Becoming a Better Writer without Writing

via Kristen Twardowski

As much as I adore the process of writing and editing, there are other ways to improve my writing skills. When writing, it becomes very easy to be trapped within myself and forget about the outside world. This inevitably causes my plots and my characters to lose some of their sparkle, their life. The inside of my head my be expansive, but characters need a little more room than my cranium can offer.

With that in mind, I have to make sure that I delve deeply into my life. After all, I write because the experience of being human is so beautiful, so terrible, and often so utterly mundane that I can’t help but want to capture it. But it is easy to forget the qualities of humanness when sitting in front of a computer and typing for hours on end. I hate the concept of writing…