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queenluaWhat would you say is your greatest strength about your writing? Or, alternatively, the weakness (if you think there is one)? from lavendre
Turns out it's way easier for me to think of weaknesses than it is strengths, heh. Here's the ad-hoc list of "stuff I could come up with when thinking for a few minutes":
A pretty cringeworthy tendency toward melodrama. I have an affection for grand sweeping statements and dramatic confrontation scenes and in these exchanges people probably spend a bit too much time shaking or giving each other long glares or swallowing dramatically and yeah. This is an obvious tendency even in my earlier writing—like, a lot of the stuff I wrote in middle school was just me swallowing a thesaurus and wanting to show off, but there was also a legitimate love of how much drama I can conjure with pure words. (It should surprise no one that back when I was playing piano seriously, all I wanted to do was play pieces by romantic-era composers all day every day, and my music compositions sounded like Nobuo Uematsu had listened to all the Russian romantics for ninety years straight, full of BOMBASTIC CHORDS and SUDDEN CRESCENDOS and LOVE FOR THE MOTHERLAND. I am a romantic fuck at heart.) Something that probably exacerbates this: I tend to write my dialogue before I write the scene around it, which seems to lead to a lot of situations of Bombastic Dialogue Which Feels Sort of Awkward in the Context of the Larger Scene.
I don't think this tendency is entirely a bad thing; the romantic composers did pretty well for themselves, after all. But I do have to work pretty hard to rein it in so I can get drama instead of melodrama.
Difficulty with very tight scenes that involve a lot of movement. This is evident in any sort of combat scene involving a lot of parties, or any scene involving very precise technical movements that need to be related to the reader (i.e. someone's building a bomb by hand, or whatever). It's just very, very hard to balance "physical details the reader needs to actually grok the scene" + "conveying a larger mood/sweep/direction to the actions so it's not just noise" + "knowing what to skip / what can be skipped" and I think I miss the mark sometimes.
Structuring larger pieces. This is actually probably a combination of a couple issues, but in general, once a story breaks 5k I start having nontrivial issues working out structure/pacing/balance of plot threads, and once it breaks 10k it becomes like quicksand trying to handle all that. I'm probably going to write a longer post about all that once I finish TLoU fic, so I'll wait until then to ramble about all that.
Stylistic "quirks" that are probably just unattractive. In my origfic particularly, I have a rather distinctive way of doing descriptive passages, scenery, and so on, and while I'm actually pleased with it a great deal of the time, I also spend a lot of time worrying that it's dumb/too nonstandard/too repetitious/whatever. Also I really like having long sentences that are stitched together by one hundred and one em-dashes, and that's probably suboptimal. In particular, it's probably me letting my personal speaking/thinking/talking style override the style for the piece, which is no good. OH AND ITALICS. I overuse them so much. I care about this maybe 50% of the time and the other 50% I'm like "FUCK IT BALLS TO THE WALL"
(can you see why my writing tends to stagnate i love my derpier tendencies too much sob)
Also I wish I could write humor, but that's not even a particular weakness, just... I've never written humor much and haven't been very good at it when I tried. Alas.
It's harder for me to think of stuff I think of as writing strengths, just because—if something's bad in a story of mine that I'm rereading, it tends to poke out and hit you in the face, whereas if it's good, it's a combination of a lot of things going right, and it's hard to parse out what exactly is making it good, you know?
I guess I'm pretty pleased with some of my pastoral-y scenes. I was reading through one of my longer origfic pieces while writing this, and while it's got a pretty action-y main plot, it's interspersed with several calmer scenes, and I just really like the way those scenes breathe in relation to the larger work. Most the time our hero's doing awesome-kickass-hero things, but we get to see her spending a quiet evening helping the village boys haul in fishnets by the river, or playing a Go-like game with pebbles, and I'm just very pleased with the feel of those.
Also I'm generally pleased with the way I handle expository lump / worldbuilding issues in my original fiction. I've created some pretty cool (to me, anyway) worlds, and when I reread my pieces, whatever technical flaws might be present, I'm generally pretty excited to read about my steampunk-rural-Appalachia world or my magical-1800s-West-Africa world or whatever, and I think I manage to weave in lots of cool worldbuildy references and such without letting it overwhelm the main plot. (Ask me about this again in three months and I might well call it a horrible weakness of mine, though; we'll see :D;;;)
lavendreTurns out it's way easier for me to think of weaknesses than it is strengths, heh. Here's the ad-hoc list of "stuff I could come up with when thinking for a few minutes":
A pretty cringeworthy tendency toward melodrama. I have an affection for grand sweeping statements and dramatic confrontation scenes and in these exchanges people probably spend a bit too much time shaking or giving each other long glares or swallowing dramatically and yeah. This is an obvious tendency even in my earlier writing—like, a lot of the stuff I wrote in middle school was just me swallowing a thesaurus and wanting to show off, but there was also a legitimate love of how much drama I can conjure with pure words. (It should surprise no one that back when I was playing piano seriously, all I wanted to do was play pieces by romantic-era composers all day every day, and my music compositions sounded like Nobuo Uematsu had listened to all the Russian romantics for ninety years straight, full of BOMBASTIC CHORDS and SUDDEN CRESCENDOS and LOVE FOR THE MOTHERLAND. I am a romantic fuck at heart.) Something that probably exacerbates this: I tend to write my dialogue before I write the scene around it, which seems to lead to a lot of situations of Bombastic Dialogue Which Feels Sort of Awkward in the Context of the Larger Scene.
I don't think this tendency is entirely a bad thing; the romantic composers did pretty well for themselves, after all. But I do have to work pretty hard to rein it in so I can get drama instead of melodrama.
Difficulty with very tight scenes that involve a lot of movement. This is evident in any sort of combat scene involving a lot of parties, or any scene involving very precise technical movements that need to be related to the reader (i.e. someone's building a bomb by hand, or whatever). It's just very, very hard to balance "physical details the reader needs to actually grok the scene" + "conveying a larger mood/sweep/direction to the actions so it's not just noise" + "knowing what to skip / what can be skipped" and I think I miss the mark sometimes.
Structuring larger pieces. This is actually probably a combination of a couple issues, but in general, once a story breaks 5k I start having nontrivial issues working out structure/pacing/balance of plot threads, and once it breaks 10k it becomes like quicksand trying to handle all that. I'm probably going to write a longer post about all that once I finish TLoU fic, so I'll wait until then to ramble about all that.
Stylistic "quirks" that are probably just unattractive. In my origfic particularly, I have a rather distinctive way of doing descriptive passages, scenery, and so on, and while I'm actually pleased with it a great deal of the time, I also spend a lot of time worrying that it's dumb/too nonstandard/too repetitious/whatever. Also I really like having long sentences that are stitched together by one hundred and one em-dashes, and that's probably suboptimal. In particular, it's probably me letting my personal speaking/thinking/talking style override the style for the piece, which is no good. OH AND ITALICS. I overuse them so much. I care about this maybe 50% of the time and the other 50% I'm like "FUCK IT BALLS TO THE WALL"
(can you see why my writing tends to stagnate i love my derpier tendencies too much sob)
Also I wish I could write humor, but that's not even a particular weakness, just... I've never written humor much and haven't been very good at it when I tried. Alas.
It's harder for me to think of stuff I think of as writing strengths, just because—if something's bad in a story of mine that I'm rereading, it tends to poke out and hit you in the face, whereas if it's good, it's a combination of a lot of things going right, and it's hard to parse out what exactly is making it good, you know?
I guess I'm pretty pleased with some of my pastoral-y scenes. I was reading through one of my longer origfic pieces while writing this, and while it's got a pretty action-y main plot, it's interspersed with several calmer scenes, and I just really like the way those scenes breathe in relation to the larger work. Most the time our hero's doing awesome-kickass-hero things, but we get to see her spending a quiet evening helping the village boys haul in fishnets by the river, or playing a Go-like game with pebbles, and I'm just very pleased with the feel of those.
Also I'm generally pleased with the way I handle expository lump / worldbuilding issues in my original fiction. I've created some pretty cool (to me, anyway) worlds, and when I reread my pieces, whatever technical flaws might be present, I'm generally pretty excited to read about my steampunk-rural-Appalachia world or my magical-1800s-West-Africa world or whatever, and I think I manage to weave in lots of cool worldbuildy references and such without letting it overwhelm the main plot. (Ask me about this again in three months and I might well call it a horrible weakness of mine, though; we'll see :D;;;)
