Ann Kroeker, Writing Coach

As you go about the work of writing, and the business of writing, don’t forget to study the craft of writing. Find ways to continually learn and improve. A lot of writers feel a strong urge to enter an MFA program to do this. If you feel compelled to pursue that, by all means, research it and see if that’s the right next step for you. But what I’m suggesting is you set out to invent a kind of self-study writing course using resources readily available online or at your local library. You'll learn efficiently when you develop a self-study writing course that includes practice and study pertaining to your biggest areas of struggle or weakness. Novelist James Scott Bell wrote an article about how to strengthen your fiction the Ben Franklin way. He explains how Ben Franklin came up with his own self-study course to grow in virtues. Franklin made a grid and evaluated whether or not he was successful in his pursuit of a given virtue each week. In The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, the Founding Father conc