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Taking stock
Here’s a simple exercise for your Monday: take a look at your writing from five years ago, from one year ago, and compare it to your writing today. Has it improved? Are you surprised by how far you’ve come?
Very few writers are born with exceptional skill, a distinctive voice, an abundance of ideas. Voice, in particular, is something that emerges as you practice writing. That’s one reason it is important to look back at your past work and see how it has improved. What mistakes are you still making? I struggle with tense (past perfect? is that a thing?), and a quirky but predictable rhythm to sentence structure (I like things in threes). Take a long look at your progress, pat yourself on the back, and make a list of elements you want to improve. See, I did that “things in threes” thing again. Baby steps.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]
Nonfiction know-how:
editing
When editing a story or essay, think about it on two levels: structural and technical. The structural side is “what is this story I am telling and how am I doing it.” Technical editing is more about commas, spelling, grammar, and word choice. Of course there’s some overlap between the two.
Whether you’re writing a new piece or touching up an old one, though, here’s what you should be looking at, at a bare minimum. Let Rowan tell you more. Fictioneers, this applies to you too, so don’t miss this one!
Want more info?
Is this your first time here? Check out Sunday’s post which kicked off the week here at yeah write. Our email subscribers can also join us in the yeah write coffeehouse at its home on Facebook. If you’ve never taken the time to read them, please take a moment to familiarize yourself with our submission guidelines. The rules are a little different for each of our challenges and we’d hate to have to send back great writing on a technicality.
Did you happen to end up here because you suddenly saw yeah write in your stats? Sometimes members of our community spot excellent writing and they send those posts on over to us. We hope you don’t mind. Take a look around and get to know our community. We’re sure you’ll be happy here.
Have questions you can’t find the answer to by poking around the site? Email us or find us on Facebook and Twitter and we’ll happily help you out.
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How to submit and fully participate in the challenge
Basic yeah write guidelines: 1000 word limit; your entry can be dated no earlier than this past Sunday; nonfiction personal essay, creative opinion piece or mostly true story based on actual events.
1. In the sidebar of this week’s post, please grab the code beneath the nonfiction badge and paste it into the HTML view of your entry
2. Follow the Inlinkz instructions after clicking “add your link” to upload your entry to this week’s challenge grid
3. Your entry should appear immediately on the grid if you don’t receive an error message
4. Please make the rounds to read all the entries in this week’s challenge
5. Consider turning off moderated comments and CAPTCHA on your own blog
Submissions for this week’s challenges will close on Wednesday at 10pm ET. Voting will then open immediately thereafter and close on Thursday at 10pm ET. The winners, as always, will be celebrated on Friday.
Thank you for sharing with us your hard work! Good luck in the challenge…[/vc_column_text][vc_column_text]