Help! I Suck at Writing!

Who Vs. Whom: The Unending Saga

Tue, 19 Mar 2013 19:11:55 -0400

…

Still too hard to remember? OK, here’s the quick and dirty tip. Like “whom,” the pronoun “him” ends with “m.” When you’re trying to decide whether to use “who” or “whom,” ask yourself if the answer to the question would be “he” or “him.”

That’s the trick: if you can answer the question being asked with “him,” then use “whom,” and it’s easy to remember because they both end with “m.” For example, if you’re trying to ask, “Who (or whom) do you love?” The answer would be “I love him.” “Him” ends with an “m,” so you know to use “whom.”

But if you are trying to ask, “Who (or whom) stepped on Squiggly?” the answer would be “He stepped on Squiggly.” There’s no “m,” so you know to use “who.”

So that’s the quick and dirty trick: if you can’t remember that you use “whom” when you are referring to the object of the sentence, just remember that “him” equals “whom.”

You Are Not The Next Stephenie Meyer

Tue, 19 Mar 2013 05:43:40 -0400

Haha, a little joke by yours truly there. Let’s face it. You are doing research to become a better writer, and are therefore light years ahead of Stephenie Meyer, even if you’ve not been published. DON’T BITE MY HEAD OFF, YOU SILLY TWIHARDS! IT WAS A JOKE!

Let me preface this post by saying that FanFic is an incredibly important facet of the diamond that is the writing community. FanFic is a way for people to get more personally involved in a story and with characters they’ve already fallen in love with, and that’s great. So, if you love you some FanFic, this isn’t about you.

That being said, you, my friend, are not the next Suzanne Collins. Or the next J.K. Rowling. Or the next Andrew Marlowe (because this applies to screenwriters as well).

Now, this certainly isn’t a dig at you. it doesn’t have anything to do with your writing ability.

My point is this: You have your own story to tell. You are an original. You may love Harry Potter, and that’s wonderful. You may write Harry Potter Fan Fiction, and that is fabulous. You may rewrite Harry Potter with different names and a few plot tweaks, and that is… Not so great.

Which is my point.

We’ve all been inspired by a stellar book we’ve read. I think that’s probably why people begin writing in the first place. And, if we’re all being honest here (and we are… Right?), we’ve probably all read a book we loved and were so inspired by it that we decided to write one. JUST. LIKE. IT.

I’ve done it. Don’t give me those doe eyes. You have, too. Maybe when you were 10 and read the Spy High series (What? No… That’s not a personal allegory…) Maybe last week when you finally got to read Lord of the Rings.

When I was in grade school, we used to get those book order forms. Do you remember those? Do children still get them?

Anyway, I thought I wanted to be a famous singer, so I begged and pleaded until my mom bought me a book about how to sing. Clearly, I was already a firm believer that you can learn anything by reading about it.

The author of this particular book was supposedly some sort of vocal coach for many famous people, and frequently gave lessons to budding vocalists, probably for obscene amounts of money, but that’s not really my point here.

One piece of advice that he gave them, and also wrote in his book, was to listen to your favorite singers and to mimic them. Like a mockingbird. Until you sounded exactly like them. He said that you were supposed to do this with three or four of your favorite artists, and then forget it all and just sing. The theory here was apparently that you would become a hybrid of the different voices, breaking out of your chrysalis with your very own style and blowing everyone all the way to Neptune with your vocal awesomeness.

I think that this can also apply to great writing, and although most of the time it’s through reading and reading and reading some more, sometimes it ends up being through mimicking your favorite author.

But. A big but here. That is not your masterpiece. That’s just practice until you’re confident and you can throw your mimicry away and break out of your chrysalis and blow everyone all the way to Neptune with your writerly awesomeness.

Which kind of puts said writing on the same level as a first draft, e.g., not publishing material.

This isn’t to say that you can’t write a wonderful fantasy novel about looking for something in an exotic land full of strange little creatures. It just means that you probably shouldn’t be rewriting Lord of the Rings as King of the Beans. That’s an injustice to J. R. R. Tolkien, and, more importantly, and injustice to YOU.

Character Sketches?

Tue, 20 Mar 2012 21:44:11 -0400

This isn’t really an informative post as such. I’m just wondering, does anyone use character sketches when writing stories? Feel free to share your reasons why/why not, and if you do use them, some favourites.

Careers for Your Characters: A Writer's Guide to 101 Professions from Architect to Zookeeper

Wed, 14 Mar 2012 19:22:00 -0400

Careers for Your Characters: A Writer's Guide to 101 Professions from Architect to Zookeeper:

kaylamariebooks:

To create realistic, well-developed characters, you have to write with authority. Careers for Your Characters enables you to describe their professional lives with the accuracy and detail of an insider. Raymond Obstfeld and Franz Neumann share the hard-to-find specifics for 101 intriguing occupations. You’ll learn: Professional jargon and buzz words. Education requirements. Salaries, benefits, perks, and expenses. Each profession’s average daily schedule. How the reality of a particular job differs from public perception. Publications and Web sites to aid in further research. You’ll save research time and write with confidence while maximizing the depth and authenticity of every character you create.

"Have something to say, and say it as clearly as you can. That is the only secret."

Sun, 11 Mar 2012 21:47:54 -0400

“Have something to say, and say it as clearly as you can. That is the only secret.”

- Matthew Arnold

10 Words You Need to Stop Misspelling.

Sat, 10 Mar 2012 03:27:53 -0500

10 Words You Need to Stop Misspelling.

For Wyanet's Sake! Don't Name Him Arkadiy.

Thu, 08 Mar 2012 20:04:12 -0500

Alright class, today we’re talking about…

Character Names

The post title was kind of an extreme example. To be fair, I’ve not (yet?) seen a writer name any character Wyanet or Arkadiy. But I have seen some absolutely ridiculous names. I can relate somewhat. As an author, you want your character to be memorable and unique, and what better way to do that than with a really unique and unheard of character name? Unfortunately, this is really faulty logic.

Imagine you pick up a novel at a book store. It has a promising title, a nice cover, and man does that first paragraph have you hooked! Then you see the character’s name. You just stare at that jumble of letters wondering how exactly you’re supposed to pronounce it. That is when you lay the book back down because you can’t stand the thought of 800 pages of trying to work out just what that name is supposed to be.

Or maybe that’s not the problem. Maybe you can pronounce it but it’s so cliché. The hero’s name is Jack or Jason and his counterpart is some other overused name. Or maybe the writer was really inspired by another book. So inspired, in fact, that they decided to name their characters after the characters from that book.

Character names can really play a very large role in your story, so it’s important to get them right.

Solution:

Make sure the character’s name is age appropriate. Say your story is set in the present, and you make your 22 year old female protagonist’s name Ava. It’s possible that her parents would’ve named her that in 1990, but it’s much more probable they would’ve named her something like Lauren or Samantha. A great resource for looking at name popularity by year is the Social Security department’s list of popular baby names.
Stay away from soap opera-esque romance names when writing romance and super spacey sounding names for sci-fi characters. In the 70’s and the 80’s, names like Ruark Beauchamp and Alaina MacGaren ran rampant in romance novels. Now, they’re laughable. You want your characters to be relatable. Not sound like they walked out of a second rate telenovela. Conversely, Zyxnrid would be a bad choice for your sci-fi character, unless they’re really from Mars. You want something that’s not over the top in either direction.
Try to avoid naming your character a really painfully overused name. For instance, Jack. I pick that because Jack is a really masculine sounding name, and is therefore overused as a hero’s name. When I was younger I liked to overuse Jason or James, and I’m sure you can think of some names that are just entirely too popular.
Don’t be pick an already legendary or iconic name. Ones that come to mind include Adolf, Scarlett, and in modern literature, Harry, Bella, and Edward.

Do you have any more advice? Or maybe a name that made you cringe and/or put down the story when you saw it?

Unlike a Post Title, Proofreading is NOT Optional.

Wed, 07 Mar 2012 18:09:00 -0500

So here we are. The first real post on Help! I Suck at Writing! And this is one of my personal favourite topics.

Proofreading & Editing.

There is definitely a time to turn your inner editor off and just let the words flow out. And while I seem to be quite literally incapable of such a wonderful release, it is necessary. It gets your creative juices flowing and your ideas on paper. And let’s all face it, a first draft isn’t going to be Dickens quality work. It’s not supposed to be.

Which is why you don’t publish your first draft, even on writing community websites. You read over it, feel like a dyslexic first grader, realise that you spelt the word ‘guess’ wrong in three places, wonder why on earth you used the word ‘guess’ three times in the first place, and then you change pretty much everything about your first draft. It’s a time honoured process. A time honoured process which, apparently, many unpublished (and maybe some published?) writers have collectively decided to skip. The real problem here isn’t even that it makes the author look really unprofessional and careless. The problem is that it pretty much drops a bajillion pound anchor off the side of the readers’ focus boat. Seriously. It brutally murders the flow of the story and the readers’ concentration on the actual plot line.

Solution:

I personally have gotten some really great advice in this area, so I thought I’d share it with you.

When going over my own work, I’ve noticed that I’m roughly 100% more likely to notice a spelling/grammar mistake if I read my work out loud. I’m not sure why this is, and maybe it doesn’t work for some people, but I think it’s definitely worth a shot.
Spell check only goes so far. You can depend on them to catch really blatant errors, but much like my iPhone’s autocorrect, it doesn’t always know what you’re trying to say. So even if you’ve got your spell check’s sensitivity on high (can you change that?), it’s still really, really, REALLY important to read through and proof it yourself.
Don’t try to proof everything at once. Trying to check spelling, grammar, verb tense, extra spaces, the list goes on, all at once is really overwhelming. Read through it once and try to only focus on making sure everything’s spelt right. Then read through a second time for grammar. Then read through for verb tense errors. You get the point.
Keep yourself refreshed on grammar rules. I know it’s boring, but it’s really important for producing quality work.

So, let’s collaborate here. What proofreading/editing advice would you add to this list?

"From my close observation of writers, they fall into two groups: 1) those who bleed copiously and..."

Wed, 07 Mar 2012 01:13:50 -0500

“

From my close observation of writers, they fall into two groups:

1) those who bleed copiously and visibly at any bad review, and

2) those who bleed copiously and secretly at any bad review.

”

- Isaac Asimov

Hello, and a most emphatic welcome to Help! I Suck at Writing! I thought I would give you a sort of...

Wed, 07 Mar 2012 01:09:54 -0500

Hello, and a most emphatic welcome to Help! I Suck at Writing!

I thought I would give you a sort of overview as to what I intend to do here, mostly because I haven’t chosen my first topic yet.

See, I’m a member of one of the tens of online writing communities who dedicate themselves to putting their writing out there and getting feedback on it, and so feedback I shall give. Not by name, of course. That would (in some cases) be cruel. But I’ve noticed from reading a pretty good amount of pieces on said website that there’s some things that, as a community, we need to work on. So that’s what I’m going to do. Everything from proper spelling to overused story lines to ridiculous character names and beyond will get covered at some point.

Most of the time, it will be sarcastic and humorous. If you’re overly sensitive or don’t have a sense of humour, I suggest looking elsewhere for writing advice.

Don’t say I didn’t warn you.