Wednesday, February 3, 2010

If I Could Turn Back Time

This time on the blog chain Rebecca started things off with this question:

What is the best mistake you've made so far in your journey as a writer? How has that mistake helped you grow :)?

I really love the way that this question is phrased, how it asks us to reflect on our "best" mistakes - because part of the writing journey is allowing ourselves the freedom to make mistakes... and then resigning ourselves to the endless rounds of edits and revisions it will take to fix them all. And in that spirit I have to say that all of my mistakes are my best ones, and all of them have allowed me to grow as a writer.

Of course, this doesn't mean that I never make the same mistake twice - in fact I often make the same mistake dozens of times over, but my experience has taught me the best way to quickly find and weed out these types of mistakes from my manuscripts. And just to keep things from getting dull I make new writing mistakes quite often as well.

What are the best writing mistakes that you have made? And to keep following this chain - head over to Amanda's blog.