Okay, this is kind of a weird website reference, but I just came back from a writing workshop - don't get me started, because I might go ON and ON about how it was taught by Orson Scott Card and Brandon Mull, among others, and how great they were - and it made me think about what has helped improve my writing. Then I read a writing post that made me think further. So anyway, the website is www.writing.com Caveat: the website is a place for people to post their writings. Then they receive peer reviews. Some of the reviews are helpful, some are ego inflating, and some are rude and mean. What helped me the most, however, was reviewing, oddly enough. As I read different writings, and commented, I tried to give specific examples and reasons. So for instance, if the story felt "off", I would analyze why so I could tell the author. Sometimes they didn't agree with me, and that was fine. Sometimes I was even wrong. But the more I analyzed someone else's writing, the easier it was to analyze my own. If you write, then you know that YOUR writing can be deeply personal and it can be difficult to look at it from the outside. So this really helped. There is a rating system, and it is pretty strict. G rated disney movies would be rated higher. There is also a parental control. Caveat to that: people put their own rating, and sometimes they are wrong. But if you point it out to a moderator, the mod can change it. "Darn", for instance, would put it in the "PG" arena. References to alcohol or drugs are automatically PG-13, as are passing references to sex in any form. Anyway, the point I'm making is that analyzing someone else's writing - what is wrong with it, or what makes it so good - can help us really understand the weaknesses in our own. My portfolio on there is http://Writing.Com/authors/scottiegaz Oh yeah. You can do a paid account but you can also have a free account. A free account only allows you to post five things, but you can review as much as you want. My port is actually set up to only allow members to read it, just because I didn't want it randomly googlable. But a free membership allows you to read it. (You can also set it up to only allow certain levels of people, or certain people, to read what you write.)
