Firstly Isaac, it appears to me that you know how to write. You have identified your weakest point. This is a really important and significant step to fixing the very problem you face. So once you have addressed this you can move on and find other ways to improve your writing. If it helps you can mail me an exert and I can take a look and offer some help. I think this is a feeling that we all share as writers. We have done everything right and we look back at the story, novella or short story, we cringe when we read parts of it back. I have learnt that after constructing the story, the interesting details are often added last. Or maybe the details that seem a bit lame just need enhancing to transform them. This often happens toward the end of the process. Remember you cant decorate a cake until you have made the cake! And, isn't it all about the decoration? This goes for narrative, dialogue or ideas too. For instance (I am guessing here) let's say that JK Rowling didn't add the chocolate frogs, the wall to get into Diagon Alley, maybe even a character like Hagrid until the final stages after the main story was complete. How would she have felt about her M.S? Maybe she might have thought it looked a little flat, boring or it just needed something a little extra or different to lift a scene, chapter or the whole darn thing. Maybe she recognised that it just didn't work for some reason. Was it at that point that she thought of the cupboard under the stairs? Realising that our story is boring is a reality we all face. For the most part, this is a true fact that we all have to deal with somehow. Maybe it is just that Miss Rowling managed to overcome this hurdle. Apparently taking her many years.
I find reading Victorian fiction helps . Arthur Conan Doyle is mostly known for his Sherlock Holmes novels . He in fact published hundreds of short stories that had noting to do with SH . Written when writing was almost the only medium that could deliver adventure , exciting exploits, exotic locations, all written with convincing attention to detail . It is dated , in many ways, but the writing techniques are still worth learning. I would also suggest a book , Between the lines by Jessica Morrell . Writing is bit like a card trick, with a sleight of hand fooling the eye. Once you know the trick , you can see the magician doing it. Morrell's book helps you see the way the magic works.
This is really good advice, and honestly something I never considered -- varying vocabulary even with the little things. It can be the difference between a character saying their favorite food is "exquisite" or "fucking delicious", which is already two very different people! This sounds like a fun drill! I'll definitely get started on it. I just hope I don't relapse into my years-gone fan fiction phase in the process. This sounds like a difficult mindset to get into, as helpful as it may be. The secret egoist in me wants to believe people will hang on every word I write, and that scares the rest of me! I'm not sure I could manage to convince myself of this, but it's definitely worth a shot! It should be worth noting that as a kid I never had an imaginary friend because I could never convince myself that imaginary, invisible people existed, and when I forced myself to create an imaginary friend (I was feeling left out from all the kids who had one) it usually involved a wildly convoluted background involving some fictional planet (what was a weird fake person without a weird fake place to come from?) that I'd get bored of for being so silly. When my real friend tried to get me to engage with his imaginary friend in a variety of social occasions, it made me deeply uncomfortable because I just couldn't pretend like I was talking to someone who wasn't there. This roleplay aspect of having an imaginary friend, like you mentioned role-play in general being for you, was embarrassing for my apparently jaded, cynical, realist six year old self! When I go to "pretend to be the characters" I find it equally difficult. I am N O T them, and I know this; I can't convince myself otherwise. I know that's obviously a skill I need to work on, but no matter where I am or what I'm doing I'm always preoccupied with or worrying about something else that's going on. I need to work out some time of the day to just sit down and let myself fully realize my story and characters within myself and practice this. I think getting in touch with the fanciful side of my brain could be the best thing I do for my writing. "Notice what's important to the character" is advice I only heard recently and I'm shocked it isn't dolled out more often because it just makes a ton of sense in hindsight. When I write I tend to want to describe the FULL scene -- especially since I write Golden Age-styled puzzle mysteries, so providing the reader with all of the information they need to solve the crime often involves offering full explanations of everything that exists in each relevant location and more -- but it never occurred to me that the narrator won't notice everything and that sometimes it'd be up to the other characters or the detective to point out information. I'm so used to the Watson, who is selectively omniscient because he's writing his account of the crime way ahead of the fact, that I never realized the Hastings, who is dense and needs Poirot to point out sometimes even the obvious things, is way more realistic. I suppose I never really sat down and thought about how different people in my life use different words. Most of how I distinguish between who is talking and who isn't is through inflection more so than vocabulary and word choice. Are there any exercises -- besides, I suppose, listening more intently! -- that could help me get more in touch with how different people's vocabulary shines in conversation? This is a wonderful exercise! I'm always looking for new exercises to better train my brain and this one seems like good fun! I'll definitely try this out -- it appeals to the part of me that bristles at the stray comma or misused and unedited semi-colon that I never bring up for fear of seeming pedantic. Thank you for bringing this exercise to my attention! I suppose I do need to learn to write and finish. I have a horrible habit of correcting and revising as I write because the thought of revising after writing hundreds of pages is incredibly off-putting. Coming to terms with that as a reality of the process would probably help me get past this and take your advice to heart, thank you! Haha, already kinda got you there! My area of focus is Golden Age and pre-Golden Age mystery fiction (Sherlock Holmes predated the Golden Age by many years), so I already have my foot in a lot of Victorian, Edwardian and interwar British literature! I haven't read Between the Lines yet so I'll get my hands on that and get to reading!
I might have put my point badly, in my usual verbose way. I didn't mean you should pretend to actually be the character, if you're uncomfortable with role play. Of course you're not that character. However, you are WRITING that character, so you DO need to know what's going on in their minds and hearts if you want them to be more than just talking heads. Try asking yourself, "IF I were this character—with all the character attributes I've given them—how would I be feeling just now? Or what would I be likely to do? Or what would I be likely to WANT to do? How would I be likely to react to that?" See if you can cross the line between what your planned plot requires and what might happen, if the situation and that person were actually real. If you do the same with the other characters in a scene as well, you'll bring your scenes to life. If you only think in terms of moving the plot (this person must yell and scold, so this other person can stalk out of the room in a huff) your writing is likely to be flat. Are you prone to focusing more on what's happening, than on the underlying 'why?' If you can't pretend to 'be' a character, then try to become more aware of their mental and emotional state. Don't just report what they do and say. Dig behind the action, till you get to the reason for it.
I so feel your pain. I, like you, exercise my modest vocabulary with words similar to the ones you describe (and including those). And, perhaps like you, I'm a very direct person who likes to fully-describe situations. If you troll around here, you'll find segments of my first attempt to write a novel. I've stalled out for the time being, and will get back to it eventually, but with two MCs, it's a struggle for me to switch perspectives. The Marko character I can relate to. Celeste I have a harder time with, both because she's female and because I'm nothing like her. People here (including @jannert) have been hugely helpful in getting me to add color to my writing. Many reported it as "flat" and I couldn't figure out why. It's not just the people here, either. Check out this post on StackExchange to see what I mean. I read a lot of science fiction, and frankly the most-lauded authors write kind of flat. The entire genre is very "here's the setting and here's the action"-oriented. I had to delve into reading other fiction to help my writing. In an effort to add some color to a scene, I was describing Marko's self-awareness of a fit of depression. He was trying to drag himself out of it, and struggling to do so. I had him contemplating Celeste, whom he loves dearly. She was sitting across from him, and I had him thinking about why he loved her; about the things she was good at that he wasn't; how their personalities complemented one another. I concluded the paragraph with a simple sentence: "She smelled like flowers." Oh my God, the reviewers went nuts. "This! This right here! It's the best phrase in the entire piece." I kid you not. Clearly I had -- almost accidentally -- done something right. I tried to get back into whatever mindset made me think to put that in, and it turns out to be entirely unnatural to me. Recently I started reading Lonesome Dove. I've noticed that McMurtry uses an odd style that switches perspective from one character to another without any clear breaks. In one paragraph you're seeing the world from one character, and in the next the perspective has switched to someone else. It's a bit disconcerting. After reading the first few pages of the novel, I wanted to try my hand at writing in the "Western" style (though without the perspective switching), and doffed off a scene that I posted here. It's entirely different than my normal writing (if you can call anything I write "normal"), and I feel like I learned something from writing it. I wish you the best of luck in your endeavors. The only thing I can tell you is to practice, and to force yourself into writing things you're uncomfortable with. No one has to see them, but you'd be amazed how positive the feedback is that you get, even when it's something you don't think anyone will want to read. Cheers. J.D.
I guess you could try using words in different ways, and see if it fits any character differently than it dos another. For example, take dope. How would your characters see this word as? Someone more in tune with street slang might see it as drugs or really cool. An older person might see it as a dumb person. Get to know your characters better, write a summary for each one and maybe a background and think how that would shape them, not only as they speak but as they interact with each other. This is what I did to help create my characters, you could try it too.
I don't know how much help this will be, but I have noticed that people tend to alter their vocabularies depending on who they're with (in the same way that they might act a little differently). My advice would be to observe two different people in two different environments. One-on-one with you would be best. Take a few people out to coffee or lunch or something over the next month. Assuming you have a solid and transparent relationship with those people, you can treat those one-on-ones as a sort of baseline.
This is very true. Even with the same people, my own vocab will vary wildly between high- and low-class words when I'm talking with my family, my boss, my coworkers, or my online friends. I don't curse in front of my parents or my boss; my coworkers don't appreciate the big words I get to use around my family; my online friends have seen every mood from 'chatspeak is my first language' to 'Shakespeare was an uneducated hick who used small words'. Most people don't have quite that much variety in their word choice, but depending on your character's background and education, they might. More education generally means more big words (or at least, more atypical words), but not always. Some people pay thousands of dollars for the fancy paper and talk like they always did.
It's so much fun. I find it fascinating when you find yourself doing it, or when you realize somebody else is doing it. My mind is in "molasses mode" today, so I can't think of any proper terminology at the moment. But one of my courses this semester was The Nature of Language, and among other things, we studied the use of vocabulary and how it changes between mediums and from context to context. So another piece of advice to the OP, and perhaps you would agree @animagus_kitty, would be to have fun with it. Easier said than done, because once you realize why you're having a problem with your writing, it can be easy to make that thing your enemy. But explore how a character speaks and acts differently in different situations. Like you said, the way she interacts with a superior may be different than how she acts with her dad. Or, maybe because of her relationship with her father, she tends to treat authority figures in the same way (could be submissively or borderline ODD). Vocabulary can actually become a wonderful doorway to discovering insights about your characters. It can also set-up some funny situations where you take a guy like me, who in "real-life" usually talks like a sailor and sounds like I didn't even graduate high-school, and then you come to find out that they're exceptionally educated and are more well-written than they are well-spoken. Then there's the guy who's long been ashamed of his difficulty with reading (perhaps he had dyslexia but was made to feel stupid, and believed it), so he compensates by saying big words that don't quite fit. A character who is more consistent in their vocabulary across contexts could be seen to have a more dominant or stubborn personality, or could be more confident, or could literally have more power than other characters. So many possibilities!
Oh, I absolutely agree. I have one character whose sole mission in life is to piss people off, and the easiest way to do that is to talk above their heads. She doesn't use the big words like 'opprobrious' and 'malfeasance' because they're necessarily the best word for that situation, she does it because it's the most irritating thing she can possibly do. If she's just chilling, instead of trying to give off an aura of power, she uses much smaller, more 'normal' words. But having the opportunity to use the big words is fun for me, as an author, and *that*, dear OP, is why she does it. PS: Using really big words sometimes requires rewriting two or three sentences prior to set up for it. That adds challenge to the fun.
Here's another trick you can try. It's a simple trick. Base one or two of your characters on somebody you actually know. (Of course disguise them well, so nobody figures out who they are.)
