Thread:RubyTheMaster/@comment-24210419-20130530063142/@comment-4332975-20130610130523

This isn't really the place for this, but what the hell...

I don't do this often anymore, and when I speak I expect people to listen, so if you care at all about improving your writing, then don't you dare "tl;dr" this shit!

It's not enough to want to "write a story". It's not even enough to want to write a good story, though that's a start. To get a really good story, you need to have a goal for that story, be it to introduce people to a game they mightn't have heard of, to make them consider a possibility they might not have considered before, or just to convey a certain emotion. Even something as simple as testing your own ability with a specific writing technique can be a goal.

However, once you have a goal, you have to work for it. Don't stop when the story is done. Stop when it's right. This is especially important when you don't do a lot of writing. Run spell check. Read lines out loud to see if the way that you wrote them sounds good and makes sense...but most importantly, be descriptive. The English language has multiple words to convey anything, so make use of them. Any descriptor comes with a question, so answer those questions. It was big. How big? It was creepy. What made it creepy? There are some questions that make the story more unsettling when left unanswered, but the only way to make that work is if people aren't busy asking questions that you don't want them thinking about, so you have to answer them.

Lastly, remember the tone of your story. If you have a narrator that's a character in your story, treat them as a person. Remember that people have thoughts and feelings. They aren't just floating observers. When something important happens, show the importance through how characters react to it. Do they shout? Run? Try to bargain? Try to fight? A person's actions can say a lot about their personality and state of mind. However, when someone is the narrator, you have an even more powerful tool at your disposal. You not only have a window into their head, but the equivalent of a full bevy of medical equipment to monitor their vital signs. Do not ignore this tool! Emotions aren't isolated concepts. When someone is feeling a particular emotion, it effects their thinking, it effects their heart, their breathing...it can even create sensations. So don't just say someone felt a certain way about something. Take a few lines and show how that emotion affected them.

The same goes for the purely physical. When something happens to someone, like getting stabbed in the leg, it doesn't just hurt. It's a certain kind of pain, it's awareness of the thing injuring them...or not, if they're in no state to pay attention, in which case the detachment itself should be notable and strange...and it generally has more effects than just the immediate, like a rush of adrenaline, or dizziness from blood loss. It might cause someone to face the reality of a situation they've been trying to rationalize as "all in their head", with all the emotional trauma and fear that realization brings. When something beyond just ordinary day-to-day stuff happens, try to think how you or someone you know would react...not just in general terms, but in detail.

Bottom line: No single sentence in a story can ever stand alone. Even a strong opening line, that may seem like an independent statement, only works if it becomes a framework to add context to everything that follows it. I've said it before, but I'll say it again. "Never write in one line what you could write in three. Don't write in three lines what you can make into its own paragraph." If you make a story that really - and I mean really - sets the stage, and has strong, believable characters, you can make a good story even when using the same ideas other people have used before.

Don't believe me? My first-ever creepypasta, My First Pikachu, was written as a practice exercise, to see if I could go through the list of common Pokémon clichés, and use them without weakening the story. Sometimes, putting just a slightly different spin or context to something everyone has heard before can change it completely.