What Do You Need to Improve: LWC Writers Share Their Top Five

This winter LWC will celebrate five years of LWC. We are starting the celebration a little early by doing a weekly top-five series. Each Wednesday LWC members will post their top-five answers to a specific question. This is week six, and LWC writers were asked this question:

In what areas would you most like to improve in your writing?

Karen Aldridge:

1. Giving myself the freedom to break the rules when it aids my story to do so.
2. Letting my imagination soar - I tend to reel it in too often.
3. Finding the right balance in description. I think I under-describe often because I'm afraid of getting too wordy.
4. Vocabulary - If I had it to do all over again, I would have paid better attention to vocabulary exercises when I was in school. I often struggle to find just the right word when I'm writing.
5. General writing knowledge - I feel like I never know enough about writing even though I constantly look for more learning opportunities. I'd love to know enough to formally teach writing some day.

Frankie Ren:

1. I need to get the stories that I write in my head down on paper.
2. Getting my POV across.
3. My spelling is the worst.
4. Writing a story in order.
5. I need to do my rewrites.

Jennifer Ballard:

1. Self-discipline. I'm not sure if this is something you can learn or improve with practice, but I struggle with it constantly.
2. Organization - of my writing: files, notes, outlines - and within my writing: plots, timelines, etc.
3. Sensory description. I am terrible with this because I don't pay much attention to such things in the world around me, so often leave it out of my writing.
4. Characterization. I'd like to be able make my characters as interesting on the page as they are in my head.
5. Plotting. I admire writers who can weave a complicated plot or subplots and have it all make sense. I struggle keeping a simple plot working out in my novels.

Ed Chinn:

1. Building good, solid endings that leave the readers weak with "wow!"
2. Integrating story lines
3. Developing plot
4. Crafting believable dialogue
5. Creating vivid and distinguishable characters.

Amanda Green:

1. Punctuation (having my work read exactly as I am intending)
2. Grammar
3. Being more concise. Getting to the point quicker.
4. Point of View / Audience
5. Dialogue

Heather Clift:

1. Scenes that are more dynamic
2. Richer vocabulary
3. Better dialogue
4. More discipline to make my fiction writing a priority
5. Self-confidence in my abilities

Sheryl Griffin:

1. Strengthening Grammar and punctuation use
2. Ability to use “word power” better (I use my thesaurus, however, I would like it to come naturally)
3. Point of view usage
4. Time management (i.e distractions)
5. My passion and bend is towards non-fiction, although, I would love to write fiction or humor pieces at some point in my life

Karen Phillips:

1. Getting started. I have spent this whole summer working on character profiles for the book that I want to write. I have written a couple of pages, but then I’ll change my thoughts about the POV or whatever and won’t use what I’ve written.
2. POV. I think maybe, just maybe I have a handle on this now, but it’s been driving me nuts who in my list of characters might tell this story that’s buried so deeply in my brain right now.
3. Did I say getting started?
4. Getting
5. Started!

Ron Billmyer:

1. My weakest area is setting and adhering to timeline goals. I want to improve and adhere to goal setting timelines.
2. I would like to develop a much better outline for my novel
3. I want to improve my character development process with detailed biographies on each character.
4. I want to be more creative in my settings and storyline.
5. Finally and lastly, I want to stop being redundant and repetitious, repeating things over and over, again and again, repetitiously.

Trisha Petty:

1. Grammar.
2. Lots of time.
3. Grammar.
4. Syntax.
5. Grammar.

Ross Martin:

1. Learning the meanings of all the writing guidelines printed in help books.
2. Finding a a mood and comfortable place to write.
3. I do not like punishing my main characters, but I must learn how to do it.
4. Learning the proper grammar to use as I like to use words that are like they sound instead of proper words.
5. I think I need to go back and take English classes.