If you could go back to when you first began to write...

[Tiana Calthye]

If you could go back in time and tell yourself, when you first started writing something, what would it be?

 

I would've told 13 year old me to not be ashamed of writing (specifically fantasy and sci-fi). I would have told her that, not to worry, only with practice will you get better and only with criticism will you learn to see the flaws and the diamonds in the story... because I know that she only ever saw her stories as AWFUL or as AMAZING. I would've told her that the only way to grow was to write more than one type of story, and that sometimes writing hurt.

 

I would have told her that her writing would grow with her and to keep on trucking on, because only by practice could she become what she is at 21.

 

Also I would tell her that it's spelt metal with a t, damnit.

 

What would you tell yourself?

[Raynuk Montar]

I would have told myself, "You are the one who knows this character best. This character is an extension of yourself, trust your gut, trust what you feel. Make the emotions real, and your readers will feel them too"

 

That and "Spell check is good. Grammar check is better"

[Tiana Calthye]

Though grammar check makes some mistakes. For example, if you write...

 

"Go back!" shouted Gandalf... grammar check will correct it to...

 

"Go back!" Shouted Gandalf.

 

I see this capitalization error a lot, because people leave grammar auto-correct on.

[Raynuk Montar]

Well, its not that really. For me its more so that I'll be writing, and then the little green squiggly will appear and I'll go back and re-read it, and see if its really how it should sound grammatically. Im smart enough to know not to trust grammar and spell check like the words of god

[Pinckz]

That is an error? Weird.

 

Still, if I were to go back to the first time I started writing I would tell myself to:

 

a) stop using so may god damned ellipses.

 

and

 

b) stop writing in mixed perspectives and tenses.

 

Other then that I still make a whole bunch of mistakes and have quite a ways to go if I want to be a real grammar Nazi. However, I honestly don't care too terribly much in the scheme of things when I am writing for myself, because I don't really care if it is out of line grammatically if it is purely for my enjoyment.

[Lord Ar-Pharazon]

I'd remind myself to be concise. I never seemed to care about how wordy things were back in high school and into college. I would probably say that I actually thought wordy was better. I took an editing class in college that helped me see just how exhaustive some of my sentences were. It was mainly for writing papers and essays though. I've been working over the past few years to decrease my word counts in more casual writing projects. A lot of my bad writing habits come from my academic background, where in political journals and legal documents, you see frequent flowery language or various terms of art.

[Amidala Skywalker]

I'd tell myself to relax and take my time with the story. My early stuff is SO rushed. I needed to just slow down and flesh everything out. Also, I would tell myself to focus on character development and not so much on action only. A good balance is key!

 

Finally, I'd tell myself to appreciate more all the good reviews I got, because it amazes me when I go back now and see how horrid my writing was but how nice everyone was about it!

[Chosen One Ephant Mon]

I have to echo LAP's sentiment. I haven't been at the creative stuff for very long but within this past year I've learned a valuable lesson that originated with argumentative/analytical writing and that I've tried to carry over to (or at least be more conscious of in) fiction writing as well.

 

I took a class last year with a professor who worshipped Strunk & White. I'm only barely joking. It was a computer science class (of all things) and I expected to take it as an easy credit, but it became apparent very quickly that the professor had a deep concern for writing quality and a serious love for classic literature. And that was our style guide for the course. The regular assignments were simple (a handful of 300 word summaries of the arguments of the authors we read), but when we got them back he would tear them apart. He would ink them up until they were practically rewritten: substituting our word choices for his, even though they were virtual synonyms, because one carried a more fitting connotation; rearranging syntax to eliminate any and all extraneous words; and flagging even the slightest ambiguity or underdeveloped idea. And on the day we received them back, he would distribute a multi-page list of "don'ts," all of them examples drawn right from our papers (anonymously, at least), and go through line by line criticizing what was wrong with each one. He railed against against specific cliches, bloated words or phrases that should (to his mind) never be used, and needlessly wordy constructions that meander to the point. Often he'd suggest a shorter word just because it saved a syllable.

 

Naturally, I thought he was a pretentious douchebag. I think everyone did. It was a head-banging experience to endure his fascistic constrictions on language and simplifications that seemed bent on eliminating voice all together. For someone who prided himself on his writing, getting back one-page assignments with revisional overhauls was both frustrating and a bit of an ego bruise.

 

It wasn't until after the class that I saw that, generally, he was right. My writing wasn't bad but I had many tendencies I performed almost unthinkingly. I had come to embrace "wordy sophistication" as my style and had never been much of an editor. What I needed was to go back to the basics and discover the value of brevity. And when I began to realize it, I noticed that in great writing, long-windedness is the exception rather than the norm.

 

I didn't agree with all his opinions, and I still don't. And he was still kind of a douchebag. But his philosophy is something I've adopted for when I write. I needed to be knocked down a peg or two to fortify the foundation if I was ever going to climb up to the next level. I'm still nowhere near where I would like to be. I still indulge in lofty language, almost surely to a fault. But now I am mindful to consider the function of just about every word to decide whether its presence is necessary or whether the idea can be stated more sharply. I think it's helped me avoid trite metaphors by trying out new ones, as well as make everything crisper in general. The lesson is one I wish I would have learned (or would have allowed myself to hear) a long time ago, but I am thankful to have learned it, even in "tough love" manner in which I did.

[DarthBrendo]

I'd go back and tell myself not to think to far ahead, not to worry about the plan of the story, but just to write was flowing out as it came out and go back and edit later. That's what beta readers are for. I'd also tell myself to experiment more with different styles, and to stop worrying so much about grammar and punctuation on the first draft.