(Miko loses it completely and just rambles on forever and ever)


If I remember

correctly, my total number of responses was around 5.  I was a little

miffed

at first, but then was pleased with it (hey, it meant at least

*someone* had

read my stuff).

Not too surprising.  If you have a good idea, even if you don't
necessarily do it well, you will get more responses.  Some of my stories
have recieved virtually no response, but others, even ones I didn't
think were that well done, struck a chord with people.  The thing to
remember is that, for every person who responds, about a dozen others
read it but didn't say anything.  (and I'm pulling that numer out of my
hat, but let's face it, if there are 1,200 people on here, more than
five probably read your story!)

I found many fics that I probably would have C&C'ed, but I was afraid

that

nobody would really take a 14-year old no-name seriously, so I dug

myself

deeper.

Every writer wants to get feedback, as long as it's not of the "you
suck!" variety.  It takes a long time to have any confidence in your own
opinions, I guess.

Fics passed, and I greedily took any helpful hints on writing

Hints on writing?

Well, as someone who, I guarantee, was not nearly as good an author as
you when I was 14 (I was awful!), and who's had to struggle a long time
to learn how to write, and who doesn't necessarily know how he does it
even today, here's a long rambling reply:

Everyone approaches writing differently, but my first and biggest
suggestion is to WRITE, even if it's only to jot notes and ideas down.
Usually I write my ideas down, run them through my head, and the
conversations between characters begin to appear, and I write those
down.  A lot of times I write dialogue and short notes to describe
what's going on, and later I come back and try to polish it up into an
actual scene.  I try to set the scene by describing where it's taking
place; I try to find ways to introduce and describe the characters if
they haven't already been introduced/described earlier, and I try to
come up with some colorful ways of describing things that can provide a
more immediate impact.

Write down phrases that you like, from other fanfic authors or just
other authors in general.  It helps to cultivate a reading list that
includes some really talented authors, and to pay attention to how they
construct sentences, and the phrases that they use.  Don't be afraid to
steal ideas outright, but also try to imitate the style of a phrase or
description, using words of your own.  Anyway, those are all things that
I've tried to do to improve my descriptive writing skills.  I've never
had a problem with dialogue, but description is hard for me for some
reason.

Ukyo Kuonji recently used a phrase that I liked... "as busy as a
one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest."  ^_^  Made me laugh, so I
remembered it.  One of my favorite authors is Terry Pratchett.  If I
could ever learn to be that funny...  every other phrase of his makes me
laugh!  In his most recent book, Jingo, the Captain of the guard is
reading a report from one of his officers, and there's a line about
"people who treat punctuation like a game of
pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey."  Or something to that effect.  And you know
you've seen people who write like that.  ^_^

Maybe those are not the best two examples of how to describe something.
One of my tricks that I sometimes use is to imagine that I'm in the
location or experiencing whatever it is, and jot down everything I can
see, smell, hear, taste, or feel.  Then I go back and pick a few of them
to add into my story.  The trick is to not give a ton of details, but a
few that are real evocative, and specific... and let the reader fill in
the rest.

So, let's say, you're downtown, on the street.  What's it like on a
downtown street?  I work just South of the Pioneer Square part of
downtown Seattle, the old part of the city (as old as any West Coast
city can be, anyway).  What's it like down there?  Well, it's dirty.
There's paper and trash everywhere.  Bums camp out under the Alaska Way
Viaduct offramp, right in front of the window where I work.  Every day,
the work corrections people come by, usually a half-dozen of them with
orange vests on, and make the homeless people pack up their tents and
bedrolls and clear out.  There's often a cop car with them, and he'll
usually say something on his speaker phone, like "Okay, time to move
out!" just to wake up the ones that are sleeping.

Sometimes I see small birds, looking for crumbs, hopping around the
people sleeping on the street.  How would you write that, to make it a
vivid image?  Maybe you could think of an image to describe the sleeping
people... curled up in blankets, wrapped up in sleeping bags, like small
hills of faded, dirty cloth... or like cairns or barrow-hills, burial
place of the dead (kind of a gruesome image).

The buildings are all made of red brick, faded and worn down from all
the years.  It rains a lot, so there's often pools of muddy water.  The
sidewalks are uneven, cracked and warped, as if after an earthquake --
that's because the whole area was built up by shoving sawdust into a
marsh.  (And this is what the Kingdome is built on?!?)

Smell?  The place is very dusty, because of the viaduct (a double-deck
raised highway, very much like the Nimitz that collapsed in the San
Francisco earthquake a few years ago).  Dust comes off of the viaduct,
and comes from the nearby Port Of Seattle, and it settles on everything
and coats everything.  There are white plastic chairs and a table right
outside the sliding door in our lunch room, but you can't sit on them.
So... you can actually smell the dust, the pollution, and you can smell
the sea, since we're a few hundred feet from Puget Sound, and when you
walk by the onramp you can smell the urine from where the bums have
relieved themselves.

Sounds?  Cars driving by on the onramp.  Seagulls, sometimes.
Jackhammers and blowtorches from a block away, where they're building
the new baseball stadium.  The honk of the "junk truck"/deli truck as it
pulls up outside, a sort of high "beep-beep" that you learn to recognize
if you don't routinely eat breakfast.  Occasional sirens.  Once, one of
the street people decided to sing at the top of his lungs, some sort of
spiritual or modern folk song, it sounded like.  I couldn't really hear
the words, just the singing, and he sounded like he was enjoying
himself, even if he was living under an offramp.  I also heard a strange
crashing/crunching sound just today, and I couldn't tell what it was
until I looked out the window.  Someone was collecting pop cans and
stomping on them to crush them.

>From all of that, you can tell I work in a pretty lousy part of the
city.  (Well... until we move in two weeks, anyway ^_^).  But if I were
to write a story where someone walked down a street like where I work,
I'd reduce all of that to two or three sentences, keeping what I thought
were the best images to give to the reader a sense of what the place was
like.

The point is, take some time to write down the sights and sounds and
smells of things around you.  (and taste and touch, if those apply).
It's a good exercise, and it gets you to thinking about how to describe
things, and how to set a scene.  Using senses other than sight will
usually help a lot -- painting a visual picture is the first thing every
writer does when describing a scene, but adding a sharp sound or smell
or an unusual texture will add dimension to your description.

Specific details and specific images are always best, though.  Saying
the street is full of litter is one thing, but describing a particular
piece of litter can paint a more vivid picture.  For example, the other
day, as I was walking to my car, I saw an empty pampers bag, white
plastic with a purple logo on it, curled up against our parkinglot
fence, where the wind had trapped it.  It was a very odd image, but it
gives you an idea of the kind of trash strewn about the place.

Another exercise that I try to do on occasion is to think of descriptive
phrases to help bring an image into sharp focus.  Is the object red?
How red?  What kind of red?  Red as a rose?  That's one of the oldest
cliches in the book, and it probably doesn't spark a vivid image in the
reader's mind.  Try writing "Red as" or "Red like" or Red the color of"
and come up with a dozen different descriptions, just as an exercise.
Unusual, startling, or jarring images are often best, as long as they
spark the imagination.  (and here I show how really bad I am at this --
but really, I'm picking a difficult one, all the obvious choices are
cliches -- but the trick is to write down everything you think of, and
then decide if any of it is any good, or what you want).  Red as a
boiled lobster.  Red as a fire engine.  Red as fire.  Red as an apple.
Red as an Arizona sunset.  Red as the Chinese flag.  Dark red, the color
of drying blood.  A dull, faded red, like a worn brick building.  A
bright red, like fresh lipstick, or the flash of a policeman's warning
lights.  The bright red of Christmas lights, or the soft, warm red of
Santa's coat.  Red stains like those from crushed rasberries.  A bright
red, like a sea of brake lights on an overcrowded freeway.  A faded
pink, like that of a kitten's tongue.  Glowing red eyes, like those
reflected in a bad photograph.  Dark red blood, running down his arm
like thick wine or spilled paint.  Stopsign red.  Coca-cola red.

But enough of my rambling.

Those comments killed my meager little ego.  All I'm saying

is please be nice with your C&C.  You can't all expect for us to be

perfect

writers.  People join this ML to become better; shooting down their

dreams

isn't a good way to do that.

Nobody is a perfect writer, and negative comments, even those delivered
in the most positive way, can still depress you, because as a general
rule nobody likes to admit that something they just created might be
flawed.  You can become a lot more objective and a lot less sensitive,
with a lot of work, but you'll never be perfectly objective and
completely insensitive.  But, of course, if nobody ever tells you what
you're doing wrong, or what you might do better, you'll never
improve....

Whew!!!  That was tiring!!  I'm not very good at writing serious

stuff... it's

too boring.  >�  If you're reading this, that means you didn't delete

this

mail and you actually sat through my whole rant.  Good for you!!!!

(Wow...

people are actually reading my stuff!!!  This is soooo cool!!!  *-*)

Ja ne!

~An-chan

Well, I wouldn't call that a full-blown, first-class rant.  Maybe you
just need time to become more cynical and bitter.  ^_^


Just kidding!



(That's a joke, ah say!  A joke!  Don't you get it?  Ah say, you're
about as sharp as a sack full of wet mice...)