by Wayne Leon Learmond

Created on: May 29, 2010   Last Updated: July 01, 2010

The only sure-fire way for anyone becoming better at writing is to do it. Write, write and write again. Writing must flow through your veins like blood. The more you practice at your writing, the better you will become.  The old saying is certainly true, that practice makes perfect, and this goes for writing - just as much as for anything else.  To become better at writing one must not only practice their writing, but also study how others do it too.

Only by learning from those who have been published can we take in hints and tips as to how to do it ourselves. This does not mean copying, word for word, other writers work. as that would be plagiarism which is frowned upon, and rightly so. What it means is to simply study at how other writers approach certain pieces of work, be they short stories, novels, magazine writing, or writing E-Zines on-line.

Only by studying other writers will you yourself learn what to do, and what not to do, if you want to become a published writer. Along the way you will pick up many hints and tips, and these will stand you in good stead when you write. To become a better writer means developing a whole new mindset. If you are one of those people who only write every-now-and-then, then you will never succeed.  To develop a different mindset to the one you may have now, requires determination, dedication, patience, perseverance and love for your art.

If you have those words within you, dedication, love, passion, determination and perseverance, then you are at least half-way to succeeding in your writing.  If rejection gets you down, and your head begins to drop because you feel that no one is giving your work a chance, then take a step back. Look at your work again, and ask yourself, why is it being rejected by publishers? Why are you not winning those writing competitions you thought you could win? There has to be a reason.

Of course if your writing consists of nothing but block text [writing that is one big block of text without any paragraph breaks] then, of course, no publisher will give that piece a second glance. If your writing consists of nothing but spelling errors scattered here and there, punctuation marks in places where they should not be, and your subject is not researched in the way that it should have been, then you will never succeed. Always use spellchecker, and be very aware of words that mean the same thing but are spelt differently. For instance, color v

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