of edits/revisions, so I have to force myself to look over the story with a critical eye. It usually helps if I take a break from it for a little bit, and then I look at the story again. Usually the second time through, I have a lot more constructive criticism to hand out, in terms of how to make the story even better. As I force myself to go into this critical mental “zone” more and more, I’ve actually gotten better at seeing flaws in writing. Part of it is also hearing other people’s critiques during workshop. I’ve picked up some common errors that a lot of people get critiqued for, and I’ve started to look for those more and more. This critical eye will help me when I’m editing my own story, I think. I’m really glad I’m one of the last people to go—hopefully everything I pick up from the workshops will allow me to write a better story! Although currently, I have major writers block. No inspiration at all for my story. Hopefully that will change soon…

Just by the way…one thing that surprised me is that my previous studying for SAT writing (the multiple choice) has actually helped me point out grammar inconsistencies and grammatical errors…so I guess it wasn’t completely useless (haha kidding, it helped a lot).