Forums » RP Discussion » Best Writing Advice Ever?

What has been the best writing advice you have ever been given/found? Where'd it come from?

Mine has been from, fittingly, my college Intro Into Creative Writing class. It has been the concept of "Down drafts" or drafts where you're writing JUST to get the idea down. Whatever needs to happen to get the idea down as quickly as possible is what happens. If the dialogue needs to be boiled down to childish, bland statements, then that's what happens! Then, you just update it in the "Up draft" where you go through and work on what needs to be fixed. It's been really helpful for plowing through writers block! Nothing has to be presentable, or even entirely coherent, at first swipe, it just has to be on the page and out of your head!

Oh! Also the idea that if you get a weird roadblock in a story or paragraph, the issue probably isn't in the last few sentences! Go back earlier on the writing and straighten out anything that's not sitting well with you. It gets a lot easier to find these knots and sort 'em out with practice! I think that came from a tumblr post haha.

Second grade. How to angle the paper and hold the pencil, and the encouragement to write freely one’s thoughts. Miss Schmidt was a jewel of a teacher. It was sad she died so young.

As for your Folkloric tips here, we called them ‘rough draft’, ‘smoothing draft’, and ‘final draft’. As far as online forum collaborative roleplay writing, I owe a lot to some awesome people who I wrote with in the ‘Shadow Over Arnor’ story on the One Ring.

I find a lot of my ‘mental blocks’ in roleplay replies stems from a lack of inspiration in the story. It may change after I go and write something else and come back to it. The tendency to overthink seems to trip me up at times.

Rough Draft was always something that was really formalized to me, likely in part because the Rough Draft was right before the Final Draft in every essay-writing class I was in, and I could never find the time to get seeminglu two different drafts together as an essay writer. The concept of "down draft" distinguishing that for me has been so freeing!

Not the be-all-end-all, but the little This sentence has five words thing that went around was pretty good bang for its buck.

Beginnings are hard. They tend to frame or set up whatever comes next.

Whether it's the first paragraph or just the first sentence, if you feel stuck on the beginning, write the middle or the end first! Then go back and fill in the beginning.

Exactly! A lot of popular novels have started off as random paragraphs and little stories!

"If I had more time I would have written less." -Mark Twain

More isn't always better, often it's just more.

My own personal advice on getting through a writer's block, especially when starting something new is just to force it with clichee starters

Like, Once upon time or "It was stormy night"

Hilariously enough, few of these starters had ended up in some of my essays back in schooldays.

Sooner you stop writing to cater to other people, the better. Too many youngins get concerned with "MY WRITING MUST APPEAL TO EVERYONE!!" and burn themselves out because there's always at least one group that whines about their style. Too long. Too short. Too descriptive. Not descriptive enough. Your writing's purple prose fluff! Your writing's one liner script!!

The happiest I ever was in writing was when I decided to kick my feet up, flip everyone off, and just write whatever dumb crap I wanted to. Turns out other people liked it a lot better that way, too. Insecurity and a people pleasing attitude in regard to writing is palpable; confidence, however, is the most attractive trait you can have as a writer. People don't like it when their potential partner does nothing but talk about how much they don't like their own writing, point out all their own flaws, etc. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy of doom. Someone who talks about how much of a giga chad they are as a writer, though? Hell. Even if they might not live up to those standards, they certainly have my attention...

Any idea can work so long as you have the balls to sell it to someone. Really sell it. I might squint hard at your 'radioactive laser-eyed zombie snail apocalypse' for a few minutes, but if you can show me that you have the guts to try and pull it off, why not give it a go? The opposite also applies - you can have a really good idea, but your lack of confidence kills it.

Stop comparing yourself to others. Stop running your RP reply through grammarly and wordcount 789 times before you send it. Embrace giga chad energy. Tell yourself that you're going to make that god dang radioactive laser-eyed zombie snail apocalypse setting happen, public reception be damned. Slap your half-baked character concept on the table with absolute confidence and roll with it.

PSA: Saturninum advice is not responsible for any consequences, injury, death, or relationship damage that may result after applying this knowledge. Viewer discretion is advised.

Best writing advice anyone has ever given me is: just keep writing. Just keep publishing.

At this point I can't remember the first time I saw it, and it's all over now, but... The reality is that I'm going to feel discouraged. There are going to be people who don't like my work (and there are) and I'm going to not want to continue. The most important thing I can do is to just keep writing and publishing.

I have to second the one about writing things out of order; start with the middle or the end and then fill in the rest. This isn't something I really found anywhere but rather that it started happening naturally as my writing style changed. I'd just answer part of a post that was appealing or inspiring if I was struggling with the task and then come back to tackle the other parts afterward. I also sometimes do a little editing after I've written up a post, moving a few sentences around when I think they might fit better in a different spot.

For reference, I don't normally do much of any editing--more often than not my posts are written start to finish. I don't normally proofread either, though I probably should.

Oh my gosh, now I want to write this! So much! Thank you for that.

I got mine in high school.

'Is this the most interesting moment in your characters life? If not, why aren't you showing us that?'

go 👏 with👏 the 👏 flow
Sometimes, you might be more inspired to work on one thing than another. Accept that that's okay. Writing shouldn't be a job, or a chore. Go with what motivates you, and you're less likely to get caught up on what you "owe". More than once I've put way too many things on my plate, and then nothing gets finished, because I hit the mental roadblock of being so caught up on where to start. That's another thing- there's a ton I want to do, but lately I'm strictly limiting myself to a few passion projects at a time. Things are getting done and burnout is behind me (for now).

I'd also recommend writing for yourself. A little roleplay exercise I started doing was writing "solo posts". These can be anything- an important event in your character's life, or what a regular day looks like for them, or a journal entry, or the character simply being introspective about their recent developments. When I write these solos, they're usually quick, I don't stop to check for typos, and I don't overthink them. I let the story pour out and it's demolished writer's block for me multiple times. Putting down that splurge of creativity, just for my own fun, helps unclog my muse and lets me get back to my collaborative interactions. This can be a great way to get deeper into an OC's mindset, too. You can share them with friends, add them to character profiles, or outright delete them when you're done.

"Writing is not painting a picture with words, it's a contract between an author and their audience."

In regards to me venting to a friend how stressed I get about the thought that, no matter how much I describe a character's appearance, someone will imagine that character incorrectly.

And this is why I don't write anymore.

The author of this might make you think it's a joke, but I've been thinking about it a lot.



Take the cyberpunk genre for example. Quite often, people will paint a portrait of hopelessness. Corporations have taken over, the environment has been catastrophically altered, drugs and violence are rampant. They forget the 'punk' part of the name, and punk is inherently about rebelling against the injustices of the world.

And why are you fighting? It is far easier to give up and accept that this is life and one person cannot make a difference. And what other reason could there be than love? Love for people that the powerful have forgotten or choose to exploit. Love for the friends and family you have watched suffer under the system. Love for the world which has been gutted and destroyed so that a billionaire can make another dollar. Maybe one person can't do enough, but you also can't do nothing because you can't stand watching the people and world around you suffer.

Not to get too off-topic but I came back here to say that Chuck Tingle's account is genuinely one of the most wholesome things I've ever followed, he's probably one of the only things on Twitter that makes it worth using.

Gosh, I love Chuck. I used to be off-put, but having explored his blogs further, he really is just a sweet and unapologetically Neurodiverse writer living his most geniune life. As an ND writer myself, I aspire to be a lot like Chuck Tingle haha

And that's honestly super valid. Writing work to be published is such a labor of love that you're giving to so many people - it comes with a lot of mental energy and unforeseen hiccups. This line is such a good reminder that not every hobby needs to be given up to the world if you don't want it to be.

I think this one is pretty basic but it was important for me to learn and changed everything about how I write. Always think about how your reader is reading the pages, and use that to influence the way you want a scene to be imagined in their head. Like in a tense situation I tend to make the wiring suddenly spastic and jarringly cut, for instance;

He reached for his gun. His heart was warm and felt torn between rather or not he should be ready to kill. As his hand gripped the handle of the pistol, he quickly whipped it out and without another thought, he fired

Isn’t bad, but I prefer writing it like;

He reached for his gun

His heart-it was warm

Torn between the idea of having to kill someone

He has never done it before

Never thought he would.

But soon his hand was upon that pistol and he felt his finger sweat against the trigger and before his body could tell him to do anything else-

Bang.

________


Not the best example maybe but hopefully it shows how being more fluid with how you space and position your words to influence how a reader takes in the information. Don’t think of it as just writing what is happening, think of it as creating art with words, think of what you want the reader to be feeling and use not just good words, but good use of the way their laid out to influence that. There are many rules to writing, and they are very important to learn, but they are also just as important to know when to break.