Mar 2023
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powerplantanimations
Mar '23
darthmongoose

OOF yeah I can relate with the human dialogue thingy. THAT took me FOREVER to get that down especially since I barely go out. The funny thing is, my MOM is the person who fixed this problem.

She watches reality shows NON-STOP and most of them devolve into social experiments. I was thinking about making a thread like this, and 90 Day Fiance is the one that I was going to recommend people because you get some of the craziest lines. Same with Housewives. I WANNA share my favorite Housewives clip, but what the lady said was just so messed-up you have to be REAL ANGRY to come up with something like that.

Impractical Jokers is another good one too where these four people compete to embarrass each other in public. The people in the background are the REAL stars. Just seeing their reactions and how they differ. Some turn out to be angry (no surprise there), but then you get some of the biggest curveballs ever. This one guy wouldn't stop smiling for example after being pranked, but then he threatened to call the cops and flipped to the point where producers had a difficult time explaining it was a joke. It's just a gold mine lol.

marnieed92
Mar '23

Dialogue is one flaw. I try to make it sound natural but it doesn’t always sound that way, and most of my chapters either have too much dialogue or hardly any :sweat_smile:

Another thing is describing stuff like places, people, or anything else. I can picture what they look like in my mind but when it comes to writing it down I struggle with it a lot :’) and probably the overuse of pronouns in sentences.

powerplantanimations
Mar '23
Surihpas

Yeah I have a relative who's trying to get down visual descriptions too. I DO recommend music though. That helped me paint the scene (although, whenever I recommend this, I tell people not to do orchestra or anime music).

@faisalhussein394 I will say exposition isn't a bad thing. Araki does it really well and he gets really wordy. Even in the middle of battles... but only because he always finds absurd ways to drop it.

cherrystark
Mar '23
Lensing

For me, clothes give insight into the character. I "default" to having all my characters wearing jeans and a t-shirt. That's a "basic" outfit today. I don't need to go into more detail because it's safe to assume people are also wearing things like underwear and shoes (though you have to question in romances :wink:)

Unless the characters are complaining about their impractical footwear or something like that. I don't think it's important. But like you said, if they're wearing something completely off the wall that makes them stand out, tell me about it. I want to see their outfit in my head.

harlan
Mar '23

Too many sentences that are too long, with multiple clauses and commas like they're going out of style and I have to use them all up now! Writing in a (hopefully) more terse voice for Ef Noir is a constant challenge.

I might overdo descriptions a little because of my love of history. Why yes, this dialogue does have to take place in a roman era public restroom complete with water buckets with sponges on sticks for wiping after defecation. :grin:

cherrystark
Mar '23
marnieed92

Dialogue can definitely be a place where doubt creeps in. I feel safe in assuming that you know exactly what each of your characters is supposed to sound like in your head. Write what's natural to them. If it means a lot of "yeah... umm... uh..." that's fine. If you listen to human speech a lot of speech is nonsensical. We invent different slang and shorthand to fit into our daily lives. So "realistic" and "natural" sounding dialogue might not always sound natural and realistic. But it could be perfectly natural for the character.

*Carl Reiner was probably the best writer at writing natural sounding dialogue. He would listen to each actor's natural speech pattern and then write their dialogue to be natural to them.

DokiDokiTsuna
Mar '23

I agree with this wholeheartedly, and it's always made me lowkey self-conscious as a writer that I'm the only person I know who does this. ^^;

Like, I use a lot of ellipses and 'um' and 'oh' and 'like' all the time, because...I mean, that's how normal people tend to sound when they talk. For everyone in a book to "Say exactly what they mean in clear efficient words. Period." is really weird and immersion-breaking to me...it's a constant reminder that I am, in fact, Reading a Novel, instead of simply experiencing a story.

And I kinda think maybe a lot of writers would struggle less with dialogue if they allowed themselves to let characters sound like people, instead of always saying something "quotation-worthy". There's a time and a place for the zingers and the poetry; when you make characters talk like that all the time they just sound artificial.

Anyway, my own biggest writing flaw is (fittingly) making characters talk too much. ^^; I love dialogue; I love to just sit and watch characters converse in my head and write everything down. I don't even mind large group discussions, especially when the characters know each other fairly well and everything flows naturally.
Unfortunately, the longer I go on letting them talk, the further they tend to go off topic. ⚆u⚆; Every time I set up a long conversational scene, I look forward to it, but the work of constructing it is usually weeks of revising and re-revising to get rid of cute, fun lines that don't actually make sense, or deliver the wrong message about the character, or take the convo in the wrong direction, etc.
And it's very painful...to the point where sometimes I weaken and just leave in a line I really like even if it's not particularly "right" for the scene. It's fine...no one will know......

Whaaaa, is that true?? I feel like it would explain a lot about why I enjoy his TV writing so much. ^^
Tbh I find myself doing the same thing with my voice actors...more and more often I imagine their voices when I write instead of the "anime dub" voices I usually use, and tailor their lines accordingly~

cherrystark
Mar '23

Yeah! I heard it on a documentary or a video commentary about the Dick Van Dyke show. The actors were all pros so he trusted a lot of their choices. I remember that the actor who played Buddy had a very particular way of speaking so he learned how to write to how the actor spoke.

Even if you didn't know his writing style, if you listen, all of the dialogue sounds "normal". Like you could easily perform the script in the 21st century and not tell the difference. Compared to other shows of the era, they sound very... theatrical? They sound very staged and phony

darryljoll14
Mar '23

One of my biggest writing flaws in writing is advancing the plot. I pour way too much on chapter 1 and it left me on a massive writer's block.

JaveCraze
Mar '23

I hate keeping scenes up because whenever I see them a day or an hour later it feels cringeworthy to me, so I delete it or edit it.. I don't really get a lot of stories done because of this. I guess I'm also not that good at writing more grounded stories, too.

Mallory
Mar '23

I am WAAY too verbose on the sentence level (and less so on a paragraph level). Like, I don't think it's terrible per se, but my scenes go on for just a little too long with just a little too much detail. I think I can definitely shrink my writing to about 60-70% of its current length and keep the same content (character/world-building and plot) in a much more succinct package.

Emalie
Mar '23

Being repetitive has happened to me a lot and the other thing is that sometimes I overlook important details of a certain scene. :neutral_face:

CandyDaisies
Mar '23
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hakei
Mar '23

Being unclear: I've gotten this feedback since my school essay writing days but somethings that I think are clear as day are apparently unclear from the reader's POV.

Talking scenes drag on in one stationary scenery: I've been trying to be better about this ever since I watched a youtube video addressing this sort of writing issue but sometimes when I'm pressed for time and/or are tired, I do fall back to it.

Ordinaryaverageguy
Mar '23

Too many sentences (in the draft at least) are long, complex monsters that need to be cut down to size.

thepenmonster
Mar '23

What’s Your Writing Flaw?

My scripts are so fire the smoke detector keeps going off and waking everyone up.

Illo
Mar '23

For mine I think is the flow of a story and how good the reader can understand!
If I could draw I would surely do comics because I like reading them and I like the story-telling of comics but since I'm untalented I ended up writing light-novels

Sometimes I feel like I can't deliver a scene I imagine in my head the way I want and probably ruin the scene and for other times I don't know how to smoothly change the scene, I have been writing for a year now and I can tell my skill has greatly improved from the start but I can still see the flaws and always trying to get better