3 Tips to Improve Your Writing Prose

No matter where you are in your writing journey–whether you’ve been penning stories ever since you could remember, or just started writing your first one, I think it’s safe to say that we all want to improve our writing prose. Those pesky descriptions you try piecing together to place your reader in a beautiful scene, or deciding whether one sentence would go better before another are so hard to get right! They always need work; sometimes it can feel like everyone has beautiful prose and you can’t figure out why yours doesn’t sound as fluid.

Let me tell you, friend, I’ve been there…in fact, I’m still there! My prose still needs lots and lots of work. Even though I’ve seen a lot of improvement in my writing over the last few years, I know I still have much to learn! So let’s dive into three helpful things I’ve discovered that can help you grow in your prose skills!

Tip #1: Receive Feedback!

Do I sound like a broken record if I say this? I feel like this is my go-to piece of advice for pretty much any situation. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it plenty more times: Writing is not a one-person job! Even though many hours of writing are spent locked away in your bedroom, typing out sentence after sentence, that’s not the only thing writing is. To grow, you need fresh eyes on your writing–you need the thoughts of writers who are more skilled than you are and feedback on how to improve.

So, if you have any writer/reader friends, or are a part of a writing community or forum, ask for feedback! Let people know that you’re trying to improve your prose, and request that they specifically critique that side of your writing. Try to seek out people who will critique your writing with constructive criticism in mind, not people who will maliciously critique your work and not build you up. if you get kind, considerate feedback and apply what you learn from it, this will be a game-changer in your writing, I promise!

Tip #2: Study Good Prose

This is a tip I myself want to implement more!! When you’re trying to write good writing, why not read and study good writing to learn from the best?

Take your favorite book off your shelf, the one that you could read over and over again, and study it. Consider each sentence, how the author describes things, evokes emotion as you read, and lays out the story through high-quality paragraphs and sentences. You can learn a lot from simply taking in quality writing and trying to mimic a thing or two in your own stories. (This doesn’t mean literally copying the story, but copying good prose isn’t plagiarism!)

Tip #3: Mindfully Rework Your Own Writing

This is an exercise I absolutely LOVE to do. Write out a few sentences or a paragraph of a story. When you’re done, take a few minutes away from your computer or notebook and rest your mind for a bit. When you come back, carefully study each sentence with laser vision. Switch your words around, try to creatively come up with ways you could make the little snippet of writing really pop out with vivid imagery and high-quality storytelling.

Obviously, if you try reworking a full novel in this detailed manner, it would take you years to go over it and correct each sentence. However, studying and reworking a small snippet of your writing this way will give you knowledge on ways to improve your prose, so that in the future, when writing a novel, you can implement what you’ve learned into the very first draft!

And there we have it! Three ways to improve your prose (without just practicing, of course!) I really hope you took something helpful away from this post. Let me know in the comments: Do you struggle with your writing prose? What are some things that have helped you improve?

Thank you so much for reading, and I wish you the best of luck on your writing ventures!

Until later,

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