HELP

Those things are all very important, but they aren't necessarily important in the first draft. (Where the first draft may be the entire work or a few paragraphs.) My view on this today (it may change tomorrow) is that for the average person, there's a minimum writing speed that feels like, well, writing. If writing at that speed requires that you leave certain elements of grammar, punctuation, style, etc., behind, then you leave them behind. When you return to the first draft, you correct those things. Correcting them will slowly increase your skill, and over time your skill will be at a point where fewer things need to be left behind in the first draft.

 

For height, characters can also "look up" or "look down" when speaking to other characters.

 

This is true.

Or always always those cringeworthy jokes. "can you tell me what the weather is looking like"

if it fits the characters personality.

 

Sit in the chair and write... one of the hardest things to do at times, when you get the creative spark, just write... fix it later or find someone with really good editorial skills, you can pay a small sum to, and have them do the editorial review. You can get 40 pages professionally reviewed for about $160-$280, it can even be certified if you need it to be. You can also do a lot of the editing yourself during down times, when looking at a blank page, and not knowing where to start.

Sometimes going back over your own work helps, asking your character where are you going, what are you going to do next, or how are you going to meet, help or mess with another character. Also giving a critical eye to what has been written is there anything needing to be added, removed, or modified. Does it make sense and can it stand on its own. I tend to write a lot of small 1000-2000 word shorts and then go back and build the bridges between those.

Set the scene, create the event, and wrap it up in a cliffhanger, and yes I know it is easier said than done.

But ultimately, allow yourself to write, and find yourself an editor you can collaborate with... I used to create teams one person would gather requirements, ask the question, the other would do the technical writing while the third would review and validate with the programmers and client. Some people are really good at listening and getting the requirements, others are excellent technical writer, while the third was a people person, loved to engage and negotiate. It really depended on what the person loved to do, good technical writer shape the requirements or instruction into sentences everyone can understand. While those who gather requirements love solving puzzles, always looking for the next hint, and asking questions. Negotiators are the ones who can sell ice to Eskimos, they have a persona about them and a repertoire of experience, adventures, trivia, and contacts, and are ultimately consummate diplomats. Although this may seems to only apply to the business world... a different way of looking at this, is the writer is the puzzle solver, always asking questions extracting the story out of the ether. the editor is your technical writer correcting and clarifying things, while a literary agent is your negotiator doing the peer reviews and setting and realigning the clients expectations to what is available.

https://www.servicescape.com/editors/english/94269

Although, based on what you just wrote, I'm curious are you more comfortable correcting, simplifying, and clarifying documents? Do you have an eye for detail, and have strong grammar skills, where you feel finding errors, or gaps in a story, are easy for you? You might just be a natural editor, or technical writer.If you fit this you may want to take the time to consider it. It does not mean you have to stop writing, but it can help shape a path toward you something you might really enjoy doing. The upside would be helping grammar handicapped writers like myself out tremendously, along the way.

 

Oh, God no. I have terrible grammar and punctuation. I go with the flow and sometimes just skip the majority of the words on any document or book I'm reading because it bores me. I get too deep into editing my work because one of my friends decided that she wanted to read my work. Well, I sent her the first three chapters of my novel and the feedback was a good one regarding plot and character interaction. Grammar and punctuation...well let's just say I failed. And she's a tech-anime-syfy-nerd, Loves to read weird crap and has high standards so I said fuck it and sent it to her. My heart was broken. But I kept writing and as I edited and reread the draft over and over I kept finding things that were either out of place or made no sense that She didn't even notice or decided not to tell me. And well... long story short I gave up. I got really angry at myself.

Maybe I should find a writing partner. IDK

 

The beginning of my story starts with a description of the town is based on. The seasons and the changes, the people and their backstories. The MC introduces himself in the second paragraph and quickly after that we get into a narrative of what happened to one of the MC and what happened. The narrative is in the first person and I have occasional chapter breaks where another of the MC takes the narrative from his or her POV. If I were to introduce his description, I think I'm going to have to make a character break on the POV of someone else so it can feel true and not as cliche. And overall I am beginning to think I shouldn't describe him at all other than a few characteristics.

 

LOL, another joke please like You'll be the first to know if it's starts to rain or just grab me the cereal box since I don't have a ladder. IDK
But I often use look up or down, I stood on my tip toes. Or my all time favorite... Not even in heels I reached his face...

 

If she likes your plot and character interactions you have 80% of the battle done. The technical aspects, you can pick up along the way. What is really hard to do, is capture a reader's imagination and not lose it. As mentioned previously, you can hire an editor while learning the grammar, and sentence structure portions. Even this forum will help you develop in this area. If you truly enjoy writing, exploring, and extracting pieces from your creative side, I would just keep writing. I'll take imaginative writing with errors, over unimaginative, technically accurate, writing any day of the week. I can fix errors, what is much harder to do is inspire imagination.

 

Hiring an editor to act as a sort of teacher seems likely to be prohibitively expensive. It would, IMO, make more sense to develop the needed skills over time.

 

You have a point, well mostly will be errors haha.
nah but I mean she still reading it. Fingers crossed that she enjoys the plot and not the grammar

 

Hiring an editor is not an option for me, that's why I haven't addressed it. It can be a little too expensive for me to have someone to criticizes me when I can come here and post something in the workshop and you guys can:
1/ critique (for free)
2/ give me pointers
3/help me with my story

overall I wouldn't pay money for something you guys can help me with. I just need to acquire the knowledge.

 

I suppose this would depend on what you want to submit to a publisher or agent. If you know you are weak in this particular area, it could serve you really well to have it professionally looked at and corrected. Using the corrected manuscript as a comparative tool, to also learn from. A writer should not give up, nor should they have to postpone a submission while learning. Especially if they have services available to them, and are willing to sacrifice a bit to pay for these. This forum is great to learn from, and to get a feel for how a story might be perceived by various types of readers. Taking writing courses is probably even better, along with reading books, and joining writing clubs. Even great writers will use an editor, and many other types of review processes, be it free or paid for. Free is great, if you can get it, paid for has its advantages in an ability to set expectations.

 

Well...yeah, I think that they absolutely should postpone a submission while learning.

 

Why? If they can get something published, or receive feedback, would this not be a part of the learning process?

 

That doesn't seem terribly realistic. I have the impression that we're talking about a writer that is still making a fair number of fairly basic errors in grammar, punctuation, etc. Is that what we're talking about?

 

Sounds like you just need more focused experience. A lot of us were readers before writers (I would say all, but there was a guy who claimed to write without reading and... ill let it go)

Chances are you were a different type of reader before you started writing. Maybe you skipped over words, or even entire sentences, to get to the good part. Maybe you ignored what was actually written, and just took in what you wanted it to be. Now that you've started writing though, that's about to change.

Start small, short stories and flash fiction. Maybe throw some poetry in there. Nothing over 10k words.

Write your story
Read your story (without editing)
Read a book (or an author you enjoy. You don't have to do the whole thing in one go, but a sizeable portion.)
Edit your story
Write another story

You have to keep in mind that in doing this, you're not trying to write the next best seller. The point is to build up experience, and not throw away time working on a massive project you don't have the skills to finish.

Or maybe do something else. I might have come off a little pushy above. Find what works for you, and go for it.

 

Again why not? If working alongside someone who knows the insides and outs. Personally I feel encouragement and small wins here, and there are much more conducive to learning, than being told, it is not good enough to submit. Do what you can, recognize your own weaknesses, and get help where possible. Enter the contests, see what other people are submitting, in many cases it is a humbling experience, but there is still a lot to be learned from it. Especially if you go back and study the work of those who won. Use it for comparative analysis to your own work.

I'm not saying just use an editor and forget about learning, to contrary I'm saying use it as an added tool to your arsenal of learning experiences. Paying for it also adds incentive, to go thru and see what was corrected and discovering why. The same way a student working their way thru college is going to do everything they can to get the most out of the dollars they are spending. if you are willing to buy software, online courses, tutorial sessions, a better monitor or computer, maybe even a more comfortable chair, or white board, all in the pursuit of writing, why would you suddenly balk at paying someone to professionally help you with editing?

 

I'm not primarily talking about editing. If someone wants to spend a great deal to use an editor as a teacher (as opposed to using an editor as an editor and using a teacher as a teacher), that's their choice.

But you seem to be suggesting that there's value in submitting work that is obviously unpolished and unpublishable. And I can't see that value. Is that not what you're suggesting?

 

That's odd that you feel so unhappy with your grammar and punctuation. I'm not seeing big errors in anything you've posted here. I do strongly believe that, to be a writer, you have to be able to express yourself coherently with words on a page. But you're not having any trouble with that just now—or at least I'm not seeing it. If there are a few mistakes in your MS, you can easily correct them later on.

What I would say—and this is just my opinion—is that maybe you should NOT be sending unfinished work to be critiqued by your friends. Obviously what your friend said has discouraged you and made you doubt your abilities to the extent that you now don't want to go on. Who knows? If you had just kept writing until you got to 'the end,' you might well have discovered flaws that you could have corrected yourself. Most of us do. I can assure you, my own novel's beginning has changed out of all recognition from my first draft. However, nobody saw a word of it until I'd written the whole thing AND edited it myself. Then I was ready for feedback, because I knew what my story was, and knew I'd actually 'done' it. After that comes the polishing, the rejigging, the rewriting, reinvisioning, the refocusing ...all those things you can do, after getting feedback, that make your novel better.

I see people on the forum all the time who love getting early feedback. Maybe that helps them, so mine is not a blanket recommendation. However, it's easy to nitpick somebody's unfinished work. And if you send out a few early chapters for validation, and don't get it, it's easy to become discouraged and lose faith in your ability to write.

Believe in your work. Write honestly. And don't show it to people until the first draft is done. Done AND edited by yourself. Preferably after letting it sit and cool a bit, so you can look at it with unjaded eyes. Don't risk getting your train derailed prematurely by handing it around in an unfinished state and allowing opinions to discourage you.

The difference is subtle, but it's there.

If you send out unfinished work, what you're saying is, "I'm trying to write. Do you think I'll make it? Should I be writing something else instead? In some other way? Are my characters okay? What about my style? Am I making any mistakes? Would you keep reading? I can't do this by myself. Help...."

However, if you send out a finished piece, what you're saying is," I've just written a novel. What do you think? Have you got suggestions for improving it?"

Also, be aware that this friend of yours is only one person. No matter how much of an expert she may be, her opinion is not necessarily the only one there is. She may never like your work, but somebody else might love it.

 

If you're truly serious about becoming a professional writer you will take a second job, beg, prostitute yourself, or do whatever it takes to obtain a talented editor. They're indispensable. My next appointment with my editor is August 26... I have her all to myself for one week of intense work on my story, and it ain't cheap!

 

not what I am suggesting at all... polish the work to the best of your ability, and then give it to the editor. we learn by doing and comparing.
the use of the editor in this instance would be due to a weakness being recognized,

I'm talking $4 a page ... for short stories while using other avenues of learning, not in pure isolation of use an editor only. It is an iterative process, the first few pieces might be garbage, but seeing your own work professionally edited gives you insights you may otherwise miss in a straight up let's learn to write course. Take what you learn from the various avenues being pursued and apply it to next short story, polish it up, send it to the editor and compare. You can get a sense of how much deviation there is. Are there less corrections, is what you get back closer to what you submitted. When you start submitting things to an editor, and it comes back with very few corrections, or deviations, you know your writing skills are improving. I would say let the $200 piece of software go and use notepad if necessary, take the $200 and get 50 pages of work looked at professionally. The software is not going to be helping you write better in the beginning. Ask the editor if they can also provide you with a list of common mistakes you are making.

Submitting your work; so you get rejected, big deal, what this is for is getting used to the process? what are the requirements? did you meet them? force yourself to push thru those rejections and keep sending, not allowing yourself to dwell on or get bogged down just because the first 5-20 or even 100 said no. No harm, no foul, you won't get there by hiding from rejection letters, it is part of the deal regardless of how good or how polished the piece may be. It is also another measurable metric as you get better. 1 out 20 instead of 1 out of 100, hey I must be getting better at this. A publisher is not going to be chasing after you just because you have a degree in English lit and know all the in and outs of proper grammar. You submit 0 because well you aren't ready yet and still learning, meanwhile I've sent 5 shorts out and averaged 1 in 100 out of 500 submissions, I now have 5 shorts published to your 0 count. I also have 5 professionally reviewed and edited stories I can look at and learn from. Meanwhile you are still learning and on your seventh revision, because a new teacher and class is now teaching you some new concept or writing style.

 

I provided the link when I first suggested this, here it is again.

https://www.servicescape.com/editors/english/94269

and I'm a far cry of being chased after by publishers...