The Golden Pencil: The Freelance Writer’s Resource

Get a Perspective On Your Writing

by Anne Wayman on September 30th, 2007

One of the quickest ways to improve your writing is to set the piece you’re working on aside for a day or two, or even longer. Thursday, I promised one of my ghostwriting clients that I’d review the manuscript as far as we’ve gotten over the weekend. What I didn’t tell him is I had no plans of picking it up until Sunday afternoon.

Sure, there were other things I wanted to do Friday and Saturday, but I also wanted to create some distance between myself and the work I’ve been doing.

It’s amazing what you’ll pick up when you give yourself a break. It’s almost as if you can come to it with a totally fresh perspective. After a break, it’s much easier to spot typos. But it’s also easier to discover sentences, and even whole paragraphs that really don’t make sense, or that would benefit from rewriting.

I find, particularly on long manuscripts, I’m much more likely to spot things that are missing from the work as well. I guess it’s sort of a case of “I know what I’m writing about” even if I haven’t filled in the necessary details.

Taking a break from your writing is NOT laziness; it’s a necessity.

How do you get perspective on your writing? Tell us about it.

Write well and often,

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POSTED IN: Freelance Writing Tips and Ideas