Making the Most of What You've Got

See how you can use your writing
strengths to overcome your writing
weaknesses

I have always been able to tell a great story, but I wasn't always able to connect the dots on paper. So I practiced until the sentences flowed like water, and the connective tissue was hard to see. This also took time. I read other writers. I wrote. I tried to find my voice by writing what was from my heart more than what I found lurking inside my brain. And in time, through practice, my writing voice came.

Making the most of what you've got is using your gifts and talents in particular avenues of writing to help you along with those areas in which you lack. And you have to have some things you do well, or you wouldn't be a writer in the first place.

Make a list of your writing strengths

As writers we're constantly coming across stuff we wish we could do better. For me, some of the stuff I'm still working on is setting.

Setting for me is kind of like poetry. It's a place you go, beyond great dialogue and a terrific plot, to round out your story and make it believable. The last thing a writer wants is for the characters to be standing in some sort of void.

And yet, setting is where I struggle. After all of the writing and editing, I am always going back to add more setting to a scene, and even then, my books are never high in setting; I focus more on what I do best.

As a good writer should.

For example, maybe you're better at setting, and lack in dialogue.
Or maybe you can come up with a terrific plot, but have a hard time connecting chapters or paragraphs.

Whatever your dilemma, be assured that your writing strengths were given to you for a reason. To help you to write. But that's not all. They were given to help you to
overcome your writing weaknesses.



A case in point.

If I'd stopped in the beginning because my stories never sounded as good on paper as they sounded when spoken aloud, I'd never be where I am today. I used what I had: the telling of a great story and all of the imagination that came with it, and connected the gift with the weakness: writing it down on paper.

And I continue to grow my weaknesses through the use of my strengths as I'm sure you do, whether you know you are doing it--or not.

Know What Your Weaknesses Are

I have been thinking lately about weaknesses and how they help us with strength. A weakness can help us see into ourselves faster than any compliment, but the trick is to actually want to take a look.

When it comes to our writing, we hope that our writing is perfect and that everyone will love it, but the opposite is probably true. Even those best sellers don't have everyone on the planet scrambling to get a copy.

And that brings me to something.

My work. Does everyone love it or even like it?

No, and I continually have to come to terms with that.

Are my books always understood or appreciated?

No. Sometimes there's some loathing involved.



With writing comes growth
Photo by: Richard Step

Does that make me want to quit?

Sometimes. But as I've said in previous posts, that's not something I'm going to do. Perhaps a particular reader has no sense at all when it comes to understanding what I write, but maybe they do, and maybe they can help me with the weakness that they see and I can eventually make the weakness a strength.

I tell writers all of the time. "If you're good at dialogue, you probably struggle with setting," and usually this is true.

As a writer, we can't be good at everything at the same time; what we can do is to see our weaknesses and work on perfecting them for our next endeavor. We need to have the courage to see what doesn't work and improve upon it and the sense to know when something is already working, though some readers might not appreciate it.