This is one of the most essential Writing tips of all. 

If we do not learn to notice our improvements and successes, we often think that there have been no successes.

And we quit writing.

We forget to keep in mind that a big skill like writing stories is actually made up of a multitude of small skills.

When we write a story, we need to choose a topic, a title, a main character, events that will take place, a problem to challenge the main character, a beginning, a middle, an ending.  We strive to write speech correctly, use paragraphs correctly, edit well, spell well…

When we become better at writing, what we are really saying is that we have become better at a lot of smaller skills.

It is possible to work patiently at smaller skills, while accepting that we cannot learn everything at once.  Regularly looking back to see how far we have come becomes a very encouraging habit!

The elf elders often ask young story elves t0 take out their recent stories, read them again, and notice which small skill was improved in each story.  No new comments or criticisms are allowed, nothing except what is better than it was before.

What is better may be one sentence or one idea.
About this, the elf elders say,
“Small skills show up in small ways.”

New idea: It is such a good idea to take out stories and journal entries and put a positive note on each!  We can look for something that is better, something we worked on maybe without even knowing it.

The successes in each story will, over time, lead to a single story that has so many successes, we can no longer use a small notepaper for the list.