Here’s a question for you: Are you ever fully satisfied with yourself? If you say yes, I don’t think you’re being truthful with yourself. No matter who we are or what we do there’s always room to grow.

As a writer, I’m still a long way off from being able to write a book with as few of edits as possible. I’m so in the throes of learning this craft to make it the best I can.

Just over two years ago I joined ACFW and I have learned so much on how to improve my writing. I’m still amazed sometimes where my writing was and where it is now. So maybe you’re thinking people don’t point out as much stuff. Wrong. In fact I think it’s just as much if not more. But how is that so? Well, in the beginning the basic mechanics of writing that I had no idea about (like tense changes, showing verses telling, passive voice, POV [point of view] shift changes in the middle of a scene, getting rid of the adjectives, adverbs, ‘ing words, along with a few others but those are off the top of my head) needed to be pointed out.

I’m not saying I’m perfect at any of those I’ve listed but I know I’m much better than I used to be. So now when people critique my writing they can focus on more in-depth things like tightening up what I write by taking out words that aren’t needed, taking my writing and transforming it into deep POV (much too complicated to get into but know that you love the characters more by doing this), and things of this nature.

The bottom line in all of this is that no matter what we do or how good we get we can always improve and learn something new. When we think we have arrived then we become complacent.