Am I good enough to write a VN or should I hire a writer?

[Aviala]

I'm in the process of making a VN. The first chapter will be free but the second and third are going to be commercial. The problem is that I've created a pretty complex world (it has taken me about 2 years on and off) and the world and the characters are very dear to me so I fear that a hired writer might not understand everything the way I do. But I'm not sure if my writing is good enough for a VN, let alone a commercial one. I'm definitely going to get an editor if I decide to do it myself but I'm not sure if my writing is good enough even then since I'm not a native English speaker.

Opinions?


Here's a sample from the beginning of the story:

I started heading back to the ship through the crowded marketplace. This was the higher level of the city so most of the people seemed wealthy. Servants and slaves followed their masters, helping to carry their burdens. Near the edge of the market, away from the crowded parts, was a drakemaster with a couple of drakes. They probably belonged to some noble from the higher parts of the city.

I made my way to the streets. It bugged me that there were so many veiled citizens around. I knew it was a necessity here but it still didn't feel right, even after all these years of travelling. Well, at least they had made the best of their situation, decorating their veils and scarves with bits of floatstone.

It was apparent that this was the country that had the biggest floatstone reserves in the whole known world. The wealthy folk didn't even bother to try to keep it hidden. And why should they have, it was the perfect way to showcase their wealth and power.

C A nation where all are equal... Yeah, right.

As I got closer to the Flyfish, more and more people appeared in the streets. There was already a crowd around the ship, consisting mostly of people from the lower levels of the town. It was like they had never seen an airship before, which was highly improbable taking into consideration that the city was so near the border.

A familiar face emerged from the crowd but I wasn't too thrilled.

C Nen!
N Captain!
N How did it go?
C We got the deal. But Nen-
N Wonderful! Great news! I knew you could do it, cap'n!
C Yes, yes, but Nen, why aren't you wearing your veil?
N Oh, no-one's going to say anything about it! They know we're not from around here.
C We've already talked about this. Business first.
N All right, okay, I know. Having to hide myself is just kind of...
C Necessary.

The Vesaian sighed but agreed to cover her face again. Sometimes it was hard to get her to understand the most basic things. We couldn't afford to do anything that could ruin our plans, that was a fact.

[ichiban]

You should do it yourself and get an editor. I think your writing is alright but could use some work. I agree with your concern that hiring a writer may drift the final work from the world you sunk a lot of time into creating. Doing it yourself is challenging, however it'll be how you want it in the end and the readers will be able to sense that. A hired writer will not have the same passion and desire to tell the story in your world as you do.

I think you could try to shorten some sentences. Studying general vocabulary could help with this. Also be careful with the tense. Your first sentence (I started heading back to the ship through the crowded marketplace.) is present tense but the following are past tense using words like 'was.'

Overall, it requires pretty heavy editing, but any decent editor can work with it and help you out.

[RotGtIE]

Your grasp on English is excellent for a second language. Hell, it's decent enough for a first language. What you are missing, I think, is the necessary technique to convert your words from a form of communication into a work of art. Fortunately, writing is one of the few skills that you can improve just by watching other people do it well. The simplest way to improve is to expand your vocabulary and read more works of writing.

The content of your story is good, from what I can see. Your grammar is fine, it's just your technique which presents an issue; I can easily understand everything you are trying to communicate, it's just that your writing is very brief and mechanical. That's a fairly easy fix, and it's a lot better than having the spirit for writing creatively without having the basics down.

"Read more stuff" isn't very specific and it's probably more time consuming than what you're looking for, so I'll try to throw out some techniques that I think would help you greatly when you re-read your drafts so that you can reconstruct them. What you have here is a great baseline, it just needs to be converted from words into literature.

Paint the scene.

This was the higher level of the city so most of the people seemed wealthy.
Near the edge of the market, away from the crowded parts, was a drakemaster with a couple of drakes.
Well, at least they had made the best of their situation, decorating their veils and scarves with bits of floatstone.

You're probably aware of the whole "show, don't tell" rule. I see that you are trying to show what this marketplace is like, but you do so by telling the reader what is going on in it. There are quite a few things going on in this marketplace that I'd like to know more about; I've never seen a drake or a floatstone before, let alone domesticated drakes or bits of floatstone. I also don't know anything about the setting, so I don't know how wealthy citizens distinguish themselves from poor ones. There is room to expand, here, especially since the narrator of this story is explaining things about the setting to his audience. This world is alien to me, and to every other reader who encounters it for the first time, so anything in it which doesn't exist in my reality or to which I don't have a fair enough analogue to draw from is going to require a bit of creative description in order to help me understand it.

Here's an example for the drakes:

A gruff man moved quickly about the outskirts of the marketplace with three drakes in tow. Bound by iron muzzles and a single chain between them, the beasts looked to be of ripe age for sale. They had each grown to the size of a mule; soon their wings would grow large enough to carry them through the skies, but for now, they were limited to following in the footsteps of their handler. Seared into the scales of their hind legs were the markings of a nobleman who lived in the upper quarter of the city; it would appear that they had already been purchased.

Even though the drakes, their handler, and the nobleman are not important parts of the plot, expanding upon them in this way tells the reader a whole hell of a lot about the world you worked so hard to build. I now know the relative size of a drake compared to something I am already familiar with (and have been given the idea that they will grow larger), I know that drakes eventually gain the ability to fly but not until they age to a certain point and their wings grow in, I know that drakes are dangerous enough to require iron muzzles and gruff men as their handlers (and roughly how many drakes a single handler can be trusted to drag around a marketplace at once), and I know that they are raised to be branded and sold to noblemen, so they must be expensive to own and care for.

Now obviously, I made up a lot of that shit, and those might not be the properties of the drakes in your story. That's rather the whole point, though; you never know what your reader is going to imagine if you give them limited information, and you don't really want to make the reader expend those brain bytes anyway. Giving the reader the details they need to understand the scene set before them will make your world come alive without the reader having to work for it. And when you show the reader that you will not leave them in the dark about things that might make them curious, you can gain their interest and they will learn to trust that you will make sure they know everything they want to know about your story when they reach a point where it sparks their curiosity.

You have the advantage of using a first person narrative, so not only can the narrator speak to the reader as though he is their tour guide, he can also detail the things he sees using the enhancements (or limitations) of his own perspective, as well as give his own opinions about what is going on. It's a two-for-one deal when you exploit this advantage, as it allows you to develop the character of your narrator while simultaneously showcasing the elements of your world.

Don't do the reader's thinking for them.

This was the higher level of the city so most of the people seemed wealthy.
They probably belonged to some noble from the higher parts of the city.

This is going to seem to come counter to the previous suggestion, but showcasing your world to the readers is not the same as drawing their conclusions for them. The easiest way to catch yourself doing this is to read over the things you write and to ask yourself if a reader could respond to anything you've written by saying "I'll be the judge of that." You don't want your audience to respond to your passages like this:

Oh, so they seemed wealthy, did they? And how do you suppose that is? I don't know what seems so wealthy about them. They could be regular old schmucks for all I know. Do they dress fancy? Do they wear funny hats? How does this narrator presume to tell me whether someone "seems" wealthy or not? I don't know this guy from Jack, and he doesn't even seem confident in his own assessments!

Alright, that reader might be a particularly mean one, but he's got a point. It's the beginning of the story, so the reader has not yet built enough trust in the narrator to believe what he says, and with no distinguishing features of wealthy people to describe in this alien world, the reader has no choice but to take the word of this narrator he's only just met for it. Trust is an effort, and readers are lazy. Don't make them work to believe anything that happens in your story, and they'll stick around for more. Again, paint the scene: show us what's so apparently wealthy about these people, and you won't have to ask us to trust you that they just seem to be that way. If you tell me that a guy with a handlebar mustache is traipsing through the market square with a big poofy hat and his cape dragging along behind him, I'm going to be the one saying that he seems to be wealthy, whether you say so or not. You put the picture in front of me, and I'll do the thought-having.

Don't be redundant.

This was the higher level of the city...They probably belonged to some noble from the higher parts of the city.
Servants and slaves followed their
a drakemaster with a couple of drakes

If you tell me that there is a drakemaster, I'm probably going to assume that drakes are involved somewhere in the vicinity of his person. If you use the word "drakemaster" and "drakes" so close together that there are only four words between them, it's going to sound like you said "I reached for the milk carton which contained milk."

If I don't know what marks the difference between a servant and a slave in your world, or if the difference is negligible, then I'm going to wonder why you chose to use two synonyms in the same sentence to point out the same thing. If I told you that I owned a few canines and some dogs, you might raise an eyebrow at my choice of words.

I get that the city seems to have "higher" parts, but I don't really know what that means. Is this city built into a mountain, or is "higher" just a figurative word which you are using to describe locations of this city separated by class and wealth, like "uptown" and "downtown"? Because you used the word "higher" at both opportunities, you robbed yourself of the chance to clarify this to the reader. If you have a chance to vary your language to avoid repeating yourself, go ahead and take it. You can always read back over it again later to make sure you aren't getting too purple with your prose.

Get used to writing in the form of a novel at all times, even during dialogue.

C A nation where all are equal... Yeah, right.
C Nen!
N Captain!
N How did it go?
C We got the deal. But Nen-
N Wonderful! Great news! I knew you could do it, cap'n!
C Yes, yes, but Nen, why aren't you wearing your veil?
N Oh, no-one's going to say anything about it! They know we're not from around here.
C We've already talked about this. Business first.
N All right, okay, I know. Having to hide myself is just kind of...
C Necessary.

No, no, no! Bad writer, bad! No cookie!

Even if you are planning to write for a visual novel and aren't going to be using the NVL format, I would still very strongly recommend that you write out your dialogue the same way an author of a novel would have to write it out. Just because dialogue is the focus of what's going on once two or more character start yapping doesn't mean that there isn't going to be other stuff taking place that you could describe. People will change their expressions or make gestures while they speak, or bits of the scenery might interrupt now and then. You're going to need to know all of this to fully understand the conversation which takes place between your characters - their discussion is an event which takes place fully within your world, not in a bubble independent of the speakers' surroundings.

In the example above, you have one character who is trying to brush off the formalities required of her in this town, and another who is attempting to enforce her compliance to them. She is trying to push ahead to what she wants to talk about, and he is insisting that she meet public standards before their discussion progresses any further. I imagine there's going to be a lot of body language going on in this, don't you? I would think that "Captain" is trying to keep his voice low enough to avoid attracting attention (he doesn't want Nen to be seen without her veil) and yet also stern enough to press the point that he means to be taken seriously. Meanwhile, "Nen" is probably trying to get away with this lack of conformity to standards, and so I would think that she is probably being overly loud, confident, and generally attempting to appear as casual as possible, to create the visual impression that she is not doing anything wrong, so she won't have to put on that damned veil she seems to dislike wearing so much. This is an opportunity for character development which completely vanishes when you decide to chisel it out and throw down a line-by-line account of who said what, rather than writing out the scene in full.

The important thing to remember here is this: just because this is going to be a visual novel, and just because people are talking, doesn't mean it's okay for you to stop setting the scene.

Personally, I think you can do it. I don't think you need to hire a writer to do any of this for you. The only thing you're really missing is literary technique, and frankly I don't even think that is a necessary prerequisite to writing out the first full draft of your story. You can always get the important bits written down first and then go back over what you've done and rewrite it to turn it into a proper story worthy enough to be called a Novel.

[Aviala]

Thanks for the feedback!

I'm really glad that both of you think I can do it with practise & the help of an editor. The world is really dear to me so having someone else write about it wouldn't feel right. I knew I had a lot to learn so thanks for pointing out specific things. It really helps me to find the flaws in my text and learn from my mistakes. I definitely also need to start reading more in English. I used to read a lot in Finnish when I was younger but now that I think of it I've only read like... Harry Potter books in English and not much else. Reading more would probably help me expand my vocabulary as well.

Oh, and if anyone else has feedback for me I'll gladly accept it!

[Laniessa]

I somewhat skimmed the other post so I'm not sure if it was covered, but I have two points I want to mention!

I started heading back to the ship through the crowded marketplace. This was the higher level of the city so most of the people seemed wealthy. Servants and slaves followed their masters, helping to carry their burdens.

Your writing has a bit of exposition. Which is fine, but it's a bit unnatural. It seems like the character is narrating to herself, so they don't need to explain that
This was the higher level of the city so most of the people seemed wealthy." Something like, "Nobles strolled the streets casually, unlike the poorer districts in the lower levels." I can't put it quite eloquently, but having an explaining 'so' makes it seem like the narrator is explaining herself, rather than simply thinking and narrating what they would see. Just try to integrate explanations in a way where it seems like your character is thinking them naturally.

It bugged me that there were so many veiled citizens around.

This sentence feels a bit off. Why does it bug her? Why is she making this observation now? Adding a 'still', or changing it to something like 'no matter how many times I walk in this town, the veiled citizens continue to irk me', might be more effective.

That being said, I'm a casual writer, so take my observations with a pinch of salt! If you really want to write this story, but you're worried about the prose, get an editor that enjoys your work. What's happening is clear, so editing would be able to straighten it out. All in all - keep reading, keep writing, and I think you'll be okay to write it all by yourself.

[OokamiKasumi]

... I fear that a hired writer might not understand everything the way I do, but I'm not sure if my writing is good enough for a VN, let alone a commercial one.

I am a professional writer, and my advice is: Write it Yourself.
-- You'll learn far more about the process of story crafting, and game-making if you use your own hands. Just ask lots of questions. Sure, the process will be slower, and the first games you produce will be small, but that's how you build Experience -- and Creativity.

Just for the record...
-- Creativity isn't how far your imagination can explode, it's how cleverly you deal with the Limits of your tools and skills.

If all you have is a pair of scissors, a roll of tape, and a cardboard box what can you make with it?
-- Quite a lot actually.

If Writing is Not your strongest skill, what is?
That's where you Begin.

Seriously, what are you Good at?

• coding tricks?
• character design?
• background illustrations?
• making interface graphics?
• plotting out branches?
• writing dialog?
• bad jokes?

Whatever it is, That should be the Core of your game's design.

The next step is to realize what you Can't do and either figure out a way to avoid needing that skill, or find another way to do the same thing. For example, if you don't know how to code ATL well enough to do an animated fight scene, either find a way to use Simple animations to convey the scene, or use a static image and Text to describe the scene.

There's a reason why Experienced game creators --and Novelists-- say: "Start small!"
-- Small projects encourage new creators to Experiment; to stretch their imaginations by learning to find ways Around their limitations. A clever creator can make something incredible with only a few resources. Most of all, a finished game (no matter how small,) gives the creator a sense of Accomplishment. This is what encourages a creator to Try Again and perhaps make something bigger and fancier.

If all you have is a pair of scissors, a roll of tape, a cardboard box, and Experience using such tools what then can you make with it?
-- Quite a lot actually.

Just keep in mind that bigger and fancier does NOT always mean Better -- especially if you're New to game-making.

The biggest danger to new creators is their own Ego and Impatience.
-- Impatience and Pride often encourages new creators to start projects that are much too big for their skill and experience levels. Sure, you can Buy skilled help, but that is no guarantee that the project will turn out good enough for people to pay money for it. There are literally thousands of games made by highly skilled people with extremely expensive resources that No One Will Buy because despite all the pretty graphics, they're Crap. Just ask the gamers around you. I assure you, they'll be able to list at least six professionally made Crap games just off the tops of their heads.

The key to Success is NOT trying to do it all the first time. It's by learning different ways to get around your Limitations in small, easily digestible, bite-sized chunks (small individual games,) that you Build upon.

In short: One Step at a Time.

So!

If all you have is RenPy, some free graphics software (GIMP,) a few images swiped from a free image site (WikiMedia Commons,) and some music borrowed from a free music site (Jamendo.com,) what can you make with it?
-- Quite a lot actually.

All it takes is Time and Experience.

[Aviala]

Thanks, OokamiKasumi and Laniessa!

Laniessa, I'll try to add more description and avoid bluntly stating things. I actually managed to fix some things thanks to the advice I got from here.

Ookamikasumi, thanks for the advice! My strongest suite is currently character art and world building but as you said, pretty art can't really fix a badly written game. And if I can't convey it with words, how is anyone going to know how well I've built the world? I'll practise writing and get an editor.

What you said about keeping the game simple is true but I don't think I can downsize the project much more. I've already decided not to add fancy animations or complicated gameplay elements (though there will be some simple ones -- luckily my boyfriend promised to help with coding those) and I've also decided to break the story into smaller parts so I can stay motivated and not crumble under the pressure of a huuuge project. The game also won't have a huge amount of branches, only a few here and there.

I know I should start with an even smaller project but I've tried and I just can't stay motivated writing a project that is supposed to be just a small practise thing. My current project is the only one I really have motivation to make so I'll finish it no matter what.

[Aviala]

I got some more writing done! This time I made sure to describe things a lot. I couldn't fix the text I posted in the first post because I'm at my parent's place but here's something I wrote today. What do you guys think? I guess this is better than before? Does it feel like I'm explaining too much about mundane things? Or do I need even more description? I'm having a bit of trouble with my limited vocabulary, is that apparent?


The lanterns in the hallway were dimmer than usual. I made a mental note to ask Kiko or Lea if the caterpillars had been fed. The kind we had in the ship were the better kind, and also more exprensive. Their light stayed bright for weeks or even months when tended right, whereas the normal ones died after a week or two.

The breeding of the lightworms became popular when airship after airship went down in flames. On a regular ship there was always water around but up in the sky water was a precious resource. Of course you could always land near a river and fill your tanks but what if you were crossing the desert or the nearest river was miles away? Flames are hungry for wood, and that’s what most airships were made of. The Flyfish, of course, was mostly made of Dor’s silver, but it was an exception. In Lower Marava, where floatstone was abundant, it made more sense to build ships out of wood at the cost of spending more floatstone than to invest in lighter but more expensive Dor’s silver.

I arrived to the salon. It was one of my favourite rooms in the ship. The dark wood and the red velvet lit by the dim – hungry, or perhaps dying – lightworms and the rare rays of light that had somehow gotten past the heavy drapes that hid the room from the prying eyes of the crowd that lingered around the ship. I decided to let some more sunlight in even though it meant the loss of privacy. The thick rug felt soft and somehow very comforting against my feet.

[RotGtIE]

Alrighty then, let's get crankin'! A couple of thoughts which occurred to me while reading this passage:

The lanterns in the hallway were dimmer than usual. I made a mental note to ask Kiko or Lea if the caterpillars had been fed.

Don't forget your semicolons; they help your reader to understand that two statements are related to each other even if they could stand as independent clauses or sentences on their own. You are aware at this point that your reader does not know what lightworms are or why worms would be related to the level of light coming from lanterns. A little nudge like this will help clue them in earlier that you're about to clear things up for them.

The kind we had in the ship were the better kind, and also more exprensive.

Don't forget to skim over your words for redundancy and typos. You've used "kind" in the same context twice in the same clause, and fat-fingered an R into "expensive." These are easy fixes which only require a brief reread through your material.

Their light stayed bright for weeks or even months when tended right, whereas the normal ones died after a week or two.

The breeding of the lightworms became popular when airship after airship went down in flames. On a regular ship there was always water around but up in the sky water was a precious resource. Of course you could always land near a river and fill your tanks but what if you were crossing the desert or the nearest river was miles away? Flames are hungry for wood, and that’s what most airships were made of. The Flyfish, of course, was mostly made of Dor’s silver, but it was an exception. In Lower Marava, where floatstone was abundant, it made more sense to build ships out of wood at the cost of spending more floatstone than to invest in lighter but more expensive Dor’s silver.

I want to touch on your method of exposition. What you have here certainly works, save for a few technical errors such as redundant word usage (water) and switching of tense mid-sentence (flames are hungry, airships were made), but what jumps out at me here is that your narrator is giving a very third-person type of explanation about a part of the world which they are currently interacting with. Your narrator is not describing lightworms for no particular reason; the issue has entered the mind of your narrator specifically because they have noticed that the light from them is dimmer than it should be. This person apparently has crewmembers who should have been keeping these worms fed, and they have failed in their task.

You know what? If I ran a ship where I bought expensive sources of light and my crew couldn't even be bothered to keep the things fed, I think I'd be pretty miffed about that. Remember where I mentioned earlier about how having a first person narrator gives you an advantage in describing the world around them, because you can simultaneously develop their character as well as the environment? This is a prime opportunity to take advantage of that. How does your narrator feel about the negligence of the crew, and the expensive materials used in The Flyfish compared to more common ships? What kind of personality do you think would be displayed by a person who is willing to run a ship more expensively than most of their colleagues? These kinds of considerations can play into the first-person exposition, and I recommend taking advantage of every opportunity to do that.

Here's an example of how the exposition could be mixed with the character and personality of the narrator through internal monologue:

The lanterns in the hallway were dimmer than usual; I made a mental note to remind Kiko and Lea that the brightworms within required feeding twice daily, not once as would suffice for lower-quality specimens. I had invested in the creatures for good reason - a typical cluster of brightworms might last a mere week or two, but The Flyfish frequently made journeys too lengthy for such a duration to be adequate. To that end, I always made certain to purchase brightworms whose light would remain for months at a time. What we gained in quality, we paid for in greater expense and maintenance, but it would all go to waste if our crew neglected to tend properly to the damned things!

By having our narrator describe the situation from their own perspective, we grant the audience an insight into the world as well as into the narrator's mind. Now the audience learns more than just what brightworms are; they learn why the narrator cares to buy more expensive ones (because The Flyfish makes longer trips than most airships) and they also learn how the narrator feels about the fact that they are being cared for poorly (annoyed at the lackadaisical behavior of the crew).

You'll notice that I took the liberty of exchanging "lightworms" for "brightworms." This allowed me to write a sentence using the much more common word light in conjunction with the worms without making redundant use of the word. "Bright" is less likely to be needed in the same sentence as the worms are, so swapping the name around was simply a practical concern to make redundancy easier to avoid. Slight alterations like that can go a long way, but it's your call. I had even considered using "brightworms" to refer to high-quality worms, and "lightworms" to refer to low-quality ones, but I arbitrarily decided against it. But you can see the difference it could have made. Be analytical about this kind of stuff and you can have all kinds of fun while writing.

Speaking of being analytical, I had a concern about the shipbuilding material. You describe the flammability of wood as being the primary reason for the popularity of lightworms, yet The Flyfish sounds like it is constructed largely from some kind of metallic frame. Even though I don't know what Dor's Silver is, I do know that actual silver is not very flammable, making it strange that lightworms would even be a significant necessity on a ship constructed from it. It would be easy to fix this by throwing in something like "Even The Flyfish, with its lightweight frame of Dor's Silver, still used considerable amounts of lumber in its construction, making the presence of an open flame aboardship a hazardous one." It's just one of those details that jump out at the reader when they start asking questions about what's going on in the world they're being introduced to, and it pays to cut them off before they start looking for holes in your story by looking for them yourself and plugging them up with explanations.

Another thing I want to touch on is the ever-present danger of the run-on sentence:

The dark wood and the red velvet lit by the dim – hungry, or perhaps dying – lightworms and the rare rays of light that had somehow gotten past the heavy drapes that hid the room from the prying eyes of the crowd that lingered around the ship.

I love how this sentence begins, especially with the narrator's aside about how the worms might be hungry or dying. It shows us the narrator's thought process in action, and that's always a lot of fun to be privy to as a reader. Unfortunately, this sentence just didn't know when to call it a day and leave the remaining details for another one. Be aware of when you are using transitional words and phrases like "that" or "which." If you get to the point where you can start a very hazardous drinking game by counting them, consider splitting up the thought with some more punctuation. It's not a sin to use multiple sentences when you have to, even if it feels like it is sometimes.

And finally, this sentence threw me off a bit:

The thick rug felt soft and somehow very comforting against my feet.

This sentence simply doesn't have anything to do with anything else which was mentioned in the same paragraph. Up until this point in the paragraph, the narrator has been talking about light and privacy, but now all of a sudden I'm jerked away to the sensation of a thick rug under feet. This sentence neither summarizes the paragraph nor states or reinforces a conclusion drawn from it. It's just kind of a bolt from the blue. If you want to detail how the narrator likes the salon more than any other room, we'll need to see more details about it, and those details will have to make up the majority of the paragraph which opens with a statement about how the salon is the narrator's favorite room.

You're rockin' solid. You learn fast, and incorporate new lessons very quickly into your writing as you go. Just make sure to stay on top of the little technical issues and keep learning from quality literature as you ingest it. I'm looking forward to seeing you finish your story; it's looking to be a very worthy read.

[Kuiper]

Based on what you've shared, it looks like you have a competent grasp of the English language. If your post is any indication of your general writing ability, the happy news is that you're on relatively even footing with most native English speakers.

However, while having a competent grasp on the English language is a necessary, it is by no means sufficient. Being able to string words together in sentences that make sense is one thing, but being able to use that language to tell an effective and compelling story is quite another. As evidence of this, there are a lot of "bad" stories (you don't have to look very far to find them) that are written by people who are perfectly competent when it comes to grammar and syntax.

Writing fiction (or "creative writing" or "storycrafting") is a skill, mostly separate from English competency, that you'll have to master. (That is to say, the things that you learn about effective storycrafting tend to apply regardless of the language you are writing in.)

Just to pull on several examples from your writing that could be improved:

The Vesaian sighed but agreed to cover her face again.

You are describing non-action when you could instead be describing action. Suppose you had written the following instead:

The Vesian sighed and reluctantly put her veil on.

In both of these "versions," exactly the same message is being communicated: Nen is putting his (or her?) veil back on, but with a sense of reluctance and resignation. However, the latter of these two examples describes tangible action, whereas the first example employs a verb ("agreed") which is much more abstract.

A big part of fiction writing is to "paint a scene," in the figurative sense. Your goal as an author should be to take abstract things and make them more tangible.

On that note, you have a lot of exposition that doesn't have concrete action to give it context.

RotGtIE's post covered several other aspects of "Show, don't tell" which demonstrate some other examples of ways that your writing could be improved.

One editing "shortcut" you can use is pay attention to the verbs that you use. In particular, if you want to describe action and create a setting that directly engages the reader, it's best to avoid state-of-being verbs: words like "was," "had," "seemed," "appeared," etc. These verbs don't indicate that something is happening, which is ideally what you want to do when constructing a scene. You don't want a scene where things just exist in a static state; you want things to happen.

The happy news is that you can often rework sentences that use state-of-being verbs to use verbs which describe action, thus making them more engaging. As an example:

The lanterns in the hallway were dimmer than usual.

Note that the verb in this sense ("were") describes a state of being. Nothing is happening in this sentence; it's simply describing the state of the room. However, it's possible to describe some action which indicates that the room was dim. For example, perhaps the protagonist has to squint to see clearly in the dim light, or perhaps the protagonist shuffles along the ground instead of walking at normal pace due to a lack of sure footing. Or maybe the action takes place in the lanterns themselves. Maybe an ember sputters, drawing the protagonist's attention to the lamp, giving an excuse to remark on the relative dimness. There are lots of options here, and part of being a writer is selecting the one that matches the mood or tone you're trying to evoke from a scene. Even better, adding action (in place of static verbs) gives us the opportunity to provide more information to the reader. For example, if the protagonist walks into a room, stubs his toe, and curses at the dim light for making him stumble, then we know that our protagonist is prone to occasional verbal outbursts.

One other general remark regarding description is that it's good to engage multiple senses. Hearing the sizzle of a flame as it sputters or feeling the chill of a breeze as a protagonist steps outside allows you to engage the reader beyond just a visual image, which helps to paint a more vivid and concrete scene. Which, as stated before, is one of the primary jobs you have as an author.


If you have the time, I'd recommend checking out some instructional resources. I especially recommend checking out Brandon Sanderson's lectures. (Brandon Sanderson is a published fantasy author, best known for works like Mistborn and the later Wheel of Time series, who also teaches a college creative writing class.) You can find a recording of one of his JordanCon lectures here:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=P ... 1BCD668EDF

This lecture covers the topic of description and viewpoint, which I think is the main area where your writing could be improved. I found Brandon Sanderson's lectures very helfpul in my own development as a writer.

Best regards, and good luck with your project! Regardless of how the finished project turns out, this will hopefully be a good learning experience for you, and that's one of the most important things that I think you can take with you, especially when it comes to your first project.

[Aviala]

Thanks for the answers, again! I'm really trying to pay attention to the things you guys pointed out as I write, and I think I'm slowly improving all the time. The thing I'm struggling with the most is the show, don't tell thing, the rest (like typos) are slightly easier to fix.

Kuiper, a part of the reason why I probably use a lot of were's and had's is probably my limited vocabulary. It makes me really happy to hear that my grasp of the English language is good but I still have a lot to learn. I often struggle to find a suitable word for a sentence. I'm not saying it's the only reason though, and I understand that I need to work on my creative writing.

I guess by the time I've finished writing this story I'll have to go back to the beginning and rewrite a lot of the stuff. Well, that would at least show that I've learned something, I'd be pretty disappointed if I didn't improve at all. :'')

As a side note, I might be getting a friend to help me with the writing. It's much better than having a stranger as a co-writer because this friend is apparently really into listening people talk about the worlds they have created and helping them come up with stuff. I still need to see if this works out and if he has sufficient english writing skills (it'd be great if he was better than me) AND if our writing styles go together or not. But whatever happens I'll still probably write most of the story, so don't worry guys, your advice is really helpful!

[laiktail]

Am I good enough to write a VN or should I hire a writer?

Based on your first passage, I'd read it. do it.