Today I have a guest post from fellow writer Anne Pyle. Enjoy!
Anne Pyle is a recent graduate and wife living in East Texas and writing away. She enjoys reading, watching television, and jamming to anything indie.
You can view Anne’s blog at http://annewarkewriter.wordpress.com
I love to write. I’ve been writing and posting poems for days, and
while it is majorly challenging and exhausting, I also feel proud to
see what I have accomplished so far. Writing is extremely difficult,
but through the trial comes beautiful work. That being said, there are
some times when I look back and feel like my earliest work’s style is
my best. It’s at least my most popular, with my short story “Blueberry
Picking” receiving the most popular feedback. I’m very proud of this
work.
If my favorite work I’ve written came out almost four years ago, how
do I know if I’ve improved? Sometimes the fear of not improving
prevents me from writing at all in a crippling mental block. To fight
this, I decided to compare two fiction texts–“Blueberry Picking,” and
a chapter from a novel I started last fall–and see whether anything
had gotten better.
As I compared these two pieces, I noticed a couple of things were
different, and finally felt some relief that yes, I had improved:
Dialogue. I noticed in my first piece that there was almost no
dialogue. This is one of my biggest struggles: how do I take my
character out of their mind and into the real world? It worked well
for my short story since the entire piece is written from the inside
of her mind, but for the novel, I used dialogue to give more depth to
the character and how she reacts with the world.
Message. In longer works, there are multiple messages, themes, and
motifs that are communicated. The short story holds only a couple, so
it is more straightforward. For me, books tend to have the meaning
disguised; the reader must earn the meaning of the piece through
reading the entire work.
Characterization. In my short story, I only showed one side of the MC:
her mental illness. In the novel excerpt, I explored the character’s
relationship with work, emotional wellness, and her boyfriend. Though
my way of showing each person’s personality is different, the meaning
seems deeper and more impactful in the novel chapter.
Looking back on all I have written since my most popular work, I can
tell that I really have been moving forward. This is a very
encouraging find, so maybe you should try it too! Take a work from the
past and a work from the present. How has it changed? Have you
improved? What would you like to bring back from the past? What are
you really glad you learned?
