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Writing Strengths and Weaknesses

Negrek

Lost but Seeking
While some people may be considered "good at writing" or "bad at writing," the craft of writing is actually made up of a lot of different skills. For example, to write well you generally need to be good at characterization as well as pacing, plotting as well as crafting sentences on the page, and everyone is better at some of these things than others. I was just curious as to what kind of writers we have knocking around the community.

So, what do you think your strengths and weaknesses are as a writer? And perhaps more importantly, What have you tried in order to improve areas that you're weak in? How well do you think it worked?
 

Kutie Pie

"It is my destiny."
Sounds like this was brought over from the Fan Fiction Mafia I wouldn't know, haven't been there in a couple of years. I'll try to answer this best I can because I kinda-sorta don't keep mental tracks of this kind of thing as I write what I can write.

I feel like my strengths are in my descriptions. I do make that conscious effort to not get too wordy, but I try to not be vague enough either that the reader will get a different impression than what I'm shooting for. It doesn't completely prevent it, but I can't recall anyone telling me they had a hard time picturing what was going on, so if someone sees the scene play out a little differently, that's fine as long as they aren't totally lost to it. Other strengths from what I've been told are the characters being kept in-character (something which surprises me at times), character interactions, and expressing the appropriate emotions (atmospheric-wise, I feel, but probably also on a character level). In recent years (2010-onward), I've been told from numerous people in numerous places that I can bring out emotions and make the characters more "alive", in a way. I don't know how common this is in story-telling, exactly (though I like to imagine it's something that is needed in story-telling), but apparently this is a strength that is unique to me. I guess it makes sense, I can't think of the last time I read something and was able to get emotional over it, so to have a good number of people tell me in reviews or even PMs that they shed a tear or two over the story (or at least say it is one of the saddest stories they've ever read) is a sign of success.

For my weaknesses, again, it comes from descriptions, though it depends on what I'm describing. I am not big of a fan of action scenes, and unless it's something I was excited about for a long time and have a very good idea of what I want to do with it, I struggle writing action. I can even struggle during calmer moments, too, unless characters are able to bounce off of each other in the scene (because then it just means I'm only writing dialogue, lol). I also find myself hesitant over writing humor due to the fact that humor is subjective, and I can kind of go overboard with the silliness. What I may think is funny has a chance of being lost on another person because my sense of humor is just weird. So far, though, it seems like humor just comes naturally into the story as long as I'm not shooting for a comedy throughout. I also feel that I have pacing problems at times. It probably stems back to my descriptions which may-or-may-not distract the reader from the pacing, but I also kind of have this slight inability to pick out filler from the plot. After all, if it's in the original writing, how can it be filler or padding? You know? I don't want things to be too slow or even clunky as I write, so I just write based on feeling, if that makes any sense.

As for what I've tried in improving my weaknesses... I don't know of anything that I've tried. Again, I don't keep track of what I can or cannot do, I just go with the flow. My writing seems to slightly vary depending on the story I'm writing, so I guess what I wasn't able to do for the one story, I can do fine in the other. It's weird, though perhaps it is a sign I can write in anything just as long as it's appropriate to the story and that I'm passionate about it.
 

Sike Saner

Peace to the Mountain
I think I handle dialogue pretty well. Or maybe I just have a rosy view of mine because I have a lot of fun writing it, heh. I've also gotten quite a few favorable comments about how I handle minor characters, so I suppose I'm doing something right in that department as well.

Pacing is probably a weak point, especially with regards to bigger, more ambitious stories with multiple arcs and all that. Which is why, going forward, I intend to go back to less zoomed-out fics--a tighter focus on singular (or at least very few) storylines rather than all the timeskipping about I've done in the past. I might work my way back toward that sort of thing--I think it's a viable format for storytelling. I just think I have a little bit more patience to develop before I can really employ it to its fullest.
 
As far as my strengths go, I feel like I'm pretty good at giving my fics a sense of direction. This used to be a bit of a weakness of mine, but with some help, I've learned how to move a story's plot forward even if not much is happening in the story itself. I've also been told that I do exposition pretty well, and make it seem interesting and real, rather than just someone spouting background stuff.

My biggest weakness, however, is action scenes. I include way too much unnecessary detail for every movement, and it's something I desperately need to work on.

Also, passive voice. Everywhere. It needs to go. Now.
 

diamondpearl876

Well-Known Member
Strengths:
- Characterization
- Character development
- Emotional scenes
- Dialogue... most of the time
- Writing first person
- Having and sticking to my own personal writing style

Weaknesses:
- Worldbuilding
- Description
- Action/battling scenes
- Writing third person
- Wanting to use passive voice a lot
- Being wordy
- Plot pacing

Welp, I'm mean to myself. :~) I've not tried to fix writing third person yet, but I have been able to practice active writing and wordiness through poetry, of all things, which has leaked into my fiction writing. Most people complained about Love and Other Nightmares' pacing (ie. catching 3 pokemon in the span of 4-5 chapters), and so now the plot is mostly focused on, well, character development. I don't know how that's going yet, as I have yet to release the latest chapter. Worldbuilding has also been an issue, but most readers seem to have liked the improvements made in Love and Other Nightmares and I've kind of adopted a Digital Skitty-esque approach to worldbuilding for Survival Project's sequel.

I think I'll always be hopeless at battling scenes, as action for the sake of action isn't my thing, but that's the pessimist in me talking.
 

Creepychu

The horror
Got to admit, it's always a bit awkward when I'm asked to describe my strengths, as a writer or otherwise. Characterization (particularly working out individual character voices) and creating my own settings is what I feel most at ease with doing and those are also the things I've gotten the most praise for, so you could probably jot those down in the Strengths column and I also get a lot of personal enjoyment out of my action scenes, so I would like to think that translates into decent writing quality as well. Really, though, I'm usually the type to fixate more on the areas that don't work for me.

Speaking of those areas, focus really stands out like a sore thumb for me. I have a bad habit of spreading my attention thin across multiple different ideas and making painfully slow progress on all of them as a result, and that's definitely the thing I'm most concerned with trying to fix right now, especially since it also ties overly much into my second running issue of over-planning things. Planning in itself sounds like a positive, of course, but if I don't actually write those plans into solid form they end up stifling my interest and muddying the waters with a bunch of currently irrelevant detail rather than improving the story, which is another issue for getting things done.

To counteract this, I've been doing my best to wean myself off writing down anything but the scarcest basic outlines for my plans and not letting myself add more until I have actually written those plans into something tangible. My hope is that by approaching things more spontaneously like this, I'll have less loose ideas to distract me and more results to show for it. So far, results have been a bit hit and miss but there's some early promise with staying on track with my main idea and things do tend to come together quicker than before once I get rolling on a concept. Getting started, for the record, is the third roadblock I'm working on, though for that it's really just a matter of cracking the whip on myself more than I have in the past. It's always a pain to get in the groove, but once I'm in it I always end up wondering why I wasted so much time getting there, so on the whole I think the change is for my own good in the long run.
 

Dragonfree

Just me
I think characterization is far and away my best quality. Characters come to me very easily and naturally, and they continually surprise me and pull the story in directions I hadn't considered that are a lot more interesting than whatever I had planned. The way I create characters, I sort of write them in based on a vague instinct and then mull over the outcome to figure out what might make that character tick, so really my process for creating characters looks a lot like how I analyze characters in other works. As a result, I sort of see my characters from the outside - I don't set out to make an interesting character and try to convey that so much as starting to find a character interesting as I myself watch their behaviour in the story, the same way a reader might. That makes me reasonably hopeful that the things that make them interesting to me should be appreciable to readers and not just in my head. And from reader feedback I seem to manage to get people to care about them one way or another, at the very least.

Then, while I'm a lot less well-equipped to judge that because there's no way I can see it from the outside in the same way, I think I'm reasonably proud of some of my dialogue and... comic timing, I guess? In particular, I really enjoy rereading some of the Morphic extras and I feel like they're generally entertaining and amusing rather than just to me, but again, I don't feel like I have an objective enough perspective on it to really tell. I know some people like them, at least.

Finally, I've gotten generally positive feedback on how I handle emotion, and while I don't feel like I'm all that great at it compared to the people I compare myself to, I've still been reasonably satisfied with some of my emotional scenes.

As for weaknesses, hah, I feel like I should list everything else. I tend to write overlong sentences with too many adverbs, for one, or word things in convoluted ways that make perfect sense to me but leave readers scratching their heads. In the past couple of years I've made an effort during proofreading to mercilessly split sentences into two unless I feel like I absolutely can't and to notice adverbs more and try to eliminate them when they're unnecessary, and I think I'm getting better about it, but I'm still working on it. The bit about wording things in ways that make sense to me but not to readers is harder to work on because, well, it does make perfect sense to me, but I've still been trying to pick up on when my meaning isn't straightforward and mull over how to say it better.

I've never been able to write vivid or evocative descriptions. My prose is pretty sparse and boring, and while I think I'm decent at getting character into it because whoo characters the one thing I do right, my descriptions of what's going on are generally just blow-by-blow this-happened-then-that-happened (except in overlong convoluted sentences). I mostly gave up on describing what things look like once I realized that's not some box you need to tick in order to be a proper writer, and while I think usually that's an improvement, it leaves me sort of at a loss when I do want to communicate to the reader what something looks like. I've yet to figure out any good systematic way to improve this; I think I have gotten better at it as I go on writing but it happens very slowly.

I'm also terrible at planning. Rather than plotting out ahead of time how the main plot arc should happen and what needs to happen to connect the dots, I've historically written stories with only a vague idea of what's going to happen or how long they're going to be and let them just sort of find their way from one plot point to another. This means my pacing tends to be incredibly wonky; half of Morphic is slice-of-life before a guy gets shot, for instance, and the main plot of The Quest for the Legends doesn't even start until twenty-five chapters in. I really do do better at that if I manage to outline things, and I've tried to do more of that in recent years, but I can't very well do decent outlines in the first place until I know the characters well, which I don't until I've actually written them - even when I do know the characters pretty well they end up acting out and doing things that weren't in the outline (but are actually way better than the outline). The only solution I can think of is continuing to write terribly-planned first-draft stories and then rewriting them into something sensible afterwards, but that does mean things take double the time.

I have the silliest tendency to not think closely enough about things, so that something obvious just never occurs to me until a reader points it out. I've also been trying to do that better, but it's pretty hard because obviously things not occurring to me isn't exactly something that's easy to consciously catch when it happens.

Also, I have never been able to get the hang of research. Even when I attempt it, which I've been trying to do more of, I have no idea how to even find the information I'm looking for, so I usually end up with something vague that relates to something sort of like the thing I wanted to know and hope it's roughly applicable.
 

Griff4815

No. 1 Grovyle Fan
I think my strengths in writing are definitely my characterization. The most common complement that I get is that my characters all seem unique and real. I like to think of myself as self-aware, and I'm inclined to agree with that. I love coming up with characters, seeing what makes them tick, seeing how they react with others or under stressful situations, making their character arcs and giving them development. Also, dialogue, as that comes hand-in-hand with characters. I also think I'm pretty good at world building and bringing things to life.

In a somewhat related area, I think I'm pretty good with emotion. During Never in the Wrong Time or Wrong Place and Victory or Death, my older Pokemon stories, there was waaayyy too much emotion. Like melodramatic amounts. I've dialed that back though and now I think I can write emotion without going overboard.

I'd say I'm deeeeecent at making plots now. I used to be terrible at them, but I think I've improved over the years. I'm still not perfect, though. It often takes a lot of effort for me to think of something and they don't just fall into my lap.

My weakness is probably my syntax. Unlike a lot of writers I see around here, my prose isn't very flowery. I'm not the best at crafting a sentence in a nice-sounding, exotic way, and most of my prose tends to be somewhat plain or to-the-point (at least in my opinion). I'd like to be better in this sector, and I do try to be, but I find that once I get into dialogue, I tend to forget about it and focus on writing the dialogue instead.

I think I've definitely improved when it comes to description, but I still have room to improve. The detail could be better and I sometimes feel like maybe I haven't added enough.

Like Dragonfree, I'm pretty bad at sitting down and planning out my whole fic. That's just not how my creative process works. I start with a vague idea and fill in the gaps as I'm writing. It would probably be better if I actually knew everything about the universe and the plot before I started writing, so the reader (and myself) doesn't have to unearth new things as it goes along, but eh. What can ya do? I'm three years into my Digimon universe and I'm still coming up with new aspects about it.

I think one of my strengths and weaknesses is that I overthink things. On one hand, it's useful because I'm less likely to create plot holes and I end up coming up with pretty detailed things about the characters and the universe. On the other hand, I often find myself stopping in the middle of my writing and researching for thirty minutes about some really minor thing in the story that probably isn't worth the time and research that I'm putting into it.
 
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Sid87

I love shiny pokemon
Oh ho ho. This seems fun.

My most pressing weakness is... I'm not sure if you would call it PACING, exactly, but it's my inability to stretch out scenes/chapters as long as I feel they should go. One of the most frustrating things that happens on EVERYTHING I write is that I sit down, work for what feels like forever, finish a scene or chapter... and then when I re-read it, it's maybe a few pages long. It feels like a breeze to just blow through it in no time at all. This isn't even just my fiction, though. It's blogging or even just every day message board posting. It feels like I take FOREVER to write something, and I say everything I have to say on the matter, but when I look at it... it's miniscule. Just this tiny little example of writing that takes a minute to read.

I'm not entirely sure how to improve in this regard, and it's something I've recognized for quite some time. When I start trying to pepper extra stuff in, it feels just like that. It's fluff. I'm saying stuff just to say it for length. That's obviously awful, but I'm never quite sure what to do to really maximize a reader's experience without getting into wasting his time. My scenes tend to be just... the meat of what's going on, but not as much flavor as I'd like. It drives me nuts. I go into my scene, I accomplish my goal, I hit all the notes I want, and I'm out. Bing, bang, boom. But it just all happens so fast that I feel a reader can't really be invested in it.

When I read other peoples' work, they have these long, fulfilling chapters where STUFF HAPPENS and things feel IMPORTANT and it takes a solid bit of time to read and absorb. Their chapters feel like a MEAL. Mine feel like a snack.


Another primary weakness of mine is this weird double-edged sword. If I plot my story out in great depth, and I have hundreds of pages of plot and ideas and definitive goals set in stone... I have a hell of a time STARTING the story. Because I get all tied up in the minutiae, I worry about making everything I establish MEAN something, and frankly... I get bored waiting to get to my BETTER ideas down the road when the characters are more fleshed out and ideas are built to a head and old events are finally paying off. That's where I WANT to be, so the earlier establishment work begins to feel like a chore. In my head, the characters at the later points are vibrant, wholly-realized individuals, so going to the very beginning and setting them up is down right tedious to me.

But that said, when I do the opposite--when I just wing and a story and make it up as I go and let the plot come to me as I write it--I will suffer greatly with ENDING the story. I get to a point where all of the sudden everything has to mean something and I need to decide on one of 10 different endings I've thought of along the way. Also, when I re-read earlier chapters, I'll find subplots or details that were abandoned or went nowhere. Brothers' Bond is lousy with all of these problems, quite frankly. And it's hilarious to me to re-read it, because it's ridiculously obvious to me every time I haphazardly changed directions. And I haven't touched it in months because I know it needs to end, and it's incredibly close to a climax, but... no ending feels fulfilling to me at this point.


What else am I poor at? I'm not particularly innovative or terribly original. I never feel like I have an idea that is brand new or inspiring.

My characters will tend towards sounding the same quite frequently because it's a lot of variations on my own voice.

I'm pretty bad at handling drama. It often feels, to me, to be devoid of any real emotion. Or it's too melodramatic and over-the-top. I'm not any better at comedy--I can write witty, charming dialogue, but a story that is funny on purpose? Ha! No. Action scenes? I'm not really bad at these, but they really suffer in regards to my primary problem of just blasting through details far too quickly.




Okay, so that was all terribly depressing. What do I consider my strengths? Or, at least, areas in which I have improved.

My description and world-building is not terrible, but I've put a LOT of work into it. I used to be really bad at it, but I've worked on it, and I feel it has improved at least marginally. I Maybe... I don't know. I'm "OK" at describing a city or using someone's mannerisms or appearance to define them. I can handle describing details without it reading like "AND THIS IS THE PART WHERE I AM DESCRIBING THIS ITEM TO YOU". Most of the time.

Dialogue. Probably the closest thing I have to an actual "strength", as opposed to just "here's something I'm not really bad at!". I can write endearing, witty, fun, snappy dialogue. I can make multiple characters really bounce off of each other and feel alive. My characters tend against soliloquy-ing, because... who besides politicians really talk in walls of text? My characters can really joust verbally, it's all very quick-hit and fluid, and their discussions feel genuine to me.
 
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Kiyuni

Prince of Heart
This seems interesting. I feel my strength is character interaction and dialogue, which results in long stretches of dialogue that go on forever because I don't know where to stop myself.

As for weaknesses, definitely telling instead of showing. Looking at all my old works there is way too much infodump and stuff along those lines. I used to make a conscious effort to show more, but that was months ago and I can't write like that anymore cause of taking a break from writing. Such is life, I guess. I am horrible at finding places to end chapters or parts, too. That might actually be a problem with ending things in general – when speaking I end up trailing off a lot because I can't end my thoughts properly.
 

DarkerShining

Well-Known Member
Well, I feel like character interaction is probably one of my strong points, and I've been told that I do it well. I just really like writing the interactions, sometimes showing how well the characters get along, other times experimenting with interactions between characters who rarely interact and finding out more about them that way. I just really like exploring my characters and seeing how they grow from their experiences.

When it comes to weaknesses, I'd have to say action scenes. I also feel that some of my descriptions of locations and characters are still a bit awkward. I'm hoping I keep getting better as I keep writing.
 

ZoruaGirl27

Queen of Angst
My place is with the emotions, yo. I can generally create realistic personalities based on backstories using the backstories as guides or vice versa, I can make the characters express the emotions they feel with words, actions, and/or thoughts, and I'm pretty okay at understanding what each character is trying to tell me in each scene.

As you can tell, I'm also good at tooting my own horn, so on to the weaknesses. My greatest weakness is, without a doubt, patience. Despite writing with a lot of words and a pretty slow pace, which you would think suggests I'm a patient person, I'm actually hilariously impatient. So I'll be writing a scene that's supposed to be tense, dramatic, or meaningful, and I'll have this huge thing planned with this and this happening... and then, halfway down, I say "GET TO THE POINT!" and leave most of it out, which ends up leaving me unsatisfied and the reader far more so. Another major weakness of mine would have to be my mood whiplash. I tend to snap from intense drama and angst in one scene to the goofiest scene ever mere seconds later. Sometimes, the change is even within only one scene! Needless to say, it can leave the reader and even myself feeling out-of-place and flabbergasted.
 
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