# Curious Question



## Judge Spear (Jun 27, 2013)

I'm just gonna invade this section for a curious inquiry.

I want to know how writers..."sketch".
I don't write and I have never written to tell a fantasy or any other type of story. Just reports for school. I've no interest in learning the trade though I enjoy reading other's work. I just want to know when you practice, what do you need to do really know if it's good? I imagine writing, learning to write, being far more difficult than it is to draw (my field) as drawing is more visual and your mistakes are quite plain. The same, I suppose, would go for music just in the form of audio. 

But writing requires you to visualize rather than having visuals or audio directly send the information to you. It's a bit tough to word the question and what I want to know as the obvious simple answer to getting better at everything is repetition, but for writing how do you _know_ you're getting better? What must writers do grow in their trade exactly?

Hope someone understands the question.


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## Gnarl (Jun 27, 2013)

ARG! That is a tough question! Think of it as painting a picture in your head with words. Where you draw the details the writer must describe them. Then we add things as we get better like humer and use the human emotions by creating a predicament. I can give you examples but this is not the right place for that. 
To get better you have to open yourself up to the most brutal form of critque, Let someone read it and actually listen to their comments without being offended!
Short stories work great for improving ones ability.


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## Icky (Jun 27, 2013)

I only dabble, but what I've always felt was helpful are quick, short little stories based on random inspiration. A good tool for this is duroc's (formerly poetigress') Thursday Prompt. Simple little writings like that, sometimes only a few paragraphs, once a week, will really help you get better control of your writing and creativity.

Also, just find random excuses to write things! This Mafia game here may be filled with gritty, dark death scenes, but it's a creative workout for me all the same.


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## Falaffel (Jun 27, 2013)

Short stories really do help you.

For how I know its good? Reviews. Otherwise idunno.


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## M. LeRenard (Jun 27, 2013)

Uhhhhhh.... geez.  I'm afraid if I try to answer this I'll end up getting super meta and confusing.
Let me at least address the whole 'sketch' thing: you write drafts.  That's basically it.  Sketches are basically like drafts for artists, right, so it's a decent analogy to make.  If you make a sketch as an artist, it's generally just to practice something, to get a feel for something, which you then do a few times and then apply it to a final piece.  You can do that in writing as well, for long and short pieces (though for long pieces you may consider writing 'sketches' of pieces of it at a time, rather than trying to do the whole thing at once and then redo it all later); write a draft to work the bugs out of your idea, write another one or revise the one draft to fix obvious problems, and so on until you feel like you know more or less what you want and how to achieve it.

But how do you know when to stop?  Well... I mean, even in art, how do you know when to stop revising?  You fix all the fundamental stuff like perspective or anatomy or whatever, and that's all fairly straight-forward, but then for the finished product you want to do things like give it atmosphere, personality, emotion, and so on and so forth, and those things are all pretty subjective.  I guess for writing you just fix the grammar, fill in plot holes, and then revise pacing and characters and atmosphere and setting until it all sounds about like how you want it to sound.  I guess you know it's good when other people like it and aren't able to spot any gaping errors, or something.


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## Symlus (Jun 27, 2013)

I just write a bunch of poetry until I feel confortable with the poetry type. As for stories, I don't know; when I write stories, it usually comes to me in a stream of thought. I have never shared any stories with anyone, I'm not sure about the improvement when it comes to those things.


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## Judge Spear (Jun 27, 2013)

And see, I actually didn't even consider that it's going to depend from person to person. Why that slipped me is unknown, but I think I get the basic gist of what you all are trying to tell. Feel free to keep adding. I know it's a somewhat tough question to answer thoroughly and concisely, but I appreciate the effort as this is something I've been wondering for a few weeks now.


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## Symlus (Jun 27, 2013)

Practice, draft, revise, revise, draft, practice. Repetition is how I get better. I never actually compose TO compose. All that I ever share are drafts that seem better than normal.


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## Ji-Ji (Jun 28, 2013)

I don't know if it's anything like songwriting, but when I write some lyrics, I'll start to jot off ideas, and emotion and things.

If a song is telling a story I'll start to write keywords, phrases, things related to the theme.

So basically on a piece of paper I'll have some lyrics I like, then an off area where I'll throw ideas down and play with them. 

(sorry if that made no sense/no help.)


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## BRN (Jun 28, 2013)

It... kinda doesn't work that way. Kinda? Aa.

Okay, see:

I'm working on this story at the moment. For me, writing is basically the process of getting an internal movie pictured in my head, onto the paper in terms of words. Right? So I know that "someone" is "saying" "something" to "somebody else".

So that's what I write. 

But "saying" isn't quite right. Is he yelling, laughing, chuckling, whispering; meekly shuffling, looking away, offering to dance? Confident smile, or a grim look in his eyes? Where are they? What are they doing? What led them there? What are these characters personalities; their histories and motivations? Why are they doing what they're doing?

I can add in all of those details, which work like shading and colouring, to bring the scene to life. But they all 'stick on top' of the basic concept, which is that somebody is saying something to someone else. The 'sketch' is the skeleton of the concept.


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_The dank dungeon passage wound onwards for what seemed like forever._

becomes

_The grim drip of festering water, seeping from loosened, mildew-ridden cracks in the ancient ceiling, echoed in the ambience of the dank and disgusting chamber. I thrust my flaming torch forwards - trying to pierce through the gloom, to no avail; the darkness was all-consuming, and I gulped as I stepped into the endless chamber_

Ta-dah.


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## Cain (Jun 28, 2013)

For me, I guess until it sort of seems... Right?
I guess it'd also help to have a couple of people read over your drafts, pseudo-editors if you want, to give you feedback, and you can ask them if they think passage x is too vague or too descriptive, etc.

It is hard, I understand from experience, and I'm sure all writers experience. But we just need to keep going. I think writing only improves with experience. Sure, you can get your thesaurus out and look for as many synonyms as you want and shove them all into a descriptive passage, but that's not really how it works. If you've gone through the process of 'Hmm. I really want to make this passage more descriptive, I think I'll add stuff to it.' then by all means go ahead. Being overly descriptive isn't a bad thing at all, look at Lovecraft. It works for some, and doesn't for others, works for some genres and themes, and not for others. Writing might seem all set in stone a lot of the time, but it really isn't.

Like how there's an almost set rule of how writing in 3rd person is almost always better than writing 1st person. The story I'm writing right now is in 1st person, because I find it much easier to express the main character's feelings, and I don't feel that I could communicate them that well if I wrote it in 3rd person. People say 1st person writing is the 'easy way out' when presented with a plot based upon human emotion, but I'm doing it anyways, and I'll see what the end result is. If it doesn't work out, I know I have to try the next one out in 3rd person. Learning by experience, and all.


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## Judge Spear (Jun 28, 2013)

SIX said:


> _The dank dungeon passage wound onwards for what seemed like forever._
> 
> becomes
> 
> ...



...Holy shit. I want to read a book now. That actually fucking worked. But it can't be that easy all the time. And I'm sure there's a point at which you can actually go overboard on it. When does that become apparent?


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## Cain (Jun 28, 2013)

XoPachi said:


> ...Holy shit. I want to read a book now. That actually fucking worked. But it can't be that easy all the time. And I'm sure there's a point at which you can actually go overboard on it. When does that become apparent?


There isn't really a sort of limit on descriptiveness. Like I said, it works in a bunch of situations and doesn't in others. It's a matter of experience, as well as what other people think.

Also if you want descriptiveness, go read Lovecraft.


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## BRN (Jun 28, 2013)

XoPachi said:


> ...Holy shit. I want to read a book now. That actually fucking worked. But it can't be that easy all the time. And I'm sure there's a point at which you can actually go overboard on it. When does that become apparent?



 Nah - it isn't that easy all the time, but it's basically what I do to write.

 In what I did for you, the paragraph has no context, and no history; but in a story, I have to fit all the details to my character's established personalities and what the reader already knows -- which means, for the most part, the story writes itself, since it's following all these precedents. You just have to find the words and the imagination. 

  It becomes difficult when you have so many "precedents" that trying to continue with what you want to write is impossible. When that happens, you have to either backtrack and make some changes, or introduce something new, to get your characters to continue how you want. (I had that problem here, and fixed it with a suggestion from Aleu which helped change the scene enough for me to continue.)


 Going overboard is really easy to do, but as Frank said earlier, you're constantly reading the things you're writing - so you get the first view of how something sounds and feels to read. 

It's pretty subjective... but you can generally tell if a sentence doesn't work, or doesn't fit. A macho character will rarely squeak, dance or giggle, for example.


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## M. LeRenard (Jun 28, 2013)

XoPachi said:
			
		

> And I'm sure there's a point at which you can actually go overboard on it. When does that become apparent?


To add on to what SIX was saying, it's all context.  What I always tell people is, since a heavy part of what constitutes 'quality' writing is subjective, the major objective thing you can always use to judge a piece is asking whether or not the author achieved what he set out to achieve.  Now... how you actually tell that isn't always straight-forward, but sometimes it is.  

Like, consider bad horror movies as an example.  There's the kind of bad horror movie where things are so absolutely absurd--buckets of blood, ridiculous concepts, horrendously cheesy dialogue--that you know the writer/director was just fucking around and having a good time.  It's bad because the creator wanted to make a bad horror movie.  In that case, the goal was achieved, and so objectively it's a well-made movie.  Then there's the other kind, where things happen that don't make sense, characters act really stupidly or strangely, the effects are sappy or poor, and so on, but there's that certain aura about it that tells you this was a serious attempt at a movie, it's just really poorly made.  In that case, the director set out to specifically make a scary movie, but had no clue what he was doing and so ended up failing miserably at it.  The former is generally amusing, the latter is generally fascinating.

So basically, if it's going overboard, try to find that sense of competence, that spark that tells you that whatever was done, no matter how off-putting, was intentional.  That's usually what I do.


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## Gnarl (Jun 28, 2013)

descriptions, go to Hemingway! Pages of nothing but just to set a mood.


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## Judge Spear (Jul 10, 2013)

M. LeRenard said:


> To add on to what SIX was saying, it's all context.  What I always tell people is, since a heavy part of what constitutes 'quality' writing is subjective, the major objective thing you can always use to judge a piece is asking whether or not the author achieved what he set out to achieve.  Now... how you actually tell that isn't always straight-forward, but sometimes it is.
> 
> Like, consider bad horror movies as an example.  There's the kind of bad horror movie where things are so absolutely absurd--buckets of blood, ridiculous concepts, horrendously cheesy dialogue--that you know the writer/director was just fucking around and having a good time.  It's bad because the creator wanted to make a bad horror movie.  In that case, the goal was achieved, and so objectively it's a well-made movie.  Then there's the other kind, where things happen that don't make sense, characters act really stupidly or strangely, the effects are sappy or poor, and so on, but there's that certain aura about it that tells you this was a serious attempt at a movie, it's just really poorly made.  In that case, the director set out to specifically make a scary movie, but had no clue what he was doing and so ended up failing miserably at it.  The former is generally amusing, the latter is generally fascinating.
> 
> So basically, if it's going overboard, try to find that sense of competence, that spark that tells you that whatever was done, no matter how off-putting, was intentional.  That's usually what I do.



You always put stuff in an elegant, lengthy, but extremely sensible and easy to understand method...
I suppose that comes with writing, yes?


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## CyanCosine (Jul 10, 2013)

For the writing process, I can usually sort of..."feel" when something doesn't sound right, and needs revising. When I think a word doesn't fit well, I often look it up in an online thesaurus for something a bit more expressive. Also, it sometimes helps to read what you've written out loud to yourself, helps you pick up on mistakes and bad wording.


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## M. LeRenard (Jul 11, 2013)

XoPachi said:


> You always put stuff in an elegant, lengthy, but extremely sensible and easy to understand method...
> I suppose that comes with writing, yes?



Well, I'm glad I could be of service.


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## Conker (Jul 11, 2013)

I write short pieces of whatever I want as practice. I have a MyIGN blog which I update once a week. It consists of whatever the fuck I want to write about that week, and I volley between fiction, essays, editorials, and reviews. It exists purely for practice, and if I look at my current stuff in compared to my older stuff, I can see a gradual improvement.


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