[Meme] questions about writing

[edenfalling]

Created by sophia_helix, gacked via minisinoo and fabu.

Name one thing you do consistently well:

Um... blanking here. I'm good at not sucking?

Nah, seriously, while I think I do a lot of things well a lot of the time, there are always times I slip up on any given factor. But the one I slip the least on is clarity. The inside of my head is often extremely non-linear and full of logical chasms -- I jump from point A to point G without bothering to detail the stops in between -- and I know, from long experience, that this confuses and irritates people. So I work very hard to lay things out in writing so that you can follow the lines of thought and action. I also work to keep the actual sentences -- the words on the page -- from getting confusing. This doesn't mean I dumb down the vocabulary, but it does mean that I try not to use long, pretty words just for the heck of it.

I think I'm also pretty good at maintaining a consistent POV and narrative 'voice.'

And, of course, my spelling, grammar, and mechanics are practically perfect in every way. *grin*

Name one thing you do inconsistently well:

Dialogue. I try to 'hear' conversations, but sometimes it just doesn't work very well.

Name one thing you do consistently badly:

Sensory description. If I am not very careful, all my stories take place in front of a blank white screen. There are no visuals, no sounds, no smells, no tastes, no temperatures or textures, etc.

Also, I go off on tangents and ramble.

Name one thing you do inconsistently badly:

Um. Blanking again. Titles, I think -- I'm not very good with titles.

I'm also not great at scene divisions within longer stories. I think I'm pretty good at endings for stories as a whole, but the smaller pieces within them often cut off rather arbitrarily. I also have a strong tendency to end chapters with people falling asleep, since it's such a convenient and natural break point. I try to fight this, but I don't always notice until after I've posted the chapters or stories in question.

Name one thing you don't do well and feel bad about:

Traditional romance. I would really like to write a melodramatic, sweeping epic romance one day, just to prove that I can actually do something like that.

Name one thing you don't do well and don't feel bad about:

My sense of humor seems to be a very hit-or-miss proposition. I don't really mind that. I know where all the little jokes are, and they make me laugh. And actually, I don't mind that my descriptive skills are patchy -- I figure that if I don't describe things to death, then the image in the reader's mind is more personal than if I bludgeoned my brain until I had crystal-clear images and wrote down every last detail.

Describe the fantasy story that you'd write if you were the writer you'd like to be:

Any of my current unfinished stories, because if I were the writer I'd like to be, I would have actual discipline and I would get them done. *wails*

Mmm. There's also the really dark post-apocalyptic fantasy story with human sacrifice, obsessive romance, and subtextual incest that I've never quite figured out how to start... but I know that will come clear someday, so I don't think it really counts. *innocent smile*

Comments

[erised1810.livejournal.com]

that last one is liek my filch/ubmrdige black quil land whip bdsm fic that isecretly wanted towr ite when i saw hiim beggi non hiskenees for her permition to whip the twins or whoever it was.
dont' we all ahve thissecret plot bunny that's so far remvoedform our usual stuf it's almsot tempting to try to write it one day?

hey. most of the time yoru stories dont' cal lfor descriptions. the dialogue adn the internal monologues are more important. IT's more about what thecharacters do and how they feel about the stuff that happens to them. It's indeed not abig thing.

[edenfalling]

Actually, if you could see the inside of my head, you'd realize that dark ideas are not very far removed from 'my usual stuff.' In fact, a good third of my ideas are dark, and another third have dark undertones. I just don't write a lot of dark fanfiction.

(...On reflection, that may not be true. I think I write dark-tinged stories more often than I realized. They're just not usually epic length, nor is the darkness gratuitous. I tend to consider darkfic as a genre where authors have horrible things happen because they want to write something 'dark,' instead of having horrible things happen because they grow organically from the characters and plot.)

[erised1810.livejournal.com]

Same definitions here. I tend to be very cautiosu because well...I jsut don't want to ignore awraning combined with m yinstinct sayign 'this wil lgivey ounightmares' and gethe reward intheend.
The darkest i've ever writte nwassome imagery forma post-war fic. and the fici tself was bout a rebirht moment, soemk ind of new start andan openign ceremony of arebuitl hogwarts but but..eeek. i dont' eve want mcgonagall t otalk to me about that period again.
although well i dependson hwo you defien it. i've had luna trauamtised with memory loss because of something, i've writen about the longbottomsi nst mungo's, i've had snippetabout tom meeting the basilisk for the firsttime. and i've had a coupel offics where Luna literal ystepped into a portrait and chose tostay there.
Eek. t's more tha nithoguht too.
(and this tiem iwil send it and not star tal lover again liek i did the last three times. :P)