Have a Moment? Nope? Can’t Fix It if You Don’t

I make a mistake.  I made a mistake.  I missed a mistake.  Sounds horrible doesn’t it?  No one likes to admit it when they make some sort of mistake, and, if it is pointed out to them, well, then it is not their fault.  It’s because of something else.

That is why everything begins as a hobby, and if you are lucky, it continues to something more grand and more fun. Hey, it might even make you money.  Take writing, for example.  Some days it is a hobby, and other days it is a day job, and the next day it’s a thing of passion.  Try going to Google and type in the search term “writing for a living”; you will get more than 400,000,000 search results.  It seems like everyone wants to be a writer. Even the subject of writing a blog yields a lot of search results.  Making money writing generates even more.  There is more to writing than earning a living or publishing… what about editing?

How about the term fixing your writing mistakes? In comparison, it throws more than 59,000,000 results back to you.  That’s a lot of writers who are looking for answers.  Writers, or anyone, know that mistakes happen, and they need to be fixed.  If that is the case, let’s dig deeper.

What are the most common writing mistakes?  It must be a hot topic; after all, no writer wants to make a common mistake. They don’t want to make mistakes at all.  Would there be more search results? If you guessed no, then, you would be right. The total search results were less than half of the last term. (28,000,000) Where does that leave a writer?  Where should the focus be?

First: Agree that we all make mistakes.

Second: Agree that even looking at the most common mistakes is a good thing because this way you know about them.

Third: Decide if your mistake was made because you didn’t know something, or if it is because you know but don’t care.  Fix them — if that is what you decide to do.

Mistakes happen, but there is no need to feel bad about making them. If you want to grow as a writer, the important thing is to learn about what you can do to fix them and then not make the same ones in the future.  It is going beyond simply counting the quantity of hours you put into your writing and looking more closely at the quality that you put into it.  If writing, or dance, or anything is your hobby, it is still a good idea to fix your mistakes and learn from them.