Unsolicited Writing Advice

[E U R Y D l C E]

Persephone_xx

Oh, okay. Sorry for the misunderstanding. surprised I like your advice.

[terradi]

Persephone_xx

It's not implied, that's just truth. A reader isn't going to spend long on a story that makes no sense to them.

Prose matters to a poet because it helps to describe and talk about things in longer paragraphs. It gives a fuller portrait of emotions and settings and therefore will help when cutting them down to only pay attention to the most important aspects.

Saying that, of course you CAN become a good writer without essay writing or poetry, however using these as tools in addition to writing prose will improve your abilities faster and more efficiently.

I didn't mention about ten million and one pieces of writing advice that exist.

I question that. Do you write prose or poetry yourself, or is this mostly a theoretical to you? I can pretty much guarantee you that if you try and tell a poet that they need to write a novel to get better at poems they're going to dismiss you outright. Ditto for a songwriter.

Not every writer is going to be heavy on the poetic statements. It can play into writing styles, but not everyone writes that way. I spent a lot more time on the characters and the dialogue than I do on the descriptions. My prose is not flowery nor is it terribly descriptive. That's not how I write. Doesn't (necessarily) mean I'm a bad writer. Merely that this is not as important to my specific style.

Impossible to get all the advice in a four-point statement. But accepting critique and trying to improve is one of the only pieces of advice that I think is actually vital for every writer. Given how much writers vary, that's saying something.

[Persephone_xx]

I3 a r o q u e

That's okay and thank you <3

terradi

Prose is my preferred method of writing, however I do poetry exercises because I feel it helps my wording and structure.

I don't think a poet should write a novel. Journalling is a good idea though, to observe the world around you/them.

There isn't just one style of poetry though. Also, I find that poetry is a lot better at NOT being over flowery and descriptive because there's less room to focus on unimportant details.

You can put it in your list of advice (:

[The Cappucine Piper]

I feel like I may be outcasted here for saying so, but I used to love writing although I knew I wasn't that great... You know, so many ideas with no means to executing the story well enough, that sort of thing... I feel that this advice helped me a lot in terms of getting back on track of what the backdrop of creating a story truly is, so...Forget all of you who are trying to h8 js <- u mad kk cya in th cb peace

[terradi]

Persephone_xx

Prose is my preferred method of writing, however I do poetry exercises because I feel it helps my wording and structure.

I don't think a poet should write a novel. Journalling is a good idea though, to observe the world around you/them.

There isn't just one style of poetry though. Also, I find that poetry is a lot better at NOT being over flowery and descriptive because there's less room to focus on unimportant details.

You can put it in your list of advice (:

I'm not quite confident or arrogant enough in my writing ability to feel like I have any business distributing my advice unsolicited. If I see someone struggling with a problem I've come across in writing, I'm happy to tell them how I tackled that particular problem, but I'm too aware of the fact that there is no one right way to do more.

I like writing in journals, though I tend to use it more to vent and get out the emotional stuff than for the purpose of observation. When I want to go out to observe the world and get a bunch of details down I tend to reach for my camera. It's a different form of storytelling, but I do enjoy it.

There isn't just one style of poetry, yes. And poets aren't necessarily going to go heavy into purple prose. The poet friends I've seen who have composed shorts have a certain feel about the way they write ... it's not heavy descriptive but it flows and runs differently than anything I've done. It is pretty, and it's an interesting style of writing. It just isn't mine.

On putting a large amount of meaning into just a few words, it could be argued just as well that posting on a Twitter account or anything else with a limited character count teaches you how to use a small number of words to get across a broader meaning. For that matter, my time overseas teaching English to non-native speakers and needing to take broad, complicated concepts and break them into simple English could likewise be considered an excellent exercise in cutting out the wordiness.

[Persephone_xx]

The Cappucine Piper

Thanks and I'm glad this helped you! I was in the same boat when I was younger, always trying to write these massive stories with no real idea what I was doing. My writing is still far from Shakespeare, but knowing how to write has helped my ideas come to life so much (:

terradi

I'm sorry you're not confident in your abilities ): I'm not sure why you're disputing this though, since becoming technically better at writing would make you feel better about your work.

All methods of writing will help you write. The idea that I was trying to get across in this post is the important of mechanics and actually knowing how to write. If you go to the artist forum, every time somebody asks how to draw manga, other artists will tell them that they need to learn how to actually draw first. Through figure studies, anatomy studies, etc. These people aren't asking how to draw realistic figures, but it does help them with their manga once their skills are built up.

No matter how great or original your ideas are, without the ability to write, they will not come across.

[terradi]

Persephone_xx

I'm sorry you're not confident in your abilities ): I'm not sure why you're disputing this though, since becoming technically better at writing would make you feel better about your work.

All methods of writing will help you write. The idea that I was trying to get across in this post is the important of mechanics and actually knowing how to write. If you go to the artist forum, every time somebody asks how to draw manga, other artists will tell them that they need to learn how to actually draw first. Through figure studies, anatomy studies, etc. These people aren't asking how to draw realistic figures, but it does help them with their manga once their skills are built up.

No matter how great or original your ideas are, without the ability to write, they will not come across.

There's no need to feel sorry for me. I'm not entirely certain it's a bad thing or an unusual thing, really.

I've been writing off and on (by this I mean working on novel-length stories) for fifteen years, and I will submit my first queries that are actually worth looking at this year. Getting those out and seeing how they're received, and getting peers that I respect to let me know what they think of my work will help, but I'm never going to be 100% confident that I'm doing anything well. That's okay. That's part of the drive to make what I do better. I'm usually happy with what I do, but actually taking that risk and handing it over to other people is hard. Especially as I've made friends with people who are landing contracts now who I know to be good at critiquing. I don't expect I have everything right, so it's going to be a learning experience. Should be interesting.

Practice always helps. I know from looking at my older stuff that I've improved over the years. Some of the stuff I wrote when I was first starting to tackle the longer stuff is now painful to read. I recognize this means I'm now capable of looking at things I believed were perfect and picking out the things I did wrong ... but sometimes it hurts to see all the things I didn't get right back then. The story itself is fine, the characters are presentable. The writing is abysmal. One of these days I'm going to go back and attack the first MS I put together. I may need to drink heavily before I read the whole thing start-to-finish again though.

[Persephone_xx]

terradi

Nobody will ever think their work is perfect, however I will always be 100% confident that you need to know HOW to write in order to write WELL.

Practice is vital in anything you do. As you said, when you started out, your writing was abysmal. Through learning and using mechanical elements your writing became better and made you into a better writer. That's why they're important.

[terradi]

Persephone_xx

Nobody will ever think their work is perfect, however I will always be 100% confident that you need to know HOW to write in order to write WELL.

Practice is vital in anything you do. As you said, when you started out, your writing was abysmal. Through learning and using mechanical elements your writing became better and made you into a better writer. That's why they're important.

Hey now, abysmal's a strong word. By a sixteen-year-old's standards, my writing was quite good. It's just that I'm not a teenager anymore, and the stakes have gone up. As well, as anyone who has written a few MSs will tell you, you get better after the first one. I think it would be difficult not to. Heck, even after finishing the first draft and then moving on to your first round of edits ... you learn things.

Many of my changes have been from learning: learning to do my research, learning how to actually include description rather than just having heavy dialogue and letting that do all the work, learning to show what is going on (as needed -- not always needed) rather than just stating it, and learning that the ellipsis is not necessary in every other line for good dramatic dialogue.

Thing is, I never set out to learn mechanics. I don't start stories with a grand idea that I'm trying to get across (and I am quite certain I am not going to write the Next Great Novel -- I'll settle for writing something entertaining that people can enjoy). I don't think I did most of what you're suggesting should be standard for anyone who wants to get serious with their writing. I'd be much more likely to chalk it up to trial-and-error, experimentation, distance, and learning how to look at my own work objectively. Reading better writing, and beginning to look at how it is done helps -- though it makes it nigh-impossible to enjoy some authors who I used to love reading.

[Persephone_xx]

terradi

Abysmal was your word, haha. I haven't read your writing.

You're over-thinking mechanics and putting it into this little box that only describes novels like War and Peace. Just because a story is well written doesn't make it a bad story. Actually, it makes it a better story. I don't have the patience to read books that aren't written or edited well. What you are describing having improved on ARE the mechanics of a story.

I think that anybody who wants to be serious in their writing needs to not put their character's feelings before their knowledge of writing.

[terradi]

You're right. I don't think of mechanics as being all-encompassing like that. If you'd talked about using proper grammar and spelling, and continuing to learn what makes a story great, I'd have reacted differently.

I tend to think of mechanics as being mechanical and abstract. And of the level of work that has to go into anything that's meant to be a commentary on society and the world in general. Or anything with a planned thirty bajillion layers of meaning. (We'll ignore the fact that the audience, especially if it's Lit Majors, are going to make up their own meanings as they go too). That's several steps above and away from anything I ever aspire to write. Mostly because my brain just doesn't function that way. I can't even write an outline. I have to dive into a story and feel it out before I can start figuring out where it needs to go and what the ending needs to be. (Exception to shorts, because they're small enough that you can start out with a planned ending and reach it quickly).

If I ever get published, it'll be stuff that disappears in a decade or so. An entertaining story, but nothing epic or lasting. About the equivalent of pop-fiction. It doesn't belong in the same category as the great stuff, in my opinion. Nor does the amount of planning and preparation that goes into it seem like it deserves lofty titles. Which is why calling the sort of work that goes into it mechanics feels odd. It's just fixing the parts that are horrible -- writing things that aren't terrible. Nothing mysterious or necessarily technical about it.

Worth noting that I also tend towards character-driven stories. I have no problems trampling all over their feelings and racking up an appropriate body count in the process of getting to my ending. But what feels natural for a character does help determine what is going to work for the story. There are things that simply don't fit the characters or that come across as strange or unbelievable given their characterizations. If that is not factored into scenes, they're not going to come out right. Now -- to fix issues like that characters can be tweaked or the plot can be tweaked. But with a developed character -- some paths just aren't going to feel right for them because they don't fit how they've acted throughout the story.

[Major Lag]

LMFAAAAAAO at all of the butthurt attitudes in this thread.

Just w_t_f. I'm not going to point out names, but there are plenty of pretentious and overblown opinions here that don't belong to the OP. I think some people just want to be contrary and argumentative. That, or they have paper-thin egos.

@ OP: I personally like directness, so I didn't find the delivery of any of your advise abrasive. But even if I did, I wouldn't feel the need to point that out because, simply put, it's not relevant. xD If anything, some of these kids just wanted to hop on the bandwagon based on the initial tone created with the first few posts. Reminds me of what I had to put up with in my college writing workshops.

Anyway, I agree with everything you said. Even if some people can deviate from your tips and still turn out good material, they're still good guidelines for the general population to follow, especially would-be writers who have yet to develop a good, sound base for their writing.

[Kani Jalo]

Persephone_xx

I don't think that posting some writing advice on a writing forum falls under the same category as an evil fairy showing up to a party uninvited.

I'm unsure of where you got the 'evil fairy' bit from--I'm unremittingly interested in fairy tales, but am unable to find how you made such an unusual connection.

Persephone_xx

I'm surprised that the people who disagree didn't simply glance at it and then move on. The high number of replies tells me that there's a lot of people who feel threatened by the advice, otherwise they wouldn't react. Which makes no sense, because it's just a forum topic on a stupid website.

It may seem a bit unhinged, but unless the other users are really immature, they are unlikely to be taking this thread as seriously as you think. Your initial post was unbelievably sanctimonious, which tends to get under people's skin just enough that they'll reply whether they actually care or not.