Sep
30th
2019
Discussion: What Aspect(s) of Writing Do You Wish You Were Better At? · 2:48am Sep 30th, 2019
I'll go first: I have no clue how to characterize any of the characters beyond their broadest strokes. Except Pinkie Pie because I'm basically her. Anytime I want to write a serious story, I feel paralyzed by that.
Also, I just suck at doing pretty much anything that doesn't involve immediate dopamine release--I'm very good at browsing Facebook or masturbating for hours, but sitting down and hammering out some serious words that aren't going to be easy to write? I suck so fucking hard at.
So how about you? What aspect(s) of writing do you wish you were better at? Feel free to leave advice for other people's comments in the comments.
I've never been able to wrap my brain around original characters. I feel like I can give canon characters a fair bit of personality and depth and all that good junk, but making someone interesting out of nothing has just... never come easily to me. Which isn't so bad right now, since, like, duh, I'm still writing fanfiction, but it does make me a bit anxious sometimes about what I'll do when or if I ever lose interest in horsewords.
And I guess speaking more generally than that, I see a number of people who say they're better at storytelling than they are writing, and I often find myself envying them, because I think I'm much better at writing pretty sentences than I am at constructing full stories and character arcs and stuff, so I tend to flounder a lot if I don't have someone to bounce ideas off of.
5130312
As far as original characters go, you might look into DnD style-character creation guides to help you flesh out your OCs. They won't tell you everything, but can offer a good starting point.
I'm much better at ideas than actual writing--actually, no, I'm really good at writing; I just find it boring. So it's not that I'm bad at writing; I'm bad at getting myself to write. I have so many hundreds of ideas I've just never gotten around to writing or finishing. This is all to say, if you ever want to bounce ideas off me or want help figuring out story arcs, feel free to hit me up!
I just have a lot of novice writer issues. My dialogue could use some work. My plots could be more original and engaging. My character work, while not necessarily bad, usually isn't great, and I often find myself writing similar things a lot. I don't just mean similar stories, but I mean using similar wordings and descriptions too.
Differentiating narrative voice.
I like to write my stories from a specific character’s perspective, one perspective per scene. Problem is, different people think in different ways, and to me the narrative voice should reflect how a character thinks. In this I fail horribly; my narrative tends to sound identical regardless of who’s perspective we’re in at the given moment. I simply fall into my typical writing style for all cases, and can’t seem to make myself pull out of it. I’ve always wanted to write something where the narrative changes its style depending upon who is the lead character of a given scene, but every time I do I eventually realize I’ve fallen into the same traps.
I consider it the consequence of being a more laid-back writer.
5130319
I'd recommend joining the FimFiction Discord https://discord.gg/JxVYc6k and hopping into the writer advice channel when you want to brush up small passages. On a larger scale, I'd just recommend reading lots of great authors and taking notes on what they do well. I particularly recommend Cold in Gardez, Skywriter, and Horizon. GaPJaxie is pretty good too, but don't tell him I said so; it'll go to his head.
Writing descriptions. I'm getting better, I can write a good one now if I concentrate, but I'm still not spouting off beautiful/funny/tone setting prose off the top of my head.
Also, when I write anything novel length my third act tends to be a dumpster fire. I have a bad habit of blowing up all my plot threads at the climax of the second act, then scrambling through the third to both rebuild momentum and tie up several different character arcs and themes. Sun and Hearth was my best try so far at that, so it's possible I'm improving there too. We'll see next time.
And, of course, finishing stuff, which goes with those other two. I can write fifteen pages of dialogue in a few days, easy, but pounding it into the form of an actual story can take months/years/literally forever.
5130321
Oh Jeez, that sounds like my characterization problem but on hard mode. I'd recommend reading some Skywriter and trying to figure out how he does it; he does a lot of character-focused stories.
Hmmm.... I haven't written anything worth sharing, by my eyes, ever. But I suppose my greatest weakness would be levity. I suck at the light and the fluffy.
Give me a prompt on suicide, or drug addiction, or depression or anything centered around sad and serious, and I've got you covered. Give me something that reminds my readers that happy endings aren't a guarantee. Give me an idea to evoke tearful memories, and I can write you a river.
Give me a prompt on something happy, and I'll find an excuse to write something sad instead. Hell, I've never even bothered trying to write Pinkie as anything other than the flat-maned kind, because I don't understand and can't muster a mindset of manic, frantic positivity. Okay, I can do manic and frantic positivity, but only as a prelude to a bipolar crash with a teary-eyed, rictus grin. The sad, depressing shit is easy, because no matter who you are there's shit we can all agree on making us sad.
Happy, on the other hand, is fucking impossible.
5130325
Not to pry, but do you yourself struggle to feel happiness?
5130321
I don't know if you ever saw this stupidly long blogpost I wrote, but it might have some thoughts that could help with that. It was focused on dialogue, but all of it goes for first or third person limited narration as well.
5130323
I take it you're more of a pantser than a plotter?
(I attempted to write a novel with my first story, and didn't get very far. I haven't since.)
5130333
I'm a very bad plotter. I have an outline (or several!) for every story I've written, and not a single outline that matches a story I've written.
5130328
*shrugs*
Some days it's as easy as walking out my door and into the woods. Or walking up to some random preacher on the street and having a conversation about where he's from.
Since I'm pretty new at this writing thing, technically the correct answer is to wish I were better at everything. But I'm a fast learner. I'm sure that if I put my mind to something, I could probably figure it out eventually.
So really, if I had magical powers to correct just one thing "writing-related", it would be my self-esteem. Get rid of the part that constantly compares myself to other people, and the part that abandons editing because I expect immediate results and don't think that anything less than perfect deserves to be worked on. I know that's okay to make mistakes, because one needs to know their mistakes in order to fix them. I even have a couple measures up, including a running blog post, to remind myself of this fact. But blah, I look forward to the day where my brain doesn't just know this fact, but accepts it, so that the curiosity, the hard work, and the learning will follow.
Something I might do if I ever write a story is write it backwards. Like, create a general timeline as a skeleton, figure out the start and end, and finish the story and work your way backwards. Instead of asking "how can I get the characters to that point," you can ask "what events would reasonably get them to this point?"
I don't know. All my writing is comments and short bursts of thoughts and ideas, personal philosophies, and random ramblings in a personal notebook.
To answer your question, I suppose I just wish I was a writer.
5130361
What do you think is stopping you?
I'm not brave enough. All the stories I write and have any desire to write are all these horrific things about suicide and immortality.
Which... well... I've gotten better at writing horrible things. But not in a sense I could ever do it commercially. And I do want to do that. None of my stories are particularly pony related. They have a shallow pony skin that would actually apply much better as original fiction. But dangit, how the heck do I market: "The main character hems and haws about suicide for four hundred pages."
I dunno. Original fiction trashes my desire to write the things I actually find interesting. And pony fiction just feels like I'm twisting my ideas to fit into the world.
And I overvolunteer myself to the point I don’t have any time anyway.
Writing stories about multiple characters. That is to say, giving multiple characters their own arcs, plots, etc, and not singularly focusing on just one character (or group of characters' interactions with each other).
That's something I dread doing, but by Celestia, I really wish I could! I love those types of stories (when they're done well, anyway).
5130312 I like to think I'm pretty decent at doing OC's. The thing is, people often make an OC by going to a pony creator and picking colors, but that's absolutely the wrong approach. If you want to write an OC, you have to give them just one 'thing.' What that is, is up to you, but you take that one point of focus, and you just derive everything else from it. For example, the 'thing' is a fear of flying (in an airplane). Mold the story around that, what happens as a result of this 'thing.' And if you're doing it right, things like colors, race, and even the character's name don't even factor into the equation until the last minute and you just pick something (or just don't, in my case), because those things are superficial.
5130321 I don't fancy writing that way myself, but have you tried just writing the narration however, then when you finish writing a chapter, go back and put yourself in the mindset of the one character that you want to narrate, and rewrite all the narration to match? I do that for dialogue all the time. Write it first, go back and rewrite it to match the character.
5130325 Well, firstly, a lot of people like sad stories. Myself included. Frantic positivity might be great for Pinkie Pie, but only as a piece of a much larger plot. If you write a story that's all frantically positive, there probably wouldn't be much conflict. The important thing to know about happiness (in writing, and otherwise, but specifically in writing) is that you really can't have happiness without having had sadness first. In other words, you might find you'd be good at writing sad depressing stories, with happy endings. Sad endings are also a thing, though.
5130361 As someone who is actually a writer (well, inasmuch as a halfassed my little pony fanfiction writer can be), that method is probably the ideal way to write a story. Not that I've ever been able to do that. It is a bitch to write endings. For me, starting with an ending would be giving up before I've even begun! Still, I wish I could do that, because, well, writing endings is hard. If you can write that first, and work your way backwards, you've got it made.
5130318 Well, nobody can help you to get up off your ass and sit down and write. But, if you manage to sit down, I can offer one little piece of advice that helps me focus on writing. Listen to music. Yeah, yeah, we've all heard that a million times. They also say listen to something instrumental without words. I take it a bit differently. I pick just one song, it has to be something really good, and really powerful, words or no, and listen to it on repeat. After a couple of repeats the words don't matter because you've got them memorized and don't pay them any mind. And because it's only one song, there's no variety to break you away from your focus. It helps me a lot, but admittedly, I'm also a victim of not having the gumption to just sit there and write.
Maintaining momentum is definitely my biggest weakness. And strength. My work ethic is Newton's First Law; I maintain the same activity (or lack thereof) until acted upon by an outside force. Sometimes I can be that force, but not terribly often. It's why so many of my stories are one-shots. It can take me months to actually put together the time and creative energy to turn a chapter from outline to finished (or at least workable) product.
So yeah, I feel you on doing things that aren't immediately met with a neurochemical reward.
I can't really put a name to it, but I have a tendency, when left to my own devices, to miss plot points that others latch on to. :B
Overambition, which quickly leas to burnout. I'm currently working on this super complex scene: three chapters, 15K words with five factions waging war (three major, two sub-factions), and about twenty major characters whose constantly-changing locations and objectives I have to keep straight. I love fiction and fantasy. I grew up on it. Love Lion King, Lord of the Rings, and Last Airbender for their storytelling. Story always comes first with me, and characters are a close second. But me? The guy writing all this? Somewhere near the bottom.
Always start by asking questions. What does the character want? How do the character's traits help them or hinder them as they try to reach their goal? How does this character's interactions with other characters affect their ability to reach their goal? How do their interactions affect the character?
Characters do not exist in a vacuum. Their traits set them up so that with just a few subtle pushes from you the author using the plot and setting, they tell their own story, abbr you the author almost take a back seat, merely chronicling what happens rather than making it happen. And it's a magical thing to see once you get to that point.
If you want to do your own research, I highly recommend the YouTube channel Hello Future Me.
Narration. I have a very sparse style. I don't mind that so much, but I need a little more and a little better narration than I usually provide. Not a lot. Five percent more would probably nail it, but figuring out where it needs to go is the tough part.
Narrative. I have a very sparse style. I don't mind that so much, but I need a little more story for readers to attach to my characters. A lot of the stuff in my edit queue is still there because I need to add more buildup so readers attach to characters. I like to start stories late, but it's often too late. This problem usually arises for me in longer stories.
Focus. I've been working on improving my focus while writing. Writeordie has helped with this issue, but I've still got room for improvement.
There are more, but focusing on those three problems comes first.
5130364
I'm lazy as fuck.
5130534
I’d recommend writing short scenes that work a story is then. Or just do shitfics like I do. Regardless, not every story has to be long.
5130556
This is coming from someone who has told himself "Yeah I'll finish Season Seven next day off," for several years at this point. It isn't that the task of writing is difficult, it's just I don't do it.