In need of advice regarding my writing quality

Questions, skill improvement, and respectful critique involving game writing.
Post Reply
Message
Author
Xamusel
Regular
Posts: 31
Joined: Sat May 07, 2011 6:31 pm
Projects: Fan stories, fan games, original works
Organization: Intersect Games
IRC Nick: Xamusel
Location: You Ess of Eh
Contact:

In need of advice regarding my writing quality

#1 Post by Xamusel »

You see, I have this idea based around a fanfic that I'm writing, but was told that my writing quality sucked enough that I shouldn't be writing Visual Novels quite yet. What I want to know is this:

Is that true?

The fanfic in question that I'm planning on turning into a Visual Novel (be warned that it's almost 125k words long for a prologue and four chapters): http://www.fanfiction.net/s/8083154/1/G ... f-the-SEED

Hope that helps you understand my plight better.

User avatar
FlawedFlare
Regular
Posts: 98
Joined: Mon Aug 06, 2012 9:46 pm
Projects: [Without Your Half],[ Underground], Unidentified Shallow Heart
Contact:

Re: In need of advice regarding my writing quality

#2 Post by FlawedFlare »

I've only had time to read about a few paragraphs. But I can definitely see a lot errors in the writing. (I may just be being difficult as I'm a little horrible at reading). I don't really believe that you'd suck at writing, but you could use some improvement and/or advice.
Duo Maxwell, currently clad in a specially made one piece suit and confined within a life support vessel, his violet eyes closed due to being under sedatives, was currently contemplating what had happened when he was last awake.
Here is an example of I think is a run-on sentence. You could maybe a semicolon somewhere in the sentence instead of having a lot of commas.
If he could summarize it further, he would, but he knew it would take a while to remember the important details about the event that was the "Professor X" start-up incident.
I think "it" could be replaced with something else. Like something more descriptive, like "the situation". And with that, you could just end the sentence at "he would". And instead of starting a sentence with "but", you could say "however".
One last point of this sentence here. "About the event that was the "Professor X" start-up incident." It sounds a little odd. To me, at least. Replacing "about" with "of" should be a good edit.

That's all the critiquing I have for now. I will suggest that you should maybe get a proof reader or editor. I mean, not everyone is perfect in writing and practice makes perfect. You can still write your own VN, but it would help that you'd get a proof reader/editor for your project.

User avatar
cuttlefish
Regular
Posts: 130
Joined: Thu Jul 05, 2012 1:23 am
Contact:

Re: In need of advice regarding my writing quality

#3 Post by cuttlefish »

First, I think that fanfic should be rated M/MA rather than T.
Pretty explicit descriptions of stripping/fondling at one part.
Second, after skimming through the first chapter, I think the main problem with your writing style is that there's lots of telling and little showing.
The fire had some attributes of green and even purple flames spewing from it, it looked that evil and even had that evil stench coming from it, though it was hard to tell what it was really like other than it being even remotely evil.
Evil is abstract. It's hard to imagine how evil looks (or smells). Try using the five senses to describe what's happening in a scene. (You could say the flames were forming grinning faces, or something like that.)

That being said, a lot of the story sounds like a summary or idea. It doesn't read like a chapter in a novel.
Before anything more could be said from Shirou, an alarm sounded in the background from Rau's end, which told them that a battle was to be expected soon.
The "which told them..." note might be something you'd note to yourself when writing the scene. In your story, this information could be relayed through character dialogue or action. (You could say Shirou began to suit up for battle.)

There are more resources about this floating around the forums, so just be on the look out for them.

Third, you should ask whoever told you your writing sucks to give their reasons. It might be different from what anyone else posts here.

User avatar
Applegate
Miko-Class Veteran
Posts: 807
Joined: Sat May 01, 2010 12:43 pm
Contact:

Re: In need of advice regarding my writing quality

#4 Post by Applegate »

cuttlefish wrote:Second, after skimming through the first chapter, I think the main problem with your writing style is that there's lots of telling and little showing.
This, chiefly. If I may quote one part...
"First layer traversed, decelerate to Mach Four, trajectory's good. Twenty-eight seconds until termination of cooling stage. Commence aerodynamic control." A voice from within one of the orbital drop-pods plummeting to the Earth's surface spoke with disciplined calmness, indicative of the speaker's professional nature.
"indicative of". To say nothing about the structure of the sentence itself, we can already raise that to mention what it indicates is to give the reader a conclusion, rather than let them reach it on their own.

You can, in spite of this, write a VN. An ADV VN relies mostly on dialogue, using narration on a necessity basis. You'll (almost) never see an ADV style VN talk about, "She said with dignity.", unless the narrator is especially keen on the way people talk. (And even then it is questionable.)

My advice would be to write the first three scenes of your Visual Novel, then present that before you get all concerned over your writing style. The way you write a Visual Novel is a vastly different approach from fanfiction prose, and we'd be comparing apples and pears in this case.

Xamusel
Regular
Posts: 31
Joined: Sat May 07, 2011 6:31 pm
Projects: Fan stories, fan games, original works
Organization: Intersect Games
IRC Nick: Xamusel
Location: You Ess of Eh
Contact:

Re: In need of advice regarding my writing quality

#5 Post by Xamusel »

@FlawedFlare: I can understand where you're coming from with that. It is extremely annoying to write in the way that I do (especially for me).

Then again, my co-author is one of those people that goes over my work and tries correcting them, unfortunately (unfortunately is because he tends to be a worse author than I'd care for under normal circumstances).

@cuttlefish: Yeah, it was rated M before, but only because I had erroneously put a sex scene in there when it was against the site's policies to have such scenes. It didn't occur to me to keep it at M.

As for your other points, let me clarify them a bit:

1) That was part of a rewritten part of Emiya Shirou's introduction in Fate/stay Night. I had no real way to describe the Fire of Fuyuki City other than to describe the evilness of an Angra Mainyu fueled fire in some way (and no real way to know if I got it correct in any way).

2) I get what you're trying to say, but one problem that I should note is that Shirou isn't even in the military of this place yet, which makes this a bit of a pain to work in a way that won't be a humongous problem.

@Applegate: I see what you mean in this case. Thankfully I can understand that this is important for me to figure out, really, for a number of reasons.

User avatar
destiny_921
Regular
Posts: 150
Joined: Sat Oct 27, 2012 2:24 am
Completed: Closure [KN]
Projects: The Universal Hope (writer, WIP)
Contact:

Re: In need of advice regarding my writing quality

#6 Post by destiny_921 »

I read about half of the first chapter but after that got...bored. Besides the usual errors (grammar, spelling, punctuation.etc), here's what I picked up.

1) Inconsistency in tenses.
I noticed that you switched between present and past tense in particular.. For example, "was" became "is". It sort of distracted me.

2) Pacing
I found it too draggy. Plus, it was like an info dump...

Like this one:
Then she headed out on a small vacation and then things started to go nuts for him. First his business had begun to spiral out of control, followed by some problems in contacting the Sweepers for some help, then Quatre was unavailable, and finally, he was being pestered to report in to Preventer HQ, again! Normally, he wouldn't have minded, at least at first, but now the Preventers were making regular use of his skills more than he would like. He had sighed and given in, figuring he could get something good out of it in the long run, but then found he had forgotten to do his laundry and that forced him to go to Preventer Headquarters in a uniform that he didn't want to wear. Then it had gotten worse on the way in, when he was accosted by someone that hated Preventer on the way there. As soon as he made it to headquarters, he was told to go and report straight to Commissioner Middie Une for an immediate mission briefing, at least he learned of a skillful new recruit while there, and then he asked why he was the one that had to go through the mission.
You used a lot of "then's". Use other sentence connectors. The facts are fine, but they sound monotonous. You could write it like:

Then, she had a minor vacation before things started going nuts. His business began to spiral out of control, followed by problems in contacting the Sweepers...The list dragged on and on. But it wasn't even the last of it! He got pestered into reporting to Preventer HQ again.

Usually, he wouldn't have minded but it seemed as if the Preventers were taking advantage of him (more specifically, his skills). Simply put? He disliked it. It felt as if he was a tool, a toy to play with. And that rankled him....


Or something like that.

3) Run-on sentences.
I noticed that you tend to make your sentences quite long, and thus resulting in long-winded sentences which doesn't really add substance to the plot/storyline. I'd suggest you either rephrase them or shorten them.

Example:
What X or him or anyone including the young man himself didn't know, was who Duo's parents were, but that would soon be remedied by way of a DNA test that X told him to do.
I would've written as:

What anyone including him, X and the young man himself didn't know was who Duo's parents were. Though, that would soon be remedied by way of a DNA test ordered by X.

I suggest you get a proof-reader and/or a beta. Practice makes perfect - so don't give up :)
“Think left and think right and think low and think high. Oh, the thinks you can think up if only you try”
– Dr. Seuss

::Completed:: Closure (KN)
::WIPs:: The Universal Hope


::Misc::
Writing Guide

Xamusel
Regular
Posts: 31
Joined: Sat May 07, 2011 6:31 pm
Projects: Fan stories, fan games, original works
Organization: Intersect Games
IRC Nick: Xamusel
Location: You Ess of Eh
Contact:

Re: In need of advice regarding my writing quality

#7 Post by Xamusel »

Thanks.

Y'know, to be honest, I do have a beta... though the fact is that I need to have this re-beta'd in order to make sure it doesn't suck as much.

Note that I'm in the process of rewriting this... again. It really sucks when I have to do this.

I was really hoping to know if I was ready to start writing Visual Novels, not if I should go about rewriting this story, but I guess I have no other choice in the matter.

Guess it's time to get about rewriting the whole thing.

User avatar
destiny_921
Regular
Posts: 150
Joined: Sat Oct 27, 2012 2:24 am
Completed: Closure [KN]
Projects: The Universal Hope (writer, WIP)
Contact:

Re: In need of advice regarding my writing quality

#8 Post by destiny_921 »

Xamusel wrote:Thanks.

Y'know, to be honest, I do have a beta... though the fact is that I need to have this re-beta'd in order to make sure it doesn't suck as much.

Note that I'm in the process of rewriting this... again. It really sucks when I have to do this.

I was really hoping to know if I was ready to start writing Visual Novels, not if I should go about rewriting this story, but I guess I have no other choice in the matter.

Guess it's time to get about rewriting the whole thing.
Woops. I knew I forgot to comment about something... Sorry!

For writing VN-wise, have you taken a look at this yet? I've only recently ventured into helping co-write VNs, but only after doing a lot of research and playing more VNs myself to get the feel of it. For VNs you need to take into account that there'll be graphics and music as well, so you need to be careful not to be too..descriptive, so to speak.

So far, I found writing for a VN different from writing stories cause there're other factors to take into account (mainly graphics - bg and sprites).

Writing quality-wise, you aren't bad but you do have some ground to cover.

EDIT: To the question if you're ready, well - do you think you're ready? Do you think you've done enough research to put it into practice? Or you could try doing an Image-based Writing thread like inhalance, specialtantei and the genius who started it all, KomiTsuku to get a feel of writing based on graphics.
“Think left and think right and think low and think high. Oh, the thinks you can think up if only you try”
– Dr. Seuss

::Completed:: Closure (KN)
::WIPs:: The Universal Hope


::Misc::
Writing Guide

Xamusel
Regular
Posts: 31
Joined: Sat May 07, 2011 6:31 pm
Projects: Fan stories, fan games, original works
Organization: Intersect Games
IRC Nick: Xamusel
Location: You Ess of Eh
Contact:

Re: In need of advice regarding my writing quality

#9 Post by Xamusel »

destiny_921 wrote:
Xamusel wrote:Thanks.

Y'know, to be honest, I do have a beta... though the fact is that I need to have this re-beta'd in order to make sure it doesn't suck as much.

Note that I'm in the process of rewriting this... again. It really sucks when I have to do this.

I was really hoping to know if I was ready to start writing Visual Novels, not if I should go about rewriting this story, but I guess I have no other choice in the matter.

Guess it's time to get about rewriting the whole thing.
Woops. I knew I forgot to comment about something... Sorry!

For writing VN-wise, have you taken a look at this yet? I've only recently ventured into helping co-write VNs, but only after doing a lot of research and playing more VNs myself to get the feel of it. For VNs you need to take into account that there'll be graphics and music as well, so you need to be careful not to be too..descriptive, so to speak.

So far, I found writing for a VN different from writing stories cause there're other factors to take into account (mainly graphics - bg and sprites).

Writing quality-wise, you aren't bad but you do have some ground to cover.

EDIT: To the question if you're ready, well - do you think you're ready? Do you think you've done enough research to put it into practice? Or you could try doing an Image-based Writing thread like inhalance, specialtantei and the genius who started it all, KomiTsuku to get a feel of writing based on graphics.
I'll keep that in mind. Thanks for clearing that up for me.

Well, thanks for being able to help me know what I should do before starting a Visual Novel, at least. I suppose that answers my question well enough.

Veniae
Veteran
Posts: 461
Joined: Sun Mar 06, 2011 9:01 am
Contact:

Re: In need of advice regarding my writing quality

#10 Post by Veniae »

Xamusel wrote:It's almost 125k words long for a prologue and four chapters
Excuse me, but what?

Okay, I'll be blunt here: I am not going to read your story. I would, but I know my attention span is way too short. What's more, reading on the computer tires my eyes, especially when it's long walls of text. (And 125,000 words in 5 chapters - that's around 25,000 per chapter - is way too long. 125k is the length of a whole novel. And not a short one at that.) And you know what? I'm not the only one who won't start reading your story because of its length.

So, let me pose a question: Do you really, actually need all of those 125 thousand words? Do you?

I bet you don't.

In the best case scenario, every word in a written work serves a purpose. It can be to advance the plot, to develop a character, to determine the mood and so on, and so forth. As tempting as it is to write long descriptions, including each and every tiny detail (which, frankly, nobody really cares about) is counter-productive.

Learn to be concise. You don't need run-on sentences or huge blocks of text to convey your message. After all, writing more - as well as reading more - takes time. You should ask yourself if your story is worth the time of everyone who reads it. Try this: sum up your story in a couple of sentences. If you can't do it in 125 words, you likely won't be able to in 125,000.

If you want to become a better writer, you might care to reread your story so far while asking yourself: Do I need this word/sentence/paragraph?
  • If the answer is "no," you know what to do. The Delete key exists for a reason.
  • If the answer is "yes," however, you should consider dividing your work in shorter chapters. It makes a story easier to read and far more appropriate for people with shorter attention spans (such as yours truly).
As it is important, I will reiterate: Every word is important. The fewer the words are, the more each of them matters.

Descriptions are not there simply to take space. If a detail is not relevant to the story, kill it with fire! No one would care about the exact number of freckles the protagonist has on his nose, or how many dishes there are in the cupboard next to the oven. (Yeah, I just made these up on the spot. :D)

Disclaimer: You should take my words with a pinch of salt. I realise I might have sounded a bit harsh, but I genuinely want to help. Because you have the ambition to improve, you will. I'm sure of it. ;)

Xamusel
Regular
Posts: 31
Joined: Sat May 07, 2011 6:31 pm
Projects: Fan stories, fan games, original works
Organization: Intersect Games
IRC Nick: Xamusel
Location: You Ess of Eh
Contact:

Re: In need of advice regarding my writing quality

#11 Post by Xamusel »

It helps that I scrapped that version of the story. I had no real plan for that story from the beginning, and I'm going to start it again with a plan, hence why the link went bad.

So far, two versions of the story went to the scrap heap, and I don't want to get the third one in the scrap heap at all. I needed a fresh start with that one (again), and so I got to the fresh start, really.

Also, honestly, I suck at keeping my chapters shorter than something like 14k words (other than two prologues that I have for two other stories). I wish that I had the ability to keep things concise, but I don't, at least not yet.

Veniae
Veteran
Posts: 461
Joined: Sun Mar 06, 2011 9:01 am
Contact:

Re: In need of advice regarding my writing quality

#12 Post by Veniae »

Yeah, having a plan/outline before you start is always handy. When you know what has to happen, you can do the more tedious part of actually fleshing out the story even when you feel uninspired/not creative.

It's normal that you feel you can't keep it concise, but don't let that prevent you from trying!

Xamusel
Regular
Posts: 31
Joined: Sat May 07, 2011 6:31 pm
Projects: Fan stories, fan games, original works
Organization: Intersect Games
IRC Nick: Xamusel
Location: You Ess of Eh
Contact:

Re: In need of advice regarding my writing quality

#13 Post by Xamusel »

That is true. I'll have to be sure to keep that completely in mind.

As far as keeping things concise, I tend to have so many things to include in a chapter, that it sorta becomes almost a novel in the process. I would prefer to keep things at a certain minimum (namely something like 14k words, like I mentioned somewhere, I believe... okay, never mind, wrong place) if I can help it... but maybe lower ought to do the trick for this.

Er, actually, I'm trying to keep things at as low a maximum as I possibly can. I do wish to keep the whole thing at a good limit per chapter... but what would be considered a good chapter limit and what would be considered a good story limit (word count wise)?

User avatar
destiny_921
Regular
Posts: 150
Joined: Sat Oct 27, 2012 2:24 am
Completed: Closure [KN]
Projects: The Universal Hope (writer, WIP)
Contact:

Re: In need of advice regarding my writing quality

#14 Post by destiny_921 »

Xamusel wrote:That is true. I'll have to be sure to keep that completely in mind.

As far as keeping things concise, I tend to have so many things to include in a chapter, that it sorta becomes almost a novel in the process. I would prefer to keep things at a certain minimum (namely something like 14k words, like I mentioned somewhere, I believe... okay, never mind, wrong place) if I can help it... but maybe lower ought to do the trick for this.

Er, actually, I'm trying to keep things at as low a maximum as I possibly can. I do wish to keep the whole thing at a good limit per chapter... but what would be considered a good chapter limit and what would be considered a good story limit (word count wise)?
That depends on a few factors..
  • 1) How much do you want to reveal in each chapter?
    2) How much is it appropriate to reveal in the chapter - following your plot?
    3) Are you going for arcs?
    4) How long is your story?
1 and 2
Be cautious. Don't reveal too much of your plot, nor too little. Moderate it. Write it out, go over it, and ask yourself i)if it seems too much of an info dump and ii)does it give away everything? If you aren't sure, don't hesitate to ask someone to go over it for you (i.e: beta/proof-read)

3
Some writers/authors go for arcs. Now, before I go on, what are arcs (more specifically, story arcs)? They're storylines set in episodic style, so to speak. For example:

Arc 1: Chapter 1-5 - The Political Dilemmas
Arc 2: Chapter 6-10 - Forging Alliances and Negotiations

Basically, what you've planned here is for the first five "episodes" to deal with the political problems of your story. As chapter 5 closes, then Arc 2 begins - the alliances and what-not, and so on forth.

4
Write out a rough estimate. Let's say you plan to end your story in 25 chapters (if you write out an estimate of words, it's much harder to close everything.). Now, check/think about your outline/plot. If there's a lot of conflicts involving multiple characters, then perhaps 10k words per chapter. But overall, it depends on your plot/storyline and how long it is. There's no story limit.
“Think left and think right and think low and think high. Oh, the thinks you can think up if only you try”
– Dr. Seuss

::Completed:: Closure (KN)
::WIPs:: The Universal Hope


::Misc::
Writing Guide

Post Reply

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users