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You probably still suck — at least a little bit – as a writer.
It’s okay! It’s totally not your fault! Just because the last sentence of your latest masterpiece just so happens to be “Muhgruh nubblub guhpuhmuhfnnn!” isn’t because of anything you did. Just because your characters are all mitten-handed, soft-headed woodcut facsimiles of popular 1980s action movie characters — hey, you couldn’t help that. Just because you plainly believe yourself to be one of the Black Eyed Peas and insert periods and other punctuation inside words and proper names, hey, what’s a writer gonna do? That’s not your fault. That’s will.i.am’s fault. Totally.
…oh, wait. Wait a minute.
Yes it is. It is your fault. I see what you did there. I see how you tried to slip the noose. Clever monkey. Trying to escape persecution! So cute. So cute. And doomed to failure. Stop hooting. I said, stop it.
Every writer sucks at least a little bit. (And let’s not pretend — some of you suck a whole lot. Your suction is so strong, you could siphon a grizzly bear skull straight out his big bear butthole. Fwoomp.)
I know I suck as a writer. Not always. Hopefully not often. But it’s in there — lurking veins black as road tar, manuscript sometimes shot through with them. A smell like rot wafting off the pages.
Whaddya gonna do? Well, you can sit there and slap your nuts around like it’s a speed bag, or you can join me on a wild-eyed, howl-mouthed journey — a pilgrimage to the deepest, blackest heart of Why You Probably Still Suck As A Writer. Ready? Let’s do this.
In no particular order…
You Don’t Know What Words Mean
Learn a word, or don’t use it. Sometimes, this falls to common misuse (affect/effect, nonplussed, moot, further/farther). The book is not “entitled” anything, unless the book is due some favor. “Appraise” means assess, “apprise” means inform. The parts “compose” the whole, the whole “comprises” the parts — if you ever write the words “comprised of,” you should have your teeth removed by an angry robot. “Titular” has nothing to do with a woman’s sweater monkeys. And so on. Some writers get trapped in a cycle of randomly believing the wrong definition for words, too, words that fall outside common misuse. In which case you get to quote The Princess Bride at them: “I do not think that word means what you think it means.”
You Are The Slave, The Comma Is Your Mistress
Someone once told you, “The comma is where the speaker pauses in the sentence,” and while that’s not automatically untrue, that person did you an unholy host of favors by oversimplifying comma use. Stop throwing random commas into sentences. Stop it right now. The comma has its stiletto heel pinning your pink parts to the floor. It burns your thigh with cigarettes. Stop being the comma’s gimp. Also, comma splices — where you use a comma instead of a period to connect two independent clauses — make Baby Jesus kill a bunch of motherfuckers with an AK-47. While we’re at it, beware overusing any form of punctuation: semi-colons, colons, emdashes. I know your pain. But quit that shit.
Say It With Me: Subject-Verb Agreement
The subject (the primary noun that does shit in the sentence) needs to hold hands and go skipping tra-la-la through the meadow with the verb. Singular nouns like singular verbs. So too with plural nouns and plural verbs. He is punching a goat. She is eating a melon. He and she are fornicating under a dirty blanket.
While We’re At It, Stop Screwing With Pronoun-Antecedent Agreement, Too
Everyone is entitled to their own writing style, as long as that writing style doesn’t stick “everyone” and “their” in the same goddamn sentence like I just did. Everyone is singular. Same with he/she. Their and they is plural. Everyone is entitled to his own writing style. Or her own writing style.
You’re American, So Put The Punctuation Inside The Quote Marks
Says it all, doesn’t it? “Baby Jesus shot all those people with that gun,” the woman said. “He shot ‘em real good.” See the punctuation? They live inside the quotation marks. That’s where they’re comfy.
The Sentence Is The Rope With Which You Will Hang Yourself
Run-on sentences chafe the balls, as do sentence fragments. Too many independent clauses: run-on. No independent clauses: sentence fragment.
Your Work Is Destroyed By Passive Voice
See what I did there? Rewrite: “Passive voice destroys your work.” Active sentences rule. Passive sentences drool.
Any Sentence That Begins With “It” Or “There” Should Be Interrogated (And Possibly Shot)
If you start a sentence with “it” or “there,” prepare for it to be a weak-kneed, bow-spined, limp-ass noodle of a sentence. And, if you’re a writer who has written for me in the past, you’ll know my fiery syphilitic rage over the construction “there is.” So blah. So bleargh. So snarrrggh-rage-kickpunch-bite-bite-stab.
Your Writing Is Like That Mumbling Hobo On The Midnight Bus
Your work has no clarity. It’s awkward. The reader doesn’t know what you mean. You lose clarity in both idea and execution. You probably don’t read your work aloud, do you? Writing is about communication. If you are not communicating clearly, then you’re sucking hind tit.
You Think Writing Is Only The Stringing Together Of Words
Writers think it’s all just about writing. That the only requirement is the ability to put one word in front of the other until you have about 70,000 of ‘em lined up like kewpie dolls. Writing is just the first part. Do not neglect the narrative. Do not ignore story construction.
The Shape Of The Page Eludes You Like A Slippery Eel Or A Ninja (Or A Slippery Ninja Eel)
Do you look at the page? The shape of the words, the sentences, the staggered contours, the physical rhythm. No. No, you don’t. And that makes you a kaka-poo-poo-doody-head.
You, Unlike The Cylons, Have No Plan
Do you do research? Mind-maps? Outlines? Notes? Character sketches? Arcs? Story bibles? Character bibles? Do you ask what this is about? Do you know why you’re writing this? Do you do nothing but free yourself and write? Then you write without a plan. You write without a safety net. Your first draft is probably going to eat curb. It does not matter how you plan, only that you do plan.
You Are Slave To Goblins And Unicorns
Writer’s block is a ghost. The Muse is an illusion. Neither of these things have substance and gain shape only by the life you breathe into them. Dispel such specters and own your authorial destiny.
You Think You’re So Super Special
You read advice, you read the thoughts of other writers, and you immediately believe that none of it is useful. “I’m just that awesome,” you think. “I have nothing to learn here.” You’re already doomed. You’re also the same guy who writes query or submission letters and doesn’t do what is demanded of you — “I don’t really need to give them the first five pages. I’ll send ‘em the whole manuscript because that’s how they’ll discover my awesomeness. And I know this agent only accepts romance and poetry, but I’m going to send her my epic starfighting space opera about the Moon Squirrels.”
You Think Every Draft Is A No-Net Slam Dunk When Really It Rebounds Off The Backboard And Flies Into The Crowd And Hits A Lady In The Face, Driving Her Nose Into Her Brain And Then She Dies But You Don’t Notice
One draft is not enough. Two probably isn’t either. You know how many drafts you have to do? As many as it takes to stop it from sucking. Three? Thirteen? Thirty? Yes.
Shiny Shiny Shiny Shiny Shiny Oooooh Shiny
Who needs to finish this piece-of-shit manuscript when another shinier one waits in the wings? Stop that. Stop that right now or you’ll grow hair on your palms. Finish what you started. Even if it is as foul and blunt as a bezoar plucked from the colon of a train-struck deer, finish it. Writers are allergic to finishing what they started. Put up with the itching and the sneezing and suck it up.
Holy Shit You’re Boring ZZZZzzzZzz Huh Wuzza Wooza?
Stop writing shit that nobody cares about. Readers are looking for any excuse to escape your awful prose. So don’t let them. Trap them with your brilliance. Ensnare them with interest.
You Break The Rules Because You Just Don’t Know Any Better
You break rules not because you are making a stylistic effort but because you just don’t know the rules to begin with, and that sucks. The first person who stands up and says, “But writing and storytelling aren’t beholden to any rules,” gets his head lopped off by a halberd. No, really. Choppity-chop. Writers have rules. Story construction is shaped by rules. They’re not always good rules. Some rules can be summarily ignored. Some rules must be ignored and reevaluated. But that doesn’t mean they don’t exist. If you don’t know them, then you cannot know why you break them.
You Continue To Enjoy The Poopy Diaper Smell Of Your Own Failure
It is easier and for some more interesting to fail than it is to succeed. Perhaps because conflict drives every story, and writers take that conflict and apply it to their own lives. To fail, then, is to evoke struggle, and to evoke struggle is to net sympathy and maintain interest. Bullshit. Nobody cares. Don’t be another one of the billion asshole nonsense douche-swab writers out there who are content in mediocrity. Learn. Improve. Engage. Read. Write. Take off the diaper. Stop complaining. Stop making excuses. Kick down doors. Blow holes in the earth and crawl through them. Failure might be easy, but it is not interesting. Commit.
That Is Just The Tip Of The Penis Iceberg
This is merely a taste of why you still probably suck as a writer. The truth is, we all suck in some way, shape, or form. That’s a good thing to realize. Hell, you go through this post, you’ll find that I’m probably breaking all these rules somewhere along the way. Sometimes that’s okay. Other times, it’s not. The best we can do is identify the problems. Stay frosty. Keep on our game. Practice. But don’t just practice in a redundant, circling-the-drain manner — practice should be iterative and show improvement.
Your Mission
…should you choose to accept it, is to drop one more “Why You Probably Still Suck As A Writer” reason here in the comments. Just one. Something you do, ideally, or something you’ve noticed others do with some frequency. Let us build a mountain of our possible failures, a mountain that we can ascend, a mountain littered with the corpses of our lessers, a mountain for all of us to conquer.
About The Author
ChuckWendig
Chuck Wendig is equal parts novelist, screenwriter, and game designer. He is the author of the novels DOUBLE DEAD, BLACKBIRDS, and MOCKINGBIRD. In addition, he's got a metric boatload of writing-related e-books available, including the popular 500 WAYS TO BE A BETTER WRITER. He currently lives in the wilds of Pennsyltucky with wife, dog, and newborn progeny.
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I’d like to refer to that part where you say, “You’re American, so put your punctuation inside the quote marks”.
Also, I think run-on sentences, when used correctly, like commas, have their place.
I mean, David Foster Wallace. That is all.
Ahem, to clarify: “You’re probably writing for Americans, so blah blah blah, punctuation inside the blah blah blah.”
– c.
To demonstrate how little YOU suck as a writer, 5 mins ago I wasin dire need of a serious bathroom break, but still had to finish reading this post. I COULD NOT TEAR MYSELF AWAY. And now look at the state of my pants. Bloody hell.
I know that in many many ways I suck as a writer. Perhaps the most worrying is a tendency to write backwards, editing the previous day’s hoo-har instead of forging onwards with new and exciting mistakes. Also, I suspect I’m trying to be too tricksy and clever with the prose instead of just writing a ton of shit. Like spinning around on a unicycle instead of racing ahead on a mountain bike. Kinda thing.
The great secret of writing is understanding you have a hint of suckiness and using it to become better. I reckon. And… always have a change of pants on standby.
Better, Chuckles.
I hope, by the way, you appreciate what I did there.
@Wood:
See the rule that describes how people break rules because they don’t know any better, not out of any stylistic conceit.
DFW broke rules, but we can have little doubt that he knew what he was doing.
Broken rules always have their place. But one should always know that they are breaking them, which necessitates knowing the rules in the first damn place. When amateur writers (to be clear, not you) signal and cite someone like DFW to excuse their own shitty writing, that’s when the problem becomes clear.
– c.
The great secret of writing is understanding you have a hint of suckiness and using it to become better. I reckon. And… always have a change of pants on standby.
Well-said, Oh Checker Of The Divine.
Though, I’ll add that if you were to subscribe to my theory of Not Wearing Pants In The First Place…
– c.
Narrative comes first. You’re writing a story, not poetry. You can fix the god damn words later. That’s what editing is for.
Oh, I suck as a writer because I end my sentences in Prepositions. I also suck as a writer for Random Capitalization Apparently.
@Wood:
What you did there. I see it.
– c.
@Chuck: True, that.
It isn’t just amateurs, of course, who use the breaking of rules to justify that they are bad writers. I read my first book by Clive Barker the other week (I had been led to believe that he was a prose stylist), and oh dear. Oh dear.
But writing and storytelling aren’t beholden to any rules.
Also, you suck because you are trying to hard to make something original instead of making it interesting. Stop trying to be something new. Do something good, first.
When speaking as Yoda, we are, our prose understandable is not. Confuse as poetic, writers do. Close the book, readers respond.
Tis true, I have fallen from the path of no-pants. I will remove them immediately, oh master.
Man do I suck. I spend a lot of time in my second drafts turning periods into commas. And killing sentences that begin with prepositions.
I also suffer from white room syndrome. All my description is added in on revise.
Chuck, have you ever seen the “Private Plane” episode of Blackadder?
Just asking.
Heh. Sweater monkeys.
@Kate- I recently read a piece on ending sentences in prepositions, and the jist was that it’s fine. It provides better flow and sounds more natural. Rearranging a sentence to avoid it often sounds stiff and formal. The one caveat was to never end a sentence in a superfluous preposition, such as, “I know where it’s at.” The “at” is useless since the sentence is preferable as, “I know where it is.”
Please, please. Please. I’m begging you: add something very hateful indeed about verbs and prepositions. This post will be full of lame on-purpose and notonpurpose errors, but I truly hate the use of verbs like “protest” with “for” or “against”. I suck for many reasons, but I do hope that being a lazy-arsed wanker who can’t be bothered to use important explanatory words with verbs like ‘protest’, ‘appeal’ or ‘wank’ isn’t one of them. (Maybe that last one isn’t a good example. Sigh.)
You know, I really didn’t need this today.
Actually, I really really really did need this today, but it still spanked my ass red and raw.
Thanks!
@Julie:
I fix the “sentence ending in prepositions” about half the time. It really depends on which sounds better (or, in some cases, less clunky — though if less clunky is the only choice, it’s often best to find a while new way of writing the sentence).
– c.
@Wood:
Nay.
– c.
@Julie: To quote Winston Churchill (perhaps apocryphally): “Ending a sentence with a preposition is something up with which I will not put.”
I hope youy see what he did there.
@Me: Did I say “perhaps apocryphally”?
Almost certainly apocryphally.
@Julie:
Yeah, I know. This is what I get for trying to poke fun at myself while still half asleep.
@Chuck: Go watch this immediately. That’s an order.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ykDeIt-55k
There’s a song on a Mickey Mouse Clubhouse episode that goes, “We’re looking for Goofy’s hat! But we don’t know where it’s at!” and I want to spew lava and shriek the writers into quivering goo.
Bookmarked, with many a guilty wince.
“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.”
You are Jane Austen’s bitch. Admit it. This is an “it” sentence that’s well executed, justified and good opener.
Oh, and I accept the mission!
“You are stealing from writers who are shit (not as shit as you, I mean, they got published) or ones everybody is stealing already. Steal something new.”
If you steal shit that’s too well known, most people won’t see it as your homage or clever allusion – they’ll just be bored by the same thing they have read over and over again. If you steal bad shit, you will write bad shit. Go read some shit nobody else reads. Steal something original. Fanboys will be like “ooh, but this was already done in a Japanese ligh novel from 1998, that was…”, but everybody else will be “ooh, an honest-to-god witch challenges a guy to prove magic does not exist or she will keep resurrecting and killing his family, never seen that before”.
Okay, maybe with less plagiarism, but what I say stands – you write shit, because you read shit. Garbage in, garbage out, muchacho.
@Marek:
“Garbage in, garbage out,” is as good a writing motto as any.
Also, I’m one of those jerks — and I admit this, I am a jerk — that thinks Jane Austen is really overrated.
In fact, I really dislike that opening sentence.
That being said, keep in mind what writers did, say, 20, 50, 100, 300 years ago is not applicable to what you can and should try to get away with, today. If James Joyce wrote ULYSSES today, someone probably would’ve thrown him in the River Liffey.
I mean, except he wouldn’t have been in Ireland at the time, since his disdain for his home country drove him into exile…
– c.
Chuck, that’s fighting talk.
Don’t diss my homegirl Austen.
I diss because I love.
Except, that’s not true. I don’t love Jane Austen.
You really want fighting words: she was the Danielle Steele of her time.
SUCK IT, AUSTENOPHILES.
… ahem, we’re really getting quite off the point. I’ll write a post one day as to why I fail to appreciate her genius, and you can all throw rocks at my head then.
– c.
I’ve got all that technical stuff down. That’s always been my strong suit. Punctuation, grammar, access to an encyclopedia. All good stuff for me.
I suck as a writer because my prose tends to the positively heliotrope. You know, epic. I really can’t help myself during the writing phase, so I am working on being super aggressive and attentive in the editing phase. Killing my darlings with extreme prejudice. But it’s a struggle.
@Chuck:
“That being said, keep in mind what writers did, say, 20, 50, 100, 300 years ago is not applicable to what you can and should try to get away with, today.”
I would caveat emptor that with “unless you know what you are doing.” Honestly, the clarity of thought, the purposefulness of every detail, the timeless plots – those are the things that make me revisit 19th-20th century works. I mean, most modern Polish books are either trying to be the new Gombrowicz (imagine “Catcher in the Rhye”, but waaaaaay pretentious) or plainly rip-off American books. Oh, and do not get me started with Polish genre fiction – 20 years ago, it was the bomb. Now it’s glorified fanfic.
I’m just going to replace our writer’s guidelines with this, okay? Okay.
Try this one:
Dialog should flow. Actions inform the reader as to who is speaking better than things like “admitted”, “declared” and “put in.” Seriously. “Put in”? Sounds like it belongs in that slashfic you’ve always dreamed of, not publishable prose for which you want to get paid.
That said, there’s nothing wrong with “said”. Said works perfectly fine. But please, do not use it every single freaking time somebody speaks. Said is not dead, despite what your fourth grade English teacher might say, but if you don’t use it sparingly, you will kill it dead. Drowned in the bathtub right next to your darlings. You monster.
Yo!
“That” – biggest overused/missused word out there. I know. I use it a LOT! Has made me a great spotter for others so they can get rid of theirs. Still working to get good enough to get rid of them in mine! (It’s so weird how you can get pretty good at editing other people’s works, yet still be totally blind to your own.
This is all kinds of awesome. I was surprised at how much of what you wrote I already know. Now only if I could remember that shit when it came time to edit my own junk. I’ve bookmarked this as a checklist.
Whoops…almost forgot. Something I do all the time is lose focus of which character is speaking. I’ll reread something and even though I wrote the damn thing, I can’t tell who the speaker is. Dialogue is definitely my weak point. It’s easy to write what you’re thinking but it doesn’t translate to someone who isn’t sharing your brain.
“Shiny Shiny Shiny Shiny Shiny Oooooh Shiny” – Trying real hard not to be guilty of this.
I suck hardcore but keep plowing away at my pile of crap. Soon said pile will graduate to the compost bin and a new pile will be started.
Hopefully I’ll learn from my first pile of crap. =D
Other reasons people suck:
- They won’t let go of their pile of crap and continue to force it onto friends, family, agents, editors.
- When they get rejection after rejection they conclude that no one understands their genius. It’s not because they suck.
I clearly have two paths ahead of me: become a better writer or continue sucking and use my suction to become a bear-assassin.
I suck as a writer because I short-circuit the whole approval process of things. I tend to assume that whatever I write will suck and will be rejected (possibly with howls of derision) and so I simply don’t write. It’s saves a tremendous amount of time for everyone involved but it doesn’t make me any better.
I also switch tenses like I’ll win something if I do it often enough.
@Brian:
+1211 laugh points.
Do not abuse them. They expire at the end of the glacial epoch.
– c.
Regarding Jane Austen, I was never sure whether those first couple of lines indicated a chatty, informal, author-as-narrator kind of prose (much like the style that Dickens used), or whether they were meant to be taken as indirect quotes from Mrs Bennet. Either one would give the prose a certain validity, but the problem is that Jane Austen didn’t make it clear (and her later prose style doesn’t bear out either interpretation much, either).
By the way, I’m much more of a fan of Dickens then of Austen, but then again I was made to read Pride and Prejudice at school at the age of 13 (which I guess is enough to put anybody off).
Why I suck? I just don’t know. Sometimes, I think it’s because I just get hooked on a word and I just can’t let it go. I think it’s just a mental tick, you know? I just don’t notice it when it happens. Then I go back to edit and they’re just everywhere. They’re just invading every sentence until I just can’t stand it anymore. It’s just annoying. That’s not just the only reason I suck, but it’s a predominant one.
Wanna know why you suck. Because you use too many goddamn words. OK, this should probably go over in your freelance post, but I just wasted my entire fucking morning cutting the flab out of some collateral copy from a freelancer. Hadn’t used the guy before, but he came well recommended. I needed 750 words (and it had to be right around that mark because of the tempate the copy is going into) on a tax service. Draft I got was 747. Fine. Except by the time I got done with it, it was 521. It’s a fairly complex service – I thought the challenge would be boiling it down. Instead the lazy son of a bitch only bothers to pick up one or two points during the interview and then fluffs it up like he’s the ugly bitch on the porn set. I just finished a Mai Lai, leaving a ditch full of bloodied adjectives, adverbs and sundry linquistic cirlique. And now I have to fill the freakin’ hole.
Alright, so this was business copy. But the lesson is universal. Treat every modifier — every adjective, every adverb, every cute descriptive clause you couldn’t resist — like a potential traitor. Waterboard its ass, make sure it serves a purpose. Otherwise, take it out and shot it.
Oh, and Chuck? The stupid son of a bitch sent me his invoice WITH the project. Didn’t check to see if I was happy with his work, just included it as an attachment to the e-mail. So, in addition to editing his copy, I edited his invoice. You send me 69.7% of the usuable words I ask for, I pay 69.7% or your bill.
Grrrrr . . .
Dan
@Dan:
Word to all that. Brevity is the soul of wit. A lack of brevity is the soul of the nitwit.
Or some shit.
– c.
Here’s my contribution to our mission:
You’re a writer, but you spend an awful lot of time just editing your own work. And re-editing. And re-re-editing. And undoing yesterday’s edits so you can make some fresh ones. You know, anything but actually filling up blank pages.
Oh, I wish I didn’t do this. But it’s true. There’s this horrible perfectionist inside me that wants to drag my soul into an abyss of interminable polishing until each individual word is luminous beacon that exemplifies everything writing should be.
Screw that.
I’m sure the ratio of writing to rewriting to editing to polishing is different for everyone, but for me, I’ve found that when I’m in “production mode” (i.e. trying to finish a complete draft), I need to spend a bare minimum of 80 to 90% of my writing time actually filling blank pages. There’s some room for rewriting at even the earliest stages, and obviously I’m not advocating that you spew forth a stream of festering crap and call that a first draft, but it’s much more important to get something finished so you can evaluate it as a whole.
The passive voice lassoes me regularly, as does comma overuse and insufficient planning.
…. which is why I have to use two posts for one thought.
Wait. The first post was my entire thought. Fuck. You know what I mean.
@Dan:
Did you happen to include the phrases “fully executed” or “payment upon final approval” in your freelance contract boilerplate?
“Stop writing shit that nobody cares about. ”
I think Dave Sim said it better in his Guide to Self-Publishing (Comics) when he said, “No one cares about your shit.”
Chuck, even the hackjob Jane Austen copycats could outright you in a maze made of left turns only.
Suckrule:
You’re scared to write about something that actually matters to you! And so you write the same story that thought was cooooool when you were nineteen! Too bad it sucked!
Your “surprise” ending sucks. It’s only a surprise if you didn’t see it coming. Thus, withholding necessary information from page one doesn’t make it suspenseful and is not a reason to keep reading the story. Stupid things to withhold from the reader until the last page include:
1) The protagonist’s name
2) The fact that the protagonist has committed a major crime
3) The protagonist’s species
4) The fact that the protagonist was sleeping the whole time (works okay in Lewis Carroll’s “Alice” books, I guess)
5) Many more, but those are the stupidest.
As for my own personal suckiness, please refer to Dee’s comment: I have some words I throw around with annoying abandon, including “just” and “really.”
Hi, just started reading your posts a few days ago. I truly like them but… Er… generally speaking, have you ever heard of verbal diarrhoea? Sorry, website isn’t on yet…
“you suck because-”
You’re too scared to write something dark, offensive or creepy because you have the fear. The fear that a reader can’t tell the difference between you and your character. The fear that the reader will think you are a racist, or sexist, or stringerist. Its a fear that treats your audience with no respect and makes your characters about as exciting as your last microwave dinner.
No, not the one that exploded and started a chain reaction that destroyed Atlantis. The other one, the one that produced soggy chips and cold chilli.
“you suck because-”
You don’t beat the ever loving crap out of your work so that it stops crying and becomes something cold, tight and sharp. You let it lie there and remain flabby, you let it go to school and get bullied. You don’t write a story named Sue.
“you suck because-”
You let a scene run on too long in order to get to some witty line of dialogue or great deep though about the human condition. You want to be clever, which actually means you want to be seen to be clever. You don’t start the scene after its already in motion and then you forget to get out as soon as the point has been made.
And I suck because i let my dyslexia get the better of me on long posts
You still suck as a writer because you spend to much time watching TV instead of reading and interacting with people. People on TV are fake. You can’t learn people from TV thus you can’t write people worth a shit with TV as your only frame of reference. PUT DOWN THE GOD DAMN REMOTE and pick up a book…then once you’re done go meet someone new.
You suck because you forget that the reader can’t see the scene in your head until you paint it for them and so your novel reads like a movie script oh and it’s too effing short.
Sigh.
Great post.
Also some writers still suck because they see editors as enemies. As a writer and an editor, I often have to explain that an editor is not out to take an axe to a manuscript.
Great post. On a happy note, for me anyway, I just got my first paying client as a freelance editor! What Chuck and co. are pointing out here is 90% of what I do, so keep on sucking! Seriously though, great advice for writers. I might give writing a shot, but I don’t know my narratives from my dialogue.
I suck for many reasons, but most of all, I suck for both thinking too much, and too little.
. . . .
And as I re-read that line, I realize there are probably too many commas in there. *sigh*
I think too much about what I feel I should be doing when I’m writing instead of focusing on the task at hand. “All right, chapter 6. Sally enters the kitchen to find. . .OH CRAP! I FORGOT TO LOAD THE DISHWASHER! I’M A HORRIBLE PERSON AND I’M GOING TO HELL!”
Conversely, I think too little because I somehow never finish my outlines. Character Bibles? Yes. World-Building Bibles? Absolutely? Outlines?
Nope.
*sigh*
Yes, I know this is a crime punishable by severe spanking, but I can’t seem to help it. I am getting better, though.
This is my first time commenting on here and it feels like an introduction to a support group.
I suck as a writer because I don’t write. I talk about it, I brainstorm, I talk about it some more, and then I don’t write.
AWESOME!!!!!
I suck as a writer because I persist in believing that more adjectives describe something more accurately, and that it’s really important to let the reader know that it’s a small whiny brown-and-white dog with ratty ears. It’s a dog, it’s just a dog, I know I should let it lie but I don’t.
Anyway, it’s equally awful when writers can’t think of different *ways* to say things, so they just use every word in the thesaurus.
Sometimes simplicity is best.
I make a bunch of drafts and refuse to edit them until recently.
My own personal suckitude (among some of those you mentioned) is getting overfond of a particular phrase or word and using it more than I should. Like more than once. Or maybe twice.
The other one, which Stephen King brought up in “On Writing” has to do with the insidious adverb. Yes, my name is Janet (“hi, Janet”) and I use adverbs.
Consider this take on the everyone/their pairing. It’s interesting, I think, to anyone who considers gender and language to be important:
http://www.crossmyt.com/hc/linghebr/austheir.html
I suck because I keep thinking about the end of the story, getting all in a rushed hissy fit to get there and then totally forgetting that everything leading up to it has to be interesting too.
I also suck because my sentences are too long at times.
I suck because I’m writing to change the world instead of entertaining people. I sneer at the best-seller lists and genre fiction, call that stuff trash, and keep thinking about what my high school English teachers told me about how books like “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” and “The Jungle” changed history. The problem being that Random House isn’t interested in the next Harriet Beecher Stowe.
That, and I hang out on Facebook too much.
Sucking at writing as much as I do, I tend to use “as”/”-ing” sentence construction too much.
[...] is down to a lack of planning. I’m going to quote Chuck Wendig here . . [...]