Posted by Shoshana Brown Jan 27 2012, 12:00 am in growth, Shoshana Brown, writing craft
If you’re a parent, you’re probably familiar with growth charts. 
You know–those graphs that show how your child’s height or weight or head circumference compares to the averages based on her age. After staring at way too many of these graphs, something occurred to me. My development as a writer wasn’t too different from the way my baby’s head was growing.
I started in the rapid-growth phase. With every chapter I wrote, my skill set noticeably improved. Simple changes, like writing my synopsis before I started the manuscript, so that I’d have a road map to follow, had the power to jump start my productivity and manuscript quality. The wonderful thing about this phase was that the rejections didn’t sting too much. By the time an editor told me they didn’t want manuscript A, manuscript B was finished, and it was so much better, I couldn’t believe I’d ever thought A was publication quality.
Then, one day, I finished a manuscript that wasn’t much better than the one before it.
