“You don’t belong here.” “Stop acting like someone you’re not!” “You must have done something to her!” “This is all your fault”Working on two years here, and I STILL get this shit
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The only way to get better at OF is to write it, so it's all a process.
I came from a fanfic background too, and one of the major differences besides the established characters and such is that the fandom itself provides context. It's harder to be aware of whether you've said enough about your setting/etc. when the context starts out only being known to you. I still ask myself that same question every time.
I would describe the narrative here as being 'oblique,' if that makes sense. It's very much like the way I talk in RL when I'm telling an anecdote about someone but I want to keep their identity a secret. There's a lot of "talking around the people and facts," and not positively identifying anyone or anything.
Here, even if you wanted to keep parts of the setting a little bit secret, none of the characters or places have names, and that's confusing all by itself. Even if they're names you're making up (for who the narrator is, or this person she's replacing, or where "here" is or where the narrator has been), having those labels makes it easier for readers to hang onto your "world." They provide a little bit of that context.
I hope I'm being helpful here and not a pest, but that last part goes a long way toward helping a story make sense.
This will definitely get better the more you do it, so I hope this short round of Idol has kicked you into writing as you'd hoped it would. :)
Nonono, you're not being a pest. This is actually exactly the kind of critique I was hoping for, since I KNOW my writing-fiction or not-has many flaws that I can't easily identify (if I can identify them at all) on my own. I appreciate you taking the time to comment with me about it, really. It is quite helpful: on top of letting me fix problems, it gives me a better ability to see my writing from the outside, because I can more easily define and describe the writing style itself, not just the content. :) And no-I won't be giving up on writing anytime soon. I have a (very very very long and quite probably very cheesy) fanfic that I'm working on just for my own self, and while I probably won't show it to the rest of the world (like most of the things I write, really), I like continually perfecting what I write for myself. The greatest critic of a work is the artist, after all.
I came from a fanfic background too, and one of the major differences besides the established characters and such is that the fandom itself provides context. It's harder to be aware of whether you've said enough about your setting/etc. when the context starts out only being known to you. I still ask myself that same question every time.
I would describe the narrative here as being 'oblique,' if that makes sense. It's very much like the way I talk in RL when I'm telling an anecdote about someone but I want to keep their identity a secret. There's a lot of "talking around the people and facts," and not positively identifying anyone or anything.
Here, even if you wanted to keep parts of the setting a little bit secret, none of the characters or places have names, and that's confusing all by itself. Even if they're names you're making up (for who the narrator is, or this person she's replacing, or where "here" is or where the narrator has been), having those labels makes it easier for readers to hang onto your "world." They provide a little bit of that context.
I hope I'm being helpful here and not a pest, but that last part goes a long way toward helping a story make sense.
This will definitely get better the more you do it, so I hope this short round of Idol has kicked you into writing as you'd hoped it would. :)
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Again, thank you. :)
~S~
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