10 things to learn from your writing mistakes

There isn’t a writer out there who hasn’t made mistakes from time to time. It is part of the writing rite of passage: you have to colossally arse something up before you can properly call yourself a writer.

The important thing is how you react to those mistakes and what you take away from them. Luckily, there are plenty of things for us to learn from our prose-based disasters. Here are ten of them.

What doesn’t work. Obviously. A large part of writing is about working out what works and what doesn’t.
What you like writing. Some of our writing mistakes come from the fact that we don’t really like what we’re writing, either because it’s not our favourite style or it’s a story you’re not that bothered about. There are important lessons to be learned here.
How to edit. In any first draft you write, there will be mistakes. Learning how to fix them is one of the biggest lessons of writing.
A thick skin. Sometimes your writing mistakes will make it all the way to the reading public (or at least the few friends you’ve been brave enough to show your work to). Criticism (hopefully constructive) may follow. It can be hard, but developing a thick skin is important.
The benefit of experience. Maybe that particular story didn’t work, but at least you tried it and you’ve got a bit more experience under your belt.
How to find the promise in your work. A key skill for writers to develop is to find where the good bits are in your work; even if most of it ends up as a write-off, there is always something worth saving.
What styles suit you. You might be hopeless at poetry but wonderful at short stories. A large part of finding out what you’re good at is about trial and error.
How to construct a good story. If you’re finding mistakes or problems in your plots, it shows you’re thinking critically, and that you know something isn’t quite right with the story – which means you’re halfway to putting together a story that actually does work.
Better spelling and grammar. We all mess up our grammar from time to time, and we can’t just rely on the computer spellcheck to fix it for us.
How much you want to write. If you’ve just written the biggest mess in the history of writing but you still want to carry on, to make it better and write more, it just goes to show how much you want it. And you can’t buy passion.