Natalie Ann Holborow

If you’re currently doing a writing course or qualification, you’ve probably got a fairly good idea of how you’re improving by your grades or peer feedback. However, if your days of study feel like a distant memory or you’ve never studied creative writing formally (which, by the way, is not a requirement if you want to be a writer), it can feel far more difficult to gauge how you’re progressing as a writer. Is the story you wrote yesterday better than the one that won an award three years ago? You read and re-read the two, trying to compare. But someone else’s praise of the first one has clouded your view of your most recent work.

And…oh, God…what if you never write anything that good again?

Relax. I get it. In fact, I panic about this several times a week. Even on the days when it feels like you’re getting worse (whether that’s more chaotic or less fluent), something is always happening in the background, even on the days where you haven’t written a word.

They’re easy to miss, but here are the top signs you’re growing as a writer, even when you honestly think you’re not.

1. You’re not overly reliant on external validation

There’s a certain high that comes from someone else telling you you’re good. It might be the email from an editor who uses the word “exciting” or the online stranger who says you made them cry on the bus (writers love making people cry). Feedback like that is lovely and often just a little bit addictive. However, depending entirely on external feedback as proof that you’re getting better isn’t always healthy (particularly if you’re depending on feedback from strangers). 

So much of the loudest feedback now comes from places built to reward speed; social media posts, after all, aren’t designed for lingering on. Its algorithms favour what is easily repeated and instantly legible, not what takes a risk, or asks the reader to dwell on something. And so if you find yourself measuring your progress by the accumulation of hearts or claps, you are – without quite meaning to – entering a game that feels impossible to win.

That’s not to say, of course, that external feedback has no place. Far from it, actually. The right kind of response, offered at the right time by someone you trust, can feel like a light switched on. A good editor, a thoughtful mentor, or a perceptive friend can help you see what you’ve missed, what you’re repeating and what you’re holding back from. However, it’s about balance. External feedback is most valuable when it’s approached as a conversation rather than a verdict; in other words, when it meets (rather than replaces) your own sense of where the work needs to go. 

Remember, the writing process doesn’t have to be a performance for others to evaluate. Sometimes the voice you need to trust most is your own. Try reading through work you wrote years ago and comparing it to what you’re writing now. What’s changed? How have you improved? This self-reflection is both valuable and enlightening.

2. You’re reading differently

Even when you really think you’re done with writing for a while and go for something wildly outside your genre “just for an escape”, sometimes switching up what you read is a big sign that you’re ready to move into new territories in your writing. 

At the start of this year, I began to feel tired of reading poetry, and found that the more I read it, the more jaded I became with my own work. Then I picked up Lucy Caldwell’s Intimacies in a bookshop in Belfast, a city I find always inspires me when I go there for work. While there, I ended up writing an essay about street art that later came out with Folding Rock. And after reading Caldwell’s incredible stories, I found that the urge to escape from my writing actually became a growing curiosity to try short fiction.

So I bought more short fiction collections: Open Up by Thomas Morris and Dance Move by Wendy Erskine. After reading these, I felt this strange urge to try short fiction again, so I took those ideas on my trail runs (I was busy working on Wild Running edits at the time). 

And guess what? I wrote my first short story in years (over a decade, in fact). And the short stories that followed ended up getting shortlisted for prizes, eventually resulting in a win in the 2025 Mslexia Short Story Competition. If I hadn’t just sent it out despite convincing myself it was all weird and a bit rubbish, I might not have learned that actually, I’d found a new style of writing that I love. Short stories give me the space I need to be weird (and I like weird).

Lesson learned: sometimes, turning away from your most familiar genre means it’s time to dip your toe into something else. Please take this as your sign to buy yourself a book in a genre you wouldn’t normally gravitate towards and see what it lights in you. You’ve got nothing to lose and a lot to play with.

3. You’ve learned to trust the mess

Hurts sometimes, doesn’t it? When you had what you thought was the big idea that was going to take all of your focus and bring you the writing success you always knew you had in you. Perhaps you’d secretly dreamed about it landing you a six-figure book deal. Maybe you’d spent the better part of a walk imagining who would play the lead in the inevitable Netflix adaptation. It was, you were sure, the idea.

However, when you go to look at it again you can’t bear to continue with it. Not only do you find the whole thing embarrassing, but you’ve got plot holes bigger than the Grand Canyon. What were you thinking when you came up with this idea? “Oh, you wally,” you tell yourself, slamming the laptop shut (perhaps that’s just me).

Not every idea is meant to live forever. Sometimes one ‘failed’ idea isn’t a failure at all, but a stepping stone to inspiring something even better. Psychologist Scott Barry Kaufman noted that creativity draws on interconnected systems across both hemispheres rather than relying on a single side or region of the brain. The creative process – from preparation to incubation to illumination to verification – consists of interacting cognitive processes and emotions. Incubation is the period in which the mind becomes fertile ground for ideas, like a seed slowly germinating beneath the soil. Inspiration might feel sudden, but in reality, it’s the product of quiet, invisible work that’s been taking place slowly. There’s a snippet of a poem I wrote about this very process:

“You know that sudden urge: to say something

about the bees clanging between the bluebells, 

to drag your fingers through the tide’s raw edges 

and tug it upshore like a sheet,

to wring something out of it…” 

(On Not Writing from Little Universe, 2024)

While these lines had come to me suddenly, standing ankle-deep in a freezing incoming tide at Wiseman’s Bridge, the truth was that these words had been gnawing away at me deeply for far longer. That morning, shivering in my towel, I sat out on the decking at our AirBnB, trying to “wring something out of it”, dissecting the movement of the water, the sparkles of rain on my friend’s shoulder, only to fail. I was forcing the process before its time.

According to Creative Jolts: Exploring How Entrepreneurs Let Go of Ideas During Creative Revision (Toivonen et al), creative professionals often experience significant growth not through execution, but through conscious abandonment of ideas that no longer fit their evolving goals or vision.

I have many notes in my phone from ideas that went nowhere. Often, I’ll scroll through, wondering if something is a snippet of a promising poem or merely a hasty shopping list. Not every seed needs to grow. Some ideas (hell, even the ones that feel positively electric at first) are just warm-up stretches. Others arrive before you’re ready to write them, or serve a purpose so small and specific that once it’s done, they have no reason to stay.

There’s no shame in letting go and moving on. It’s part of the process.

4. You’ve adopted a growth mindset

Do you believe that being “good” at writing means sitting down and effortlessly producing something clever and gripping like the final page of a Booker prizewinning novel, but on the first try? If the words don’t come easily, do you assume you aren’t cut out for it? If someone offers feedback (even kindly), do you take it as a polite way of saying: “Maybe you should do something else?” That’s a fixed mindset talking. You can go ahead and tell it to shut up.

Or, do you see your mistakes not as signs that you’re failing, but as learning opportunities? Perhaps you’re learning to stay open, whether that’s to editors who suggest changes or your own uncomfortable realisations when you read back something you thought was brilliant and realise it needs a little more work than you thought. Rather than taking it personally, you’re taking it seriously.

This is what Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck calls a growth mindset: the belief that talent and ability can be cultivated through effort, curiosity, and time. In her research, she found that people who adopt this kind of mindset not only improve more over time, but they tend to bounce back from setbacks more quickly. This is because they expect to be challenged, seeing it as part of the process rather than a reason to stop.

In practice, it might look like choosing to revise a story after it’s been rejected because something in you believes it can be better. It might look like trying out a new genre, or giving yourself permission to write badly just to get the words moving again. Or it might simply look like writing steadily through the part where most people give up (hello, messy middle of a book).

The good news is that you don’t need to be endlessly optimistic or emotionally bulletproof to have a growth mindset (thank God). Start by reframing failure as a learning opportunity. And remember, one of the key concepts of a growth mindset is seeing other people as inspiration rather than competition. Don’t be afraid to reach out to others – a supportive community is a powerful thing.

Keep growing, writer

You might not always be able to see the difference day to day, but sometimes stepping back and reflecting on all of the points mentioned above can help you realise just how much you have grown. And that feels pretty nice.

Growth as a writer sometimes comes in spurts, but more often than not it’s all in those invisible wins that stack up over weeks, months, years and endless drafts.

Even when it feels like nothing is happening, one day you’ll look back and realise how far you’ve come.