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writing @hexbear.net
darkguyman @lemmy.dbzer0.com

What is some good general writing advice?

I'm pretty new to writing and frankly, my stories are horrible writing-wise when I read them. Any piece of advice would appreciated.

19 comments

  • Don't try to jump straight into a magnum opus. Start with smaller things that result from an idea you have that's ready to turn into its own piece, rather than aiming to write a longer piece and adding inspiration into it after.

    Everyone has inspiration. It comes in passing moments, and most people don't write it down.

    There's a good reason why fan fiction became widespread, and that is because it allows you to take a premade setting and characters, and put your own twist on them without having to do the rest from the bottom up.

  • Dialogue is key. Pay close attention to dialogue

    Read your dialogue aloud. Does it feel like a natural thing to say, given the circumstances? Do your characters sound consistently like themselves? When your characters talk to each other, do they sound like separate people with unique experiences and perspectives?

  • Keep writing and producing crap. Over time you will improve. Finish what you start. Even if it's shit. A finished shitty story is a million times better than a "good" one that never gets completed.

    • Bad finished story is always better than good idea or concept. Concepts always pristine and perfect because they have no shape or form. A real written page is always more valuable than a cool idea.

  • I find it helps a lot to plan. Try to figure your story out before you begin. You can always change your plans later.

    For me, writing early in the morning with coffee and trance-inducing music makes things much easier. Lock yourself out of the internet, put your phone in a place that's difficult to get to.

    Publish your work. There's no such thing as objective feedback. Everyone has some kind of bias. People who actually spend money on your work want to like it, otherwise they feel like chumps. In my experience, writers and editors criticize a lot more than general readers. When I read really popular and successful novels, I can't believe how lazy they are, for lack of a better word (although many of them are still entertaining). A lot of successful writers seemingly barely edit their work at all (they go through it once or twice), while writing teachers will insist that you spend ten years driving yourself insane "honing" a piece of fiction that has a 99% chance of going absolutely nowhere, not because of your skill, but simply because thousands of books and stories are published every second, and how many of them achieve any kind of prominence? Write quickly. Crank your shit out, publish it, learn what you can, and move on to the next project. Take down ideas for projects so you always have something to work on. These days because of my job I can usually only crank out a few pages a day. This still results in me publishing about two books per year.

    Politics is essential to writing. Show, don't tell is CIA bullshit. There's plenty of liberal and fascist slop out there, but not a lot of communist slop, especially in English. A lot of the communist fiction that exists is also depressing or defeatist. I try to be subtle about the politics in my writing, but I find that people still easily figure it out. There's no fooling them. I feel like a lot of readers can sense that there is something different about my work, but they can't even put their finger on it because they've never encountered the dialectical materialist style. The ideological realm is another front of class struggle.

    The rule with reviewers is that if they all mention one specific issue with your story, then it's probably a problem. But if liberals are complaining about the communism in your story, does that mean your communism is a problem? (No, fuck 'em.) The reviewers that truly drive me crazy are the ones who hate your story only because of its politics, but pretend that other issues, always vaguely described, are the real problem.

    It's pretty normal to dislike your work when you look back on it. Hopefully this is because we are constantly growing as writers. It makes me nuts when people tell me they like my older books rather than my newer ones. (I think this is common for lots of artists of all kinds.) Are we actually improving, or do we just desperately want to believe that we are improving?

  • Nobody gives a shit about the events that happen in your story. They care about how the events impact the characters of your story. Your audience will never get invested in the stakes of the story if the characters aren't invested in them.

  • Personally, I like prioritizing the characters. What makes them tick? What are some interesting details about each one?

    Especially when starting out, I like to keep things lighthearted, lest you end up writing coldsteel the hegeheg.

    • Write what you know. Pretty cliché advice, but you're going to have an easier time making characters cobbled together from people in your own life. Or situations you've experienced. Whatever you do, don't try and be an expert in an industry you haven't worked in or in a subject you haven't studied. Nothing worse than feeeeeemale scientists in stories who boobily bounce their boobs to the lab where they make their dead dad proud his daughter became a physicist just like him.
    • Why now, why these characters? The fundamental part of storytelling is answering why the audience should care about this story you wrote. For example, we care about Luke Skywalker because he's going to be at the forefront of a successful rebellion. Nobody wants to read about Luke hanging out with his friends picking up power converters while the Empire continues to carry on without a rebellion. Why is your story taking place when it does? Why are these characters important to this situation?
    • Conflict is inherent to good stories. What do characters want, materially or socially, that puts them at odds to the wants of other characters? Maybe it's the same romantic partner. Or the same job. Perhaps they're on opposite sides of a war. You can have a story with no villains and remain a good story so long as there's conflict between the protagonists.
19 comments