Can writing be taught?
No, throw this book away.

The opening two lines of Making Your Words Work by Gary Provost. This was the book recommended by Rob Sawyer…hopefully to fix my prose problems. As I read the introduction, I couldn’t help but think this book was aimed towards me.

Check this out:
Maybe you’re not getting published at all. There’s a good reason. It’s because writing well is so damned hard that your writing may not be good enough.

Then he asks the question:
Why is getting published so hard? It’s not. Writing well is what’s hard

The only thing that concerns me is that much of what I’ve read so far (mostly on style) I already know. But maybe it was simply something that I didn’t recognize in my own writing. Maybe all it took was for someone to point it out the errors in my writing for me to see it? We’ll see. We’ll see.

I’m almost finished my first ‘new’ edit of an old short story. And I’m almost finished the first draft of a new short story The Sorcerer’s Wife. I guess those will be a good measuring stick.