Episode 211: Rating our Writing

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Today on Fable and the Verbivore, we’re sharing an episode where we talk about ways to go about rating our writing.

In this episode, we discuss different aspects of our writing that we can look closely at and identify what we naturally do well, ones we are actively taking the time to improve, and ones where we need more focus and exercises to improve. As James Scott Bell suggests, we talk about working to as objectively as possible or with the help of others assess and rate yourself on a scale of 1 to 10 (or 1 to 7 with decimals as Fable prefers) on different writing elements.

Things like:

  • Character Development

  • Character Arcs

  • Dialogue

  • Description

  • Action

  • Setting

  • Theme

  • Structure

  • Plot

  • Story

  • Scene (Going from point A to B)

  • Voice

Another lens would be to look at the five modes of storytelling — Action, Description, Exposition, Dialogue, and Interior Monologue.

We talk about how matching up what we’re good at with genres that play to those strengths can naturally help strengthen the stories you’re writing, while also allowing you to work on strengthening the things we’re not as proficient in for future projects. We both recently started writing in the romance genre and we share some of what we’ve learned about our own skills, simply by switching the genre we’re writing in.

Towards the end of our conversation, we talk about the benefit of giving yourself the invitation to say and write what you really enjoy and how pen names can help give you a little anonymity and create a safe space for writing things without as much fear.

We hope you enjoy this episode! Keep reading, writing, and putting your voice out there!

Into the woods,

Fable & The Verbivore

Notes:

Books Mentioned:

Music from:https://filmmusic.io
‘Friendly day’ by Kevin MacLeod (https://incompetech.com)
Licence: CC BY (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

Bethany Stedman