During my childhood, my mother frequently repeated the old proverb, “Practice makes perfect.” She’d say that adage whenever I was practicing the piano, memorizing multiplication tables, or preparing for an oral book report. Practice didn’t help me become perfect, but it did help me make progress. I honed my skills and reinforced my knowledge with each repetition, steadily improving.
Apparently, writing a book is the same. The more you write, the better you get at writing. You learn how to show, instead of tell, which enriches and enlivens the story. You figure out how to create three-dimensional characters and bring them to life. You incorporate the setting as an integral part of your story. You include action beats instead of flat dialogue tags and eliminate adverbs. You find the proper balance between info dumps and backstory. You master the art of storytelling.
I wrote legal documents for a living, so I thought it’d be easy to transition to the literary world. But creating good fiction is harder than it looks! Fortunately, there are a lot of good writing classes and “how to” books to help guide an aspiring author. One instructor recommended that we read books in our genre to see the writing rules in action, which suited me just fine. I look for any excuse to curl up with a good book and read.
Sometimes you have to follow Nike’s motto of “Just Do It.” I dove in and gave writing fiction the good old college try, even though I wasn’t sure what I was doing. I finished my first book and landed an agent. Then, I moved on to the next story in the series. When my editor returned my second manuscript, she commented that my writing style had improved. My Sisters in Crime mentor advised me to write a prequel next, instead of a sequel, so the series launches with my strongest writing. I’m following her advice. I’ll go back and tighten up my original manuscript when I’m done. Hopefully, the end result will be a trio of page-turning cozy mysteries. After all, practice makes perfect.
