Writing Craft: My Rookie Mistakes
Dec. 26th, 2017 11:15 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chestnutnolaI just finished reading through Self-Editing for Fiction Writers: How to edit yourself into print by Renni Browne and David King.
I've only been writing for two and a half years and I've seen so much improvement in my work since that first story in July 2015. A few months ago, I decided in reading through my older works, to do some editing over the course of the next year to apply what I've learned. I found Self-Editing for Fiction Writers is a good book to take a gander at if you're thinking of self-editing your own work. Between reading books about the craft of writing like Self-Editing, listening to writing podcasts, and just writing and working to improve, I can see my rookie mistakes glaring at me from the pages of my early works.
The scourge that is the epithet is most noticeable in my early works. Forsaken has over a hundred epithet's describing Q as "the boffin" or "his boffin" and have to at some point let those go, go, go!
The use of as or ing is overdone in most of my works.
My dialogue mechanics, I think are generally good, but could use a bit less terms describing emotion, when the dialog by itself is perfectly cable of bringing the emotional state of a character across. Over using Dialog Tags in my earlier work is also another sin that needs some serious self-editing.
I'm getting better at using beats, and my proportion in regards to description is better than it was at the start, but I do have to be mindful of not overdoing my descriptions. However, I have had readers tell me that like my descriptive "style," so I do need to be wary of stripping too much of that aspect of my writing out. Trying to find a balance between all the elements of writing is the biggest challenge of all. Too much or too little of dialog, internal monologue, exposition, and description makes a piece of writing extremely unbalanced and affects the mood, flow, and pace of a story IMHO.
Overall, I'm happy with my author voice, the structures of my plots, pace, and characterizations. I do think working on self-edting and applying what I've learned to my early works will definitely improve my overall writing ability.
I'm still a Rookie, but I'm learning.
I've only been writing for two and a half years and I've seen so much improvement in my work since that first story in July 2015. A few months ago, I decided in reading through my older works, to do some editing over the course of the next year to apply what I've learned. I found Self-Editing for Fiction Writers is a good book to take a gander at if you're thinking of self-editing your own work. Between reading books about the craft of writing like Self-Editing, listening to writing podcasts, and just writing and working to improve, I can see my rookie mistakes glaring at me from the pages of my early works.
The scourge that is the epithet is most noticeable in my early works. Forsaken has over a hundred epithet's describing Q as "the boffin" or "his boffin" and have to at some point let those go, go, go!
The use of as or ing is overdone in most of my works.
My dialogue mechanics, I think are generally good, but could use a bit less terms describing emotion, when the dialog by itself is perfectly cable of bringing the emotional state of a character across. Over using Dialog Tags in my earlier work is also another sin that needs some serious self-editing.
I'm getting better at using beats, and my proportion in regards to description is better than it was at the start, but I do have to be mindful of not overdoing my descriptions. However, I have had readers tell me that like my descriptive "style," so I do need to be wary of stripping too much of that aspect of my writing out. Trying to find a balance between all the elements of writing is the biggest challenge of all. Too much or too little of dialog, internal monologue, exposition, and description makes a piece of writing extremely unbalanced and affects the mood, flow, and pace of a story IMHO.
Overall, I'm happy with my author voice, the structures of my plots, pace, and characterizations. I do think working on self-edting and applying what I've learned to my early works will definitely improve my overall writing ability.
I'm still a Rookie, but I'm learning.
