It's all so arbitrary

Shadow_Ferret said:

Let me make one thing clear. I was NOT, in any way, shape, or form, disparaging our good SYW crit peeps. I believe everyone here has something to offer and they each have their own wonderful perspective and insight into what they're critting.

My whole post was disparaging ME. I have the feeling I just don't have the capactity to learn. I'm not quitting, I'm not flouncing. I'm just frustrated as hell at my lack of ability to learn how to recognize in my own writing the weaknesses and what it takes to correct them.

Did Shakespeare have beta readers?

I read several handbooks. Not the right one though. Obviously not the one Stephen King, Dean Koontz, William Faulkner, et al have read.

Click to expand...

How long have you been writing? Sometimes it just takes time, and if you keep working at it, the mind kind of expands and the comprehension level goes way up. I think every writer, including myself, has probably endured those same feelings of frustration at some point. I really think it's a matter of gutting it out and waiting for it to pass. I guess it depends on how long you've been at it already, though.

Shadow, I'm really new in this forum, so feel free to disregard this.

The most significant change in my prose came from two samples of work I posted here for critique, one in Horror and one in SciFi/Fantasy. Within a few days I spotted a pattern, a consistant flaw in my style that made the work a little rough. Sure, one reviewer would love what another destroyed, but overall the main issues in my writing became apparent when multiple reviewers responded to multiple samples.

You might want to give yourself three topics unrelated to your WIPs (the son of a crippled man finds the axe handle his father used to beat him with, a boy and his best friend become trapped in an abandoned prison, a woman harassed by an unknown stalker is forced to walk through a large park at night, whatever your genre or style).
Write the opening and three pages of those, doing whatever you want with them, and let them act as prose tests for analysis.

Again, just a suggestion from a new guy, but it's based on something that worked for me.

Shadow_Ferret said:

I have the feeling I just don't have the capactity to learn. I'm not quitting, I'm not flouncing. I'm just frustrated as hell at my lack of ability to learn how to recognize in my own writing the weaknesses and what it takes to correct them.

Click to expand...

What are some of the things you have learned so far?

I read several handbooks. Not the right one though. Obviously not the one Stephen King, Dean Koontz, William Faulkner, et al have read.

Click to expand...

"The right one" depends on what you need to learn next, and what you're ready to learn next.

What are your beta readers telling you lately that you disagree with? That you don't understand? That you understand, but don't know how to fix? Knowing these, we may be able to offer some ideas that will fit nicely for you.

Dale

Shadow_Ferret said:

Thus my frustration. I see all these young writers GETTING it. Heck, most everyone here, if you read the posts in Novels, or Short Stories, or their comments in SYW, GET IT.

Click to expand...

In my opinion and experience, it's much easier to critique others' work than to assess your own writing. Heck, some people (no people in particular) are better at critiquing than writing.

I don't have an answer, SF. I'm not too goal-driven about my writing right now, other than write, finish, polish, enjoy it. If you can enjoy it - end result and/or process - take that and keep working toward more. It sounds like you've met with some success outside of fiction writing, and that's a not insignificant accomplishment.

Well, I've heard of this before. Some writers feel they can go no farther, and they manage to break out of it by attending a workshop. Now I've never gone to one myself, and I'm not affiliated with any workshops--but I've heard of that working for some writers. They can be pricey, though.

(Scratching head...) It's hard to say what problems you might be having without seeing your work. If your novels are epic fantasy (since I see you write fantasy) that's a tough sell to an agent these days. I'm guessing your short fiction is fantasy, which is primarily what I write. If you want to PM or e-mail me something, I'll take a look at it and give you some private feedback. It may or may not help. Don't worry, I won't steal it. I've got more than enough of my own material. It's up to you. But otherwise, it's too hard to tell what's going on.

to you, Ed, and we know you weren't having it in for any of us, okay my friend.

ETA. How could I not love someone who called me Poo Poo Head the first conversation he ever had with me,

Shadow Ferret.

I'm a little younger than you, and a lot newer to this forum. I haven't even been writing many years. But I have been working with writers for many, many years, some I have even 'trained', and a few I have been privileged to give their first break. For what it's worth, my advice would be this:

You've already been given the answer several times in this thread, albeit somewhat obliquely, but here's a spelling out. THERE IS NO ANSWER. There is no magic button. It makes me want to cry sometimes, reading posts on this board and watching people desperately reaching for that 'rule' which will guarantee success. Maybe if I avoid adverbs. Maybe if I really learn how to show not tell. Maybe if I change the POV. Maybe if I cut the prologue. There is good common sense in all of these things, but none of them are any more than tools in the box, they are not themselves the design you want to follow.

Yes, we all need to hone our craft. All of us. But there comes a time when we need to stop looking at the craft and look at the thing we're building instead - and the fact you're feeling as you are suggests you've reached it. I had a look at your Ants Flash piece, and one thing leapt out immediately. You did something I have never, ever seen a professional writer do: You weren't happy with the writing, so you changed the story. You added characters, a backstory, and a whole narrative in order to make a piece of flash fiction work.

Uncle Jim has said it many times, but I think it's worth repeating - if only because I frequently need reminding of it myself: The Story is King. The writing is there to communicate the story, not the story as a vehicle to show your writing. Forgive me if my diagnosis is off, because it's based on a single sample, but it looks to me personally as if you have been trying for so long to work on your writing you've almost forgotten what it's for.

What I'd suggest is this. Try to rediscover the joy of it that made you want to start writing in the first place. Wait till you have a story. Do NOT look at plot ninjas, story-generators or any of the other hack-devices - come up with a story you personally want to tell. Then sit down and write the hell out of it. Write as fast as you like and don't worry about the quality of the writing - think only about that story and telling it to an audience of one: your reader. Enjoy it. Only when it's finished should you look at the writing, and even then, only consider whether it's serving the story or you could tell it better some other way. You might be surprised at how well it turns out.

Honestly, what you're going through happens to all of us sometimes. It did me when I first came to AW. I wrote my first novel out of sheer joy, and without having much of a clue what I was doing. Then it sold and suddenly I had to write another one. The panic! Suddenly I had to 'learn how to be a writer'. For months I was blocked, until I finally learned how to go back and do what I did the first time - just tell the bloody story and forget everything else.

Try it. A singer has to do a lot of scales to train her voice, but she won't give a great performance until she learns to put her technique into the background and her soul into the song.

You've been doing scales a long time, Shadow Ferret. Now it's time to sing.

Louise

NeuroFizz said:

I know Ed is much practiced in his writing, and I suspect he is widely read. For that reason, I'm going to walk a different path (as usual) in response to the original post.

When I started writing, I read widely and I bought several of the how-to books on writing. But I never could catch the full impact of the various conventions of the craft from the writing of other people, whether it was from written works or examples in the how-to books. It wasn't until I had my own work ripped to shreds that I could clearly see where I was making my mistakes. I just couldn't get the same level of understanding from those other examples. And those bruise-inducing experiences continue to be the best lessons.

Ed, do you have a trusted writing partner (or writing group) who will not only be ruthless in critting your work but also benevolent in explaining the reasons for the crits? Eventually we have to get our work out there for careful and thorough evaluation. Sometimes what we perceive as wounds or lumps in terms of our writing are really among the best learning experiences.

We can talk all we want about whether we should follow modern writing conventions or not, or any of the other ideas expressed here. And we can suggest a person read more and more and eventually it will percolate into that person's writing. I call BS on all of that for some (many?) of us--eventually we may need the kind of help and mutual encouragement that just can't come from the threads of AW, SYW included, or from reading the works of published authors.

Click to expand...

Fizz brings up a good point, Ed. Many of us, especially those of us who have been here for a while, have many friends here who's writing and who's opinions we trust. Sometimes, rather than, or along with SYW, it can be extremely helpful to enlist one of those folks to be a beta for you. I know that when I'm called on to do that I'm probably harsher than I am in SYW. And when I ask for others to do the same for me, I expect honest brutality. How the hell else can I learn?

If you haven't done it yet, it's something you might want to consider.

Uncle Jim has said it many times, but I think it's worth repeating - if only because I frequently need reminding of it myself: The Story is King. The writing is there to communicate the story, not the story as a vehicle to show your writing. Forgive me if my diagnosis is off, because it's based on a single sample, but it looks to me personally as if you have been trying for so long to work on your writing you've almost forgotten what it's for.

What I'd suggest is this. Try to rediscover the joy of it that made you want to start writing in the first place. Wait till you have a story. Do NOT look at plot ninjas, story-generators or any of the other hack-devices - come up with a story you personally want to tell. Then sit down and write the hell out of it. Write as fast as you like and don't worry about the quality of the writing - think only about that story and telling it to an audience of one: your reader. Enjoy it. Only when it's finished should you look at the writing, and even then, only consider whether it's serving the story or you could tell it better some other way. You might be surprised at how well it turns out.

Click to expand...

QFT.

Without the joy of storytelling, all the writing skills in the world won't make a writer satisfied with the work.

Writing skills can polish and refine the story, but without a story the writer wants -- needs -- to tell all those skills give you little except exquisitely crafted sentences nobody wants to read.

Shadow_Ferret said:

Which illustrates one of my biggests problems. I write skeletally and need to flesh things out. That's why I post things in SYW. I'm posting what to me looks like a beautiful, full-bodied woman, but what the readers are seeing is a skeleton. That's because I know in my mind what supposed to be there and I'm mentally adding those details. Unfortunately, the reader can't see those details.

And that's one of the difficult things for me, to remember to put flesh and clothes upon my stories.

The story is there, it's always there, I just keep too much of it in my head.

Click to expand...

And now that you've indentified a big problem--now's the time to figure out what kind of exercises will help you break yourself of keeping too much of the story in your head.

That might be a different thread, though.

Shadow_Ferret said:

Well, actually, that problem I've known since college.

Click to expand...

OK--so what are you going to do about it now that you've hung it out for everyone to see?

I dunno, but it sounds to me like you've been analyzing too much, that you're too focused on the writing and not enough on the storytelling.

I know I'm repeating myself, but that's honestly how it sounds to me.

Shadow_Ferret said:

The same thing I've been doing. Put it in SYW (or in beta) and have them tell me, "Hey, you need to expand this."

As far as the problems that started this thread... I got a book at the library, "How to Read Literature Like a Professor." Maybe if I can figure out what the difference between bad writing and good is, maybe if I can learn how to analyze fiction, it'll somehow help me with my writing. But who knows? I've been struggling with how to analyze fiction for decades now.

Click to expand...

I have a friend who also writes skeletons, as you put it. The challenge she's doing now is to purposely write a story twice the size that it would normally take her--and she's to do this by making certain that every page she writes has at least X amount of references to the five senses and twice that amount of emotional reactions. At least, that's the way I understand it from what she's described to me.

She's now about 30-5K into the book. She's stopped at the end of each scene and reworked it to meet the minimum standards set for herself. What she's finding is that, bit by bit, she's putting in more and more of that fleshing out stuff in, or at least now aware of what she's missing when she looks it over.

And she is writing a book she intends to submit, so she's trying to make all this practice count from the get-go.

She'll never be a flowery writer, but she's getting a good balance of meat and bone into the body of the story. It's pretty cool to witness.

Maybe something like that would work for you.

Shadow_Ferret said:

You know, as I think on it, I don't believe I changed the story. The story remained the same throughout. I embellished upon it to give people something to focus on, to flesh out the character, give people a reason to care about his fate.

Click to expand...

You know your own story best, I'm only giving an outsider view - as a reader will do. From that perspective, you started with a simple, clear story about a man who crushed an ant, and then the ants got their revenge. Man thinks he's above nature - nature rips him to pieces. Simple, clear, and very, very strong. It made me think.

You then made it a story about a man who was a wife-beater and therefore needed his comeuppance in the moral scale of things, but he didn't get it from the wife, he got it from the ants, because he was also a drunk who smashed an ant. Yes, it ticked every box in the writers' rule book for making the reader care, and if the story had been a novel I'd have totally agreed with what you did. I can absolutely understand why critters preferred your final version. I didn't. To me it had not only become a different story, it had actually stopped being one altogether and become a collection of ingredients for a story instead - which is why lucidfzl's cooking analogies have worked so well for me in this thread.

I write skeletally and need to flesh things out. That's why I post things in SYW. I'm posting what to me looks like a beautiful, full-bodied woman, but what the readers are seeing is a skeleton

Click to expand...

Fine. As Deleyan Lee has incisively pointed out - if you know that's your problem, then it's time to move on and deal with it. Why go on posting things in SYW if you already know what people are going to say? Why not just say it to yourself and then act on it?

Please, try trusting yourself. If you saw the dialogue in this thread in any other form you'd recognize it for exactly what it is.

It's this:
1. You tell us you've been analyzing your writing for years. You've been reading books. You're endlessly submitting work to get the opinion of others. You're searching for The Answer and not getting it.
2. Some of us suggest that in that case it's maybe time to do something different, to analyze less, to rely on others less, to stop looking for an answer that will never be found outside your own self, and to trust your own story instincts.
3. You reply that yes, you know you have a problem. You're going to analyze more, read more, submit more and maybe just maybe one day find the answer.

Please, SF, I'm not trying to patronise you or make light of your difficulties in any way. On the contrary, I'm trying to suggest you know the answer better than any of us. But if somebody with the experience and serious publishing clout of CeCe took the time to advise me like this:

I dunno, but it sounds to me like you've been analyzing too much, that you're too focused on the writing and not enough on the storytelling.
I know I'm repeating myself, but that's honestly how it sounds to me.

Click to expand...

I'd personally be inclined to listen.

Best of luck, whichever way you go,

Louise

Okay, I read your Ants story. And now I understand exactly what your problem is: you have a definite fear of ants.

And furthermore, you need to take up cooking and singing to fix that problem (see previous posts in this thread).

Yes, she does.

There are people on AW who tell me in confidence who they really are, and they're Names with a capital N.

She's also good for PMs about James Purefoy, but I'm not sure that would interest you.