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The way I write is bipolar; shitty sometimes, sometimes surprising (i.e, in my academic work, My professors and peers consistently praise me. Things like "poetic", "story-like", "fun", "very well-written" is what I usually get. On the other hand, outside of /lit/, once every few weeks people say I don't write correctly and have communication problems). The compliments were and are still shallow...anyone published would sneer at my work as being far below average.
Some examples of its failings are....
>overuse of "I" and "but" and other such words--this fucks up and limits the structure...my "range" of sentences is narrow even without it
>stilted+robotic writing in general, not "conversational" and lively\
>doesn't help that I usually don't think of sentences as being connected; they're disjointed, lack that sense of...gestalt?
>redundant word usage, almost autistic
So, how do I undo my bad habits and write well?
This is all for leisure's sake. Being published isn't my goal here, I just want my writing to have that gusto to it--to not have it just be...satisfactory, or functional.
Also...what would you say would be a good point in which I should wholly abandon style for the sake of actual content? I know style can give form to content, I just don't know specifics because I am an amateur (18).
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>>9741262
Read more. Write down and define unfamiliar words when you see them. Write more.
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>>9741262
stop being an aspie
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You navel gaze too much. You need to look upwards and outwards. You need to look at the titans of your language--which I assume is English--and treat them as mountains to scale. Shakespeare, Milton, Byron, Keats, Melville, Joyce, Faulkner: you need to look at them and stop looking at yourself. Tell yourself you can be as great as them and always keep them in mind.
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>>9741326
Pretty good advice. However, I don't know if I necessarily need to learn more words (and I now go weeks without seeing one I don't know). I think I'm better off putting common but high-impact words into my working vocabulary.
>>9741416
I know you're trying to be funny, but how would one go about that without suicide? You must be an expert at not being an aspie.
>>9741424
...Fuck, that hit me hard. I've never had a role model or an idol. I always doubted people, and I wonder if this refusal to kneel, learn, and look up, was what fucked me over. How do you strip away your ego and believe in someone like that? I'm an orphan, so even if my childhood I had no one to look up to.
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>>9741525
It's not that hard, who cares if you're an orphan, no one has parents forever. Just keep writing shit and eventually you'll be proud of some of it and then it just keeps going
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>>9741262
The responses I'm seeing are fairly lofty and general (not to say that they don't offer good advice), but there are some simple things you can do to give your writing a sense of flow and continuity. Something that's really worked for me in the academic spheres and in my limited experience with "personal" writing is simply reading my sentences out loud as I write them. Reading your work out loud is often presented as a proofreading tool, but I think that "good" prose has a unique musicality that you can hear in your voice. Unconnected sentences are audibly strange - "robotic" really is a good word for it. Obviously, you'll develop your own unique stylistic flairs, but I try to make sure that someone reading my work out loud would be noticeably well-spoken.
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>>9741262
For a start, drop anime
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>>9741525
>How do you strip away your ego and believe in someone like that?
As someone who knows what it means to look up to other writers: envy. Pure, simple, naked envy. You read The Sound & The Fury and want yourself to be that great. You read Hamlet and wish you were that great. Then you go out and make yourself great. Envy is a powerful fuel. Other writers have recognized it. Consider this quote from Faulkner:
>"Let the writer take up surgery or bricklaying if he is interested in technique. There is no mechanical way to get the writing done, no shortcut. The young writer would be a fool to follow a theory. Teach yourself by your own mistakes; people learn only by error. The good artist believes that nobody is good enough to give him advice. He has supreme vanity. No matter how much he admires the old writer, he wants to beat him."
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