How Do You Know if Your Writing is Getting Better?

By Janice Hardy, @Janice_Hardy 

Without objective feedback, it's hard to know if you're improving or just making the same mistakes. 

Almost every writer at some point has wondered, "Is my writing getting any better?" I've wondered about it, many writers I know have wondered about it, and odds are good you have, too. It's a normal question when what you're doing is so subjective. 

Sadly, there's no easy checklist to verify if you're improving or not. It's also really tough to judge our writing, because it's hard to be subjective about our own work. We can love our bad writing and hate our good writing—and we often have trouble telling the difference. 

Of course, you can always get a paid critique or manuscript review from a trusted professional source, but not everyone has or can afford that option. For this post, I'm focusing on what we can do on our own.  

 

Here are some things you might try:

Ask your friends or writing partners: They might not want to be completely honest if it might hurt your feelings, but they should be able to tell if your work is getting better or not. The real trick here—be objective and take it all seriously. Try your best not to get defensive if the answers aren't glowing. 

 

Check out your old critiques: Previous critiques are gold mines of information we can use. Examine what comments you regularly received, then compare them to new critiques to see if you're still getting those comments. If the feedback is the same, that's a good indication that you're still making the same mistakes. But if you're making all new mistakes, that's actually an indication that you're improving, especially if the new mistakes are on more advanced writing techniques.

One caveat on critique comparing: Look at polished or close-to-finished work, not early drafts. There are probably things that qualify as "bad writing" that you do during a first draft that are part of your process. Maybe you use adverbs as placeholder words or have a lot of "she smiled" type tags that you'll later flesh out with real internalization and emotion. If this is the case, your new work will probably have the same comments.   

Judge it for yourself: It's a lot harder to be objective, but you can also review your old and new work as if you were critiquing someone else. What feedback would you give that author? It might help to use a critique form or something that forces you to evaluate the writing and articulate what you think. 

Compare your old work to your new and ask:

• Are you willing to share this with others?
• Are you embarrassed by it?
• Are you looking for ways to improve it?
• Do you feel comfortable submitting it?
• Can you identify the good as well as the bad?
• Do you feel like it's gotten better?

(Here's more with How to Be Your Own Book Doctor)

Let's take a walk (of shame?) down my fictional path.

Since things are so much easier when you have examples, I critiqued several pieces of my old writing from as far back as college. Hopefully it'll give you ideas for things to look for in your own work, and questions to ask, such as, are you telling emotions through adverbs or are you dramatizing scenes? Is there a solid point of view or is the narrator floating about somehow? Are you giving the reader reasons to care about your characters?

At the very least, it should be entertaining, right?

1992-ish: This is from an idea I had that became my training novel. 

This draft was handwritten in pencil, so that shows you how long ago I wrote it. Eventually I wrote it "for real" with the intent to sell, but these pages aren't there yet. This is the opening of the first chapter.

The Griff Inn was a dark, dreary little tavern that sat on the end of an equally dark and dreary street. Its windows were dirty, its floors unswept and its customers were an accurate cross-reference of the riff raff of Kintari. It drew the thieves as easily as the murderers, and that naturally brought in the charlatans, the highwaymen and the local scum.

Let's just say it was not the moral backbone of the city and leave it at that, shall we?

It was, however, Aradelle's destination and she walked through the darkened streets with none of the fear the average person would feel in the same situation.

I cringe reading this. It's all told, there's this weird omniscient first person-esque narrator, there's no hook. 

Now, it's not horrific, as it has a developing voice that's kinda nice, and I can see the beginnings of my style starting to come through. There's storytelling, weak as it is, and it's going somewhere (eventually). 

To critique myself, I'd say I needed to work on point of view in a big way and show, not tell. I'd suggest going deeper in the head of my point of view character (and pick a real point of view style) and show the world through their eyes. Since I'm following Aradelle here, she'd be my choice. (And a decade later she was).

1995-ish: Same story a few years later. Again, the opening chapter.

Akeem rubbed his eyes and prayed he hadn't heard Breon correctly. 

"What do you mean you lost the body?"

Breon glanced at his comrades helplessly before answering. 

"It was in the back room of the Inn but when I sent Heslyn back for it, it was gone."

"You mean you left the body alone?"

"Well, I guess..."

"Oh, Breon, how could you? How am I supposed to explain to the mayor's wife that we lost her husband's body?" He paused again to run his fingers through his hair. "Do you have any idea where the body went?" 

The three men looked at each other sheepishly, a sign that Akeem took to mean no.

"You do have people looking for it, right?

"Oh sure, we've got Taashar and Everald out right now." Breon looked from Heslyn to Brandir for agreement. They both bobbed their heads helpfully. 

"Kren," Akeem called to his advisor and scribe. "How long before we have to tell the Lady Alizine about this?"

Better, but it has a host of problems. I have a point of view character finally, Akeem, but I'm not solid in his head and I'm still telling. There's not much voice yet, but a sense of it is there. It starts off a lot better, too. There's a fun hook, a goal, and something is clearly going on. 

This is a workable scene and I could fix this with not a lot of trouble. Get rid of the telling (like the "he paused to run his fingers through his hair" and the "before answering") and add some internalization to get a better sense of who these characters are would improve it considerably. I'd want to avoid introducing seven characters on the first page. I'd replace all those adverbs with stronger verbs and nouns to show the actions. 

Despite these flaws, you can see there's a story building and with some tweaking, I could make this work. It's not a bad rough draft, actually. The underlying structure is okay.

2003: I set the fantasy aside and wrote a YA sci fi. Again, the opening page.

Nadine stared out the window overlooking her soon-to-be-ex-home and sighed. There it was, hanging in the cold, black void of space. Though billions lived on it, Earth was alone.

Just like me.

She could make out Florida's peninsula; a fat, blue-green finger covered by white cloudy smudges. Her house was there, somewhere south of the blue spot that was Lake Okeechobee.

Last week, her stuff had been stacked in her room, but now it was all gone, given to friends or thrown away. All that remained was crammed into a 24 by 24 box with a nine-digit number stenciled across the side. Her life. Squared. 

Photos of friends she'd never see again, the gold medal she'd won at the Interstate Gymnastics Competition, the worn stuffed pig her father had given her when she was three, the brand-new driver's license she'd never get to use. Most precious was Kyle's letter, sweet words that told her how much he'd miss her, how much he loved her and would always love her, even when she was a trillion miles away.

She sighed again. Life was so unfair.

I totally see improvement with this, so I hope you guys can, too. Nadine is a solid point of view character, and the internalization is her opinion about her situation. I've set up a situation here, though the hook is a bit weak. I'm taking too long to get started, tossing in too much backstory (the "what's in the box" paragraph is too long). There's a voice here, though it's not quite where it will be in a few more years. But it's not far off.

The writing is fairly solid, but the story and the plot could use some development. The text also needs tweaking to trim out the slow parts and get a bit more "what's about to happen" in there sooner. Even though I'm in Nadine's head and using her voice, she's telling a bit much to get some of that background in. It's not terrible, but it could be stronger. Again, a decent first draft (though this was a polished draft to me at the time)

(Here's more with Assessing Yourself as a Writer: Does Your Writing Make the Grade?)

2006: I went back to my fantasy premise (I still love the idea of that novel and one day hope to make it work). The opening pages.

The dead man sat on a rock just above the high tide line, and the way he eyed the children made Aradelle reach for her knives. Yet her hand hesitated over the rapier. She needed the man’s soul, but she’d prefer not to take it where the children might see. Nerves tight, she waited behind curtains of old nets tangled over the skeletal beams of a decade-old shipwreck. 

Lightning crackled across the water. The children squealed. A heartbeat later, their high-pitched giggles merged with a deep rumbling. 

“Priestess, are we too late?” Durshuur whispered from deeper within the wreck’s shadows. His golden eyes shimmered, and in the dim light, his elongated pupils looked almost normal.

“For the others, yes, but not these.” 

Two little boys darted in and out of the waves, flinging small crabs at each other. A red-haired girl played in the tide pools the unusually low tide had uncovered, shrieking when a crab flew her way. Aradelle longed to race out and chase them away. She didn’t lest she scare the dead man.

Durshuur knelt, peeked over her shoulder. “Will he try to take all three?”

“If he can. The fisherman’s twins disappeared together.” Lost in the woods, or so Sepeluk’s magistrate had claimed that morning. He’d been organizing search parties when they’d arrived. It was only a matter of time until they found the bodies and made her task harder. 

“Maybe the twins really are missing?” 

She frowned and Durshuur quickly looked away. 

“Of course not. Apologies, Priestess.”

This is only a year before I started The Shifter, and it really surprises me how little of my voice I see. It was much stronger in my earlier work. Here, I'm trying hard to sound "like a fantasy novel" and that sucked the life out of my writing. 

I finally made Aradelle my point of view character, and I feel in her head for the most part. It's not as close as I'd like, and a little tweaking is in order to yank out some repetitious words, and clear up a few spots where I pull away from her head. 

Overall, it's not bad, and this did get me some nice rejections, but there's nothing about it to grab a reader either. 

If I critiqued this today, I'd tell myself I'm trying too hard to tell a story, not Aradelle's story, and that shows. 

I'm focusing more on the setting, the mood, the tone, and not nearly as much on the goal of the point of view character and how she feels about it. Her feelings and motives are tucked in a bit, but they're kinda afterthoughts. I don't think anyone cares what's going on here. Without that, why bother to read on? 

2007: The very first draft of the opening of The Shifter.

Stealing eggs is a lot harder than stealing the whole chicken. With chickens, you just grab a hen, stuff her in a sack and make your escape. But for eggs, you have to stick your hand under a sleeping chicken. Chickens don’t like this. They wake all spooked and start pecking holes in your arm. Or your face, if it’s close. And they squawk something terrible.

The trick is to wake the chicken first, then go for the eggs. I’m embarrassed to say how long it took me to figure this out.

“Good morning little hen.” The chicken blinked awake and cocked her head at me. She flapped her wings a bit as I lifted her off the nest, but didn’t fuss. Soft down floated around my head like dandelion fluff.

“Don’t move.”

Two words I didn’t want to hear with someone else’s chicken in my hands. 

I froze. The chicken didn’t. Now spooked, her scaly feet flailed above the eggs that should have been my breakfast. 

A watchguard with a rapier aimed at my chest smiled. Most times I enjoyed handsome men smiling at me in the moonlight, but his wasn’t a friendly smile. I’d learned to tell the difference between smiles a lot faster than I’d figured out the egg thing. 

“So Heclar,” he said, “you do have a thief. Guess I was wrong.”

It's easy to see I found my voice and my stride here. A solid sense of point of view and character, a good hook, solid writing. You care about this character and what's going on with her. It has some bumpy spots I later smoothed out, but it's not that far off from what was eventually published. A huge difference from what I wrote back in 1992, eh? 

2018: The opening page of my urban fantasy, Blood Ties.

The child was pure evil, no doubt about it. The bane of the entire prosthetics ward, so naturally they’d dumped her on me. Being the new gal anywhere had its share of drawbacks, and Andrews Medical Center was no different from any other hospital I’d worked at, hence the Saturday shift, and the problem-patient hazing. For five days I’d put up with Daisy’s faux woe-is-me show, even though I’d stopped falling for that trembling lip and tear-soaked-eyes act on day two.

 
“I know it hurts, Daisy, but you can do it,” I said, voice level. One did not cajole the Devil Child lightly.

“You don’t know anything, Miss Legs.”

Not her best rejoinder, but I admired her skill at avoiding repetition. I knelt beside her and placed a hand on her shoulder. “I know if you don’t do your therapy you’ll be stuck in that wheelchair.” I tipped my head at the chair, crammed into the corner next to the therapy stairs like it had pissed off its father. “Put your other leg on and let’s get to work.”

“I hate these things more than I hate you.” She glared at the prosthetic she hadn’t yet put on as if she could make it burst into flames by sheer will.

 
“So don’t let them win.”

Her glare shifted to the floor in front of her and I mentally crossed my fingers. One, two, if she made it to five—

“They’re not alive! They can’t win anything!” she screeched, swinging her leg at me. I braced for impact. “You’re so stupid! Go away.”

Maybe I'm biased, but I'm happy with this (which is why I published it). There's strong dialogue, my voice is clear and all me, and there's a good mix of dialogue, exposition, internalization, and stage direction. There's also a likable protagonist, and it gets right into some action that readers will hopefully care about. 

Obviously, it's a lot more polished and readable than my early work, and I can clearly see a big difference in skill here. This is pro level, which it should be considering I was a professional author when I wrote it (grin). 

It's not easy to know if you're getting anywhere or just doing the same thing over and over, but the more objective you can be about your writing, the better the odds of spotting improvement, or places where you can improve. 

Often our writing gets to a polished level before our storytelling does, so look there as well for improvement. A story that grabs readers, but has writing that needs a lot of polish, is a step in the right direction, too. Or you might be at the stage where the writing is good, you're doing everything you should be doing, it's just a matter of finding the story that makes readers care.

EXERCISE FOR YOU: Give your old work a look and pretend you've never seen it before. How does it compare to what you're writing now? What feedback would you give yourself? 

How do you judge your old work vs. your new writing? Can you tell if you've improved or not?

*Originally published January 2011. Last updated September 2024.

If you're looking for more to improve your craft (or a fun fantasy read), check out one of my writing books or novels:

In-depth studies in my Skill Builders series include Understanding Conflict (And What It Really Means), and Understanding Show Don't Tell (And Really Getting It). My Foundations of Fiction series includes Plotting Your Novel: Ideas and Structure, a self-guided workshop for plotting a novel, and the companion Plotting Your Novel Workbook, and my Revising Your Novel: First Draft to Finished Draft series, with step-by-step guides to revising a novel. 

Janice Hardy is the award-winning author of the teen fantasy trilogy The Healing Wars, including The Shifter, Blue Fire, and Darkfall from Balzer+Bray/Harper Collins. The Shifter, was chosen for the 2014 list of "Ten Books All Young Georgians Should Read" from the Georgia Center for the Book. It was also shortlisted for the Waterstones Children's Book Prize (2011), and The Truman Award (2011).

She also writes the Grace Harper urban fantasy series for adults under the name, J.T. Hardy.

She's the founder of Fiction University and has written multiple books on writing, including Understanding Show, Don't Tell (And Really Getting It), Plotting Your Novel: Ideas and Structure, and the Revising Your Novel: First Draft to Finished Draft series.

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