Through my writing life, nothing improved my writing more than participation in peer-based workshops: where a group of writers at about the same stage in their artistic development gather to read one another's work and offer feedback specifically aimed at improving each other's stories.
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This is a deceptively simple exercise, and the reasons it works so well are quite counter-intuitive. The most obvious benefit is the way that a workshop encourages you to write at all. When you're at the start of your writing career, you are almost totally reliant upon your own internal self-discipline to keep producing.
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