Attached Link: http://www.bylinemag.com/

[I](http://www.bylinemag.com/) subscribe to ByLine magazine, and an article caught my attention: "Creating a Writer's Guidebook." I can't transcribe the whole thing here, because of copyright, nor is it available online, but I will give you the general idea.  First check out Michelle Mach's very attractive website: .  It has some good links and may give you some ideas for a site of your own, if you don't already have one.

From the author: "Creating a guidebook for my writing helped me to expand my goals beyond 'write more' and 'get published,' build on my strengths, and learn when to branch out to new areas."

1. Collect all your work for one year (two-side print to save paper and photocopy what appears in print), create a cover, a table of contents, and have it bound; include reading lists, class attendance, writing exercise, feedback, reviews, submission spreadsheets, goals--anything that provides a snapshop of your writing life.
2. Now look at your guidebook and see what it says about your writing over the past year.  What was successful? What was not?  What paid off?  Find your strengths.  Notice what you can learn from criticism.
3. Now this part will work best if you create more than one guidebook (i.e., you give this a try for a couple of years).  Take a look at your progress, your milestones. Are you making progress?  Keep a list of "firsts" in your guidebook.
4. Are you seeing a pattern?  Are you setting goals, short term and long for your writing? Are you seeing progress toward meeting those goals
5. Remember the positive.  "The guidebook lets you appreciate your work as a whole. Just as a school yearbook features formal portraints, team photos, and candid shots, your guidebook shows all the aspect of your unique wirting life. Slow down and appreciate them--you might even uncover a salable idea."
6. What the guidebooks may also reveal to you is the kind of writer you really are as opposed to the kind of writier you think you are.

That's a pretty brief overview, but you get the idea, perhaps. 

I can hear the "oh, that's too much trouble" right now. 

So what would happen if you started thinking today about doing your guidebook a year from now?  What would you set aside and preserve for inclusion for a  book about your writing?  If you knew you were going to be creating such a guidebook, would it make any difference to how seriously you take your writing, the commitment you are willing to make to it?  I don't mean that everyone one of us will get published or win contests.  But everyone of us could, in a year, have a guidebook that documents our progress as writers in a solid way.

It's just a thought.

Someone was telling me that they were waiting to investigate other jobs until they had a certificate, until they finished training a couple of people in the office, until they finished a certain project, until, until, until....

And I looked at this young woman, full of potential and more full of excuses, and asked her what a dear friend told me once:

If not now, when?

The friend was a woman who was then my age now.  She had decide to go back and train as a nurse because that was what she had always wanted to do and always set aside for the sake of doing what other people wanted.  Two years later, she was dead.  But I know she had no regrets about returning to study what meant the most in the world to her to do.

So, hearing her voice inside my head,  I ask myself and you:

If not now, when?

And for those of you I know are already on the road, I may just stop waiting to mend the hole in my sole and join you.

Hi Dialyn,

I've just got back from some weeks of travel and work, and was asking myself where my writing was heading because i've noticed a shift in my style, but still couldn't identify patterns. Also, I've been trying to juggle, rather one-handedly, work, writing, painting and music, and reaching points of frustration because of fatigue caused by four hours of commuting a day in humongously crowded buses.

I don't know why i decided to scroll down and see what people had posted, and this post caught by eye. For some reason, it's come again at a very timely point of my life, and has helped gather many stray thoughts i've been having over the last few months.

I would agree with you. Any creativity does seem to require more sweat than brilliant flashes of inspiration. I think that's where we really become skilled wordsmiths, painters, musicians, etc. Your suggestion to try and make a guidebook to see one's growth and progress is a good one, and it does require discipline, which a serious writer would somehow find time to put in.

If not now, then when? :)

Thanks for the post, dialyn. It's been very helpful, as always. :) And my best wishes for the journey on the road. :)

hanevi.

Thought provoking ideas, Dialyn.  The physical binder collection makes good sense for a more honest appraisal than my imagination.

Re-reading pieces written earlier, makes meshudder at what was left out, and of course the phrasing always needs a touch up.  My friend Steve says this is the Nathaniel Hawthorn syndrome;  someone who used to pencil-edit his published books.

To know where you are is a must if you hope to improve.  As writers we need constructive criticism as feedback - gushing plaudits won't do the job.  A critique may be way off-base, but it makes you consider  and re-check your work.

Alas, Renderosity is not the place.

Dick

I have strong feelings about critiques because, with all due respect,  I don't think most of us here have the experience or the credentials to be critics of someone else's work. With a few exceptions that I know of, most of us are unpublished amateurs who are writing for pleasure or entertertainment.  There are talented people here. There are people who will never find their way to print. That doesn't mean I think the opinions are without value, but they are the opinions of readers who may, or may not, have any background in the kind of writing I'm attempting. I would not change my writing based on critiques from someone I don't know.

For example, I could give criticisms of poetry but you wouldn't want me to. I am a bad poet myself, I don't read poetry, I don't have an interest in poetry, I don't study great poets and I don't memorize great poems. Given all of that, why on earth would a poet seek criticism from me? For the same reason, an author of fantasy would not solicit my opinion. Fantasy, adored by so many here, bores me. I have no right to comment on works that I am prejudiced against before reading a word.

I tend to believe, perhaps wrongly, most people here use Renderosity as a vanity press...a place to get encouragement and praise to continue writing. There is nothing wrong with that, but it makes them very vulnerable to disillusionment when someone is not instantly infatuated with their words.  I would not want to be the person who discouraged someone from writing because my uninformed self printed a careless word of critique to somone who asked for my opinion (unsolicited advice is worse).  And that has happened to me already here. I don't post criticisms as a result.

"A writers’ group offers feedback and encouragement. At its best, it becomes a respectful forum for critiquing your manuscripts. Similar comments help to identify areas of strength and weakness in your work. A writers’ group is the perfect forum for test flying your concepts and ideas. A thriving group meets regularly. Its members share in the conversation and dedicate as much attention to your work as their own. The group becomes a think tank, a creative incubator. … But writers are a dangerous lot. A writers’ group can go sour when members attempt to reform or remold your work. Every writer wants to construct a particular story in his/her own way, but it is unfair to suggest that you change your work to suit another writer’s notion of the story. Good artistic critique comes in the form of questions, not suggestions. The questions are for you to consider. It’s your job to figure out how to fix your story."  author Christopher Klim

Before seeking criticism from an outside source, first learn to be objective about your own writing. Step back and learn the skills you need to proof and edit your own work.  Only the writer knows what he or she was attempting to communicate, and that ability to self-edit, self-evaluate are  powerful tools.

Personally I would not put forward anything for criticism until I felt it was the best I could do. And I would put nothing on the galleries or forums that I wanted to see put in print.