by Travis Stidham

One of the most valuable creative writing tips that will immediately improve your writing: have someone else review your manuscript.  The best way to do this is through a writing community or a workshop group and there are at least five ways that this benefits you.

Any writer looks forward to the day when they can sit down at the breakfast table with a glass of orange juice or a cup of coffee and crack open the newspaper to find a review of their latest book.  Odds are, though, that this review will not praise your godly writing talent; it will give the good with the bad.  Submitting a manuscript regularly to a workshop group will get you thinking of criticism as it pertains to the manuscript and not how it pertains to you.

Would you write something you didn’t think was good in your manuscript?  Sure, if you’re pressed for time.  But what about those absolute gems you sprinkle throughout your piece?  The workshop group will love those, right?  This is why attending a workshop group is one of the most valuable creative writing tips.  Anything that you write down, somewhere in your thought process had to be a good idea.  Others will see these lines, paragraphs, pages, or ideas from a neutral perspective, and can take out the shovel to bury them without much delay.

When you write a story, there’s a limit on what can happen or how the ideas can connect based on your experience.  Maybe you never thought that the main character stuck in his mountain life has to go to the city to reach a sense of enlightenment.  Submitting your work to a community will break the limit on your writing that is set by your thought processes.  Others can open your manuscript up to possibility after possibility.

You cannot know everything about writing, but other people can know things that you do not.  Maybe someone in the group says a word you have never heard, such as authorial interpretation.  Finding the meaning of craft words like these is like finally realizing the name for that mysterious tool in the toolbox.  Listening to others in a workshop will allow you to learn different critiquing methods that you can use to improve your writing.  

We all know the stigma: writers are recluses that lock themselves in small rooms for hours.  This may be true, but after so long you get an itch under your skin and you have to talk to someone.  What better topic could there be to talk about at the time then about writing?

There are a number of creative writing tips that will help you, but none will have an effect as immediate or gratifying as a good workshopping.  Sitting through a workshop of your manuscript will open your mind to the flaws, the strengths, help you improve your writing.