This month I've been looking through previous drafts of my current WIP and it struck me that the writing in these drafts may well be better than anything I'm currently producing. The plot may have improved through lots of painstaking editing but I feel the writing itself has, at the very least, plateaued. My writing and reading habits haven't changed. I still read articles on writing and have thought about taking a writing class on and off. But I know what I was like as a student. I was one of those kids who either got it right away or my brain would close like a steel trap and I'd be stuck. No matter how much I'd work at something it just ended up going nowhere fast,
It makes me wonder whether writing skill is like aptitude for art or sports where some people just tend to be born with the goods while others can work hard to improve their skills but there will always be a limit to what they can achieve. I hope not because it probably means I'm at the end of my line creatively and that could be kind of a bummer.
