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When writing, it is VERY VERY IMPORTANT to keep superobjectives in mind. What is each character's overarching goal? Does it change, or do only their objectives -- temporary goals -- develop?

Also, it is dangerous to have a character "be" something. They must "do" something. Instead of having a character "be sad", it is much more effective to have that character "mourning". At each beat or moment, a character must be employing an active verb.



Those are just examples from my notes. There are countless verbs that can be played out, and it is important to always keep them changing.

These are actually all acting technique things (( heart Stanislavski)), but I've found that they apply quite well to writing. Some people can do this without ever being taught. It's just how they write. Even just keeping this in mind, however, can help a lot of writers, I believe. You should be able to look at your work, take a moment, and apply an active verb to each character in the scene. If you can't, then you probably need to work on your characters a bit.

I wrote up a spitload of advice that I repeat often. I was going to offer it if anything like a general advice thread popped up. Since it's here, I'll post what I have and remove some of the extra tidbits I might be repeating. It was initially addressed to be placed in the poetry forum, so I apologize for any confusion. sweatdrop

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Pi's Poetry Principles, or How Not To Get Toasted

It seems to me that a lot of the people that come to this forum flee to poetry in a state of desperation. When something extreme happens to you, whether it be good or bad, a simple journal entry feels inadequate for expression. Therefore, we attempt to collect our thoughts in the form of poetry.

Unfortunately, that's not all there is to poetry - and a lot of people are getting burned in this forum due to their insistence that poetry is all about emotion. I'm going to quote another user in her approximation of the balance of poetry:


While the percentages are merely a guesstimate, I think she's got a grasp on something that could be potentially helpful to the people here who would want to develop their writing and work to become better at the art.

So! My goal with this post is to outline some of the basic pointers of poetry that I find myself repeating frequently, and I'm going to use the scale presented above.

1) Emotion in Poetry
The idea frequented by amateur poets is that you need to feel the emotion in yourself to make the poem good. And they're half right. Barbara Kingsolver said in an interview, "Set your scenes in places you know well. Otherwise, your details will be bogus." While she was talking about stories, the same thing applies here.

However, I would ask you to compare the following two examples.



I'm willing to bet that both poets are equally distraught about their fathers' waning lives. However, ask yourself: which poem really tears up your heartstrings? Now ask yourself, why? Why is Dylan Thomas' villanelle so much stronger to an outsider than the first one?

The answer lies in the reader. Your words, in poetry, do so much more than express your emotion. They invoke emotion from your readers. If your poetry fails to do that, you might as well be holding a discussion. Obviously, people will feel sympathy with you in the first example. But the second example brings them to examine their own losses more thoroughly.

Therefore, think before you emote. Which leads us to the next point:

2) Thought
Yes, folks, there is thinking involved in poetry. Don't believe me? Go look up how many years Thomas Stearns Eliot spent on The Wasteland.

Therefore, don't expect everyone to love something you've thrown together in five minutes. Moreover, don't use the time devoted to the poem as an excuse. I mean, really - what's the rush? No one's breathing down your neck to post the poem. Take pride in your work and devote some effort to it.

Write while your muse is fresh, edit while it's quieting, and read while it's silent. When I say "write," I mean write as much as you possibly can. When I say "edit," I mean look at your poem critically and severely, and take the time to make valuable changes to it either on your own or per suggestions from other people. When I say "read," I mean go look up some great poetry on the Internet, or go to the library and check out books both of poetry and on poetry. It's amazing the things you can learn just by partaking of an indirect internship. Consider it training from the masters. Now, you have a fair chance of getting good ideas here in the forum, but remember that most of the sources here are still in high school/college and are learning right alongside you.

Also, take the time to criticize other poetry on the board. There's always something new to read (even though it may feel like you've read the same thing a thousand times before wink ). Find the flaws that you've learned to catch and point them out. It's helpful for both ends, as it enlightens the author and helps you keep some of the details of technique fresh in your mind.

3) Spelling and Grammar
Time for a heavy sigh. This is the most frequently debated point here.

Let's get one thing straight. Using no punctuation or capitalization does not automatically make your piece artistic. It's not that original, if you couldn't tell by the thousands of amateur poets that make the same claim. In the same vein, just because your grammar is perfect doesn't mean you're automatically brilliant.

If there is anything beyond contestation, it's this: spelling cannot be sacrificed. I know someone said to me once, "Cummings must drive you insane." As a matter of fact, he doesn't. The only time he alters the spelling of words is to make a point. YOU ARE NOT E E CUMMINGS. I made one attempt at trying to use his devices effectively, and it's hard. I spent several hours working on that poem to get it to a reasonable level. Laziness is not the same as creativity. Make yourself intimate with the rules of grammar before ever trying to bend them.

Now, before we abandon this subject to more helpful advice, I'm going to insert a comment on punctuation. We have several devices at our fingertips; for instance, there are semicolons and commas that distinctly set pauses (and parentheses, which can either make or break a poem). Periods signify the end of a thought, but exclamation points can really drive something home! As for ellipses... well... they're better off used sparingly than frequently. With regards to the colon: it can make an interesting setup to the next thought - then again, so can the hyphen, but that's a bit more abrupt. But why would I recommend avoiding the question mark? (I'll get to that soon, if you don't notice by now.)

You don't need a mark of punctuation after every line. It's better to keep punctuation where you would put it in a sentence at first. It will increase your familiarity with the devices. Also, as a quick note, it is no longer tradition to capitalize the first letter of each line. It actually Breaks the flow, if You think about It.

Ooh, I've hit the word flow! That means we should move on.

4) Rhythm and Flow
I'm going to break this down into two slightly more tangible concepts: form, and the common "don't"s of poetry.

First of all, the most commonly used form here is free verse. Why? Because, on the surface, it's easier. You don't have to count feet/syllables, you don't have to rhyme - seems perfect, right? Maybe not. With free verse comes more room for error. "But," you might interject, "people accuse me of my rhymes being forced." Rhyming dictionaries are actually rather helpful, such as rhymezone.com. Don't necessarily copy everything straight from there; the point is to find some new ideas just looking at the words.

That being said, experiment with other forms, such as sonnets, villanelles, pantoums, or even something like blank verse. It will broaden your experience and help you work on the free verse poetry you're used to writing.

Now, for Pi's list of most commonly offered tidbits:

---SHOW, DON'T TELL.---
I can't tell you how many times I've said this to poets. There is a huge difference between listing off everything and giving a full description. When writing, say too much. You can always cut out unnecessary parts later. But to say, "Her eyes were pretty," is so... boring. To say, "The elusive flare of her flawless emerald eyes trapped me," must seem somewhat more interesting.

---Adjectives are your friends, but don't make them your enemies.---
With description comes adjectives (duh). However, you want to make sure that your adjectives don't weigh down your description. One good example comes with precious stones. Let's take a look at "The elusive flare of her flawless emerald eyes" again. What if I had said "crystalline emerald eyes"? It sounds prettier, but crystal is far less precious than an emerald - especially one with that flare of elusive blue (to quote the movie Gigi). Therefore, make sure to triple check the definition of each word.

---Never hide your meaning.---
You may think you're cool for having subtext and a "deeper meaning" in your poem... but isn't that what you should be doing anyway? Furthermore, if you're masking the meaning of your poem from your reader, isn't that a bad thing?

If your meaning is incoherent, then you've failed, to some degree. If your meaning takes a couple tries to interpret, you're heading in the right direction. While you shouldn't tell them everything, it's important to make sure they're taking something from your poem. We're not writing riddles here; we're writing poetry. (Of course, if you wanted to write riddles, there is a thread in the Writers' forum for that.)

---Didn't you say something about not using questions marks?---
Oh, yeah. That.

While you do want to stir your readers' thoughts and make them ask questions, you don't necessarily want to ask them yourself. Make the statements that invoke the questions. Your poem should be your version of the answer. Don't leave it hollow by flooding your piece with question marks.

---Avoid using too many "-ing" verbs or starting a line with a conjunction.---
The purpose of your poem is to take the reader through a new perspective. Your words need to be active and strong. Saying, "My heart is breaking," seems much more pathetic than, "My heart breaks." Why? In the first example, the heart is little more than a fragile, inanimate object. By giving it action, you strengthen potential imagery and make the poem that much more powerful.

Similarly, conjunctions (and, but, or, yet, etc.) are weak words and do little to stimulate a line.

---Avoid repitition and redundancy.---
Yes, they are two different things. Repitition involves copying a line and pasting it into other stanzas. (Assume, for the moment, that we are only working with free verse, as some forms require repitition.) Redundancy is explaining the same idea three different ways in three consecutive lines. You only have so much time to say what you're going to say and leave your reader feeling stunned. Don't drag it out by saying the same thing over and over again. Writing poetry is like setting jewels into a royal crown - you want just the right ones to catch the glint perfectly.

Of course it sounds hard. That's why we're not all masters.

---Don't let your title be your poem.---
Your title should be a very brief summary of your poem. Your first line should not rely on your title. This is the one place you have to really boast your creativity. Open up the possibilities with wordplay or an obscure word that pertains to your theme or something that isn't just "Pain" or "Anger" or "Love." Also, make sure you say more than your title. I've read some poems where I could've read the title and left with more ideas than reading the poem. This is generally a bad thing, as you want people to read your poetry.

If you can't quite decide on if they aren't unique, if you are writing a short story, you could count up the words in a sentence or make each sentence one line. That way you could compare the amount of words in the surrounding sentences or compare their length.

When writing dialogue in prose, make sure you consider the environment and mood you want to convey and so that your dialogue meshes accordingly. If you are writing a realistic story, make sure that the characters are saying things that -sound- realistic and natural.





I know people want to cram description and fancy words into dialogue to make it sound sophisticated, but your character no longer sounds like a natural entity to the reader. I think for realistic stories for the most part, you should be able to write dialogue that you could actually say to a stranger without getting weird looks. Even really intellegent people talk normally, so don't think that because your character is a super-genius that they talk like a lecturing professor.

Another issue is with the word "said". Some authors never, ever use it. They may think that using it immediately detracts from the story, and do their best to replace it with more exotic phrases. I don't find this to be helpful though.



All of those words used to replace "said", while being more descriptive, also detract from the dialogue. The reader is focusing more on the fact that Bob bellowed or Amy scoffed rather than the actual dialogue. In the last sentence especially, having the verb "bellow" detracts from the Bob's curt response. If "said" was used instead, the dialogue would have a greater impact. Also, you don't always need to use 'said' or any other dialogue verb at all, especially for short responses or if the person's tone is obvious. The third line is a good example of that, because it is obvious Regina is fed up and yellng at them.

Could anyone post some character's charts? I'm having a rough time keeping my characters the same until the end of the story, or they're actually too vague and contradictory. (If this has already been posted somewhere, tell me, it would be useful) ^^

Thank you for saying that! So many people are capable of great writing, but don't spend the time or take the effort to do it. It takes a lot of time and self control to, for example, write a novel. It's so easy to get side tracked into something else. You have to stick with it to the end if you want it to work out. Many people think that their writing is bad, so the never write anything. Well how do you think people get better? They practice!

Keep a journal. Write about everything you see. Look for inspiration in everyday life. The more you write, the better you will get. Don't expect to things to happen like magic!

To elaborate on my "stick with it" theory, it helps to make a graph when writing stories. A plan helps immensely as well. It's easy to just get an idea and suddenly start writing, but if you don't plan out your plot in advance, you won't be able to add elements such as foreshadowing. You won't be able to drop subtle hints and clues. It is possible to add these things later, but your story might not have the right flow. It's also easy to get side tracked when you don't have a clear intent in mind.

PLAN OUT YOUR STORY BEFOREHAND

I can't stress this enough. I'm not an expert, but I have learned through experience that it is worth it to plan things out in advance. At least get a general idea of what you want to accomplish. I can guarantee it it will help you later on.

That seems more like a personal preference than advice to me.