Quick Links: Your Never Ending Writing Improvement Program

Quick links, bringing you great articles on writing from all over the web.

When I was a software engineer for corporate America, we followed a concept that was called Lean. It was based on Japanese work principles of continuing to look for ways to improve.  Over at Writer’s Helping Writers, author and writing coach Jim Bell shares a similar concept called kaizen to help writers to continue to do their best.

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Your Never Ending Writing Improvement Program

In Japan, after World War II, the concept of kaizen was introduced into their industrial culture. It resulted in a huge boom in technology and manufacturing that rebuilt Japan and made her prosperous.

It’s a simple idea. It means ongoing quality, and systems set up to test quality all the time. And, every day, striving to do something better.

Why should a writer do any less?

You are responsible for designing your own writing improvement program. One that never ends.

To do that, you have to look at both yourself and your fiction. And you have to take the “critical success factors” of each and figure out ways to make them better.

But most writers don’t think in a kaizen type of manner. We are artists, after all! We want to frolic in the tulip fields of the imagination! We don’t want to get weighed down with things like, yikes, strategic planning! We could have gone to engineering school if we wanted to do that kind of thing.

Come on there, Bunkie. It’s not that difficult.