ITT creative writing tips for beginners - short stories edition.

don't be trash

>>9991788
ill keep that in mind

also checked

Put your ego aside, the faults in your writing are not yours, but you have to make them right. Or better.

Easier said than done, but I think it's most important for getting better at writing.

>>9991799
The checkee gets checked as well

>>9991787
Say everything you can about the situation or a character or whatever, than cut 90% of the description / dialogue.

Helps if you can't write the best opption on the first try.

Don't write anything until you are ready to work on your masterpiece. If you do any writing before that, it will ruin your image.
Spend all day just reading books, even the crappier one. Once you reach 100 books you can start your own book.
Remember, the reader is God.

>>9991814
>the faults in your writing are not yours

huh? They actually are yours, in fact 100% yours.

But yeah, it's also your responsibility to make them right.

How do you come up with characters?
I have struggled with this. But last night I was thinking and realized that since my ideas stem mostly from dialogue, that I'd be better off "talking about" a character in order to come up with it. I am now writing small, first-person accounts of people who interact with a character, in order to develop the initial idea of a person. I used to try and combine abstract characteristics (a fatalist, crushed by his own pessimism against his dying hope) and this method seems to be working for me.

This is a breakthrough for me, but I hope maybe it would help someone else too.

>>9991877
could you give an example of this method for me?

>>9992051
Yeah. This is real off the dome, unedited and some sentences shift subject or I didn't write down the whole thought. Very stream of consciousness

"I grew up in ah ouse with four brothers, raised only by my mom, and sometimes her brother and his wife. We arrived in a staggered wave, older sibling only older by a six months, so we all came to low-functioning independence in a wave whose imminence must have hit our mother unbearably, all too quickly. When we entered our Jr and Senior years, she had moved into a small room in the top floor of our house with a bathroom down the hallway, letting the eldest brother take over her room. "Growing boys need room..." It began to feel that we had caught up to her in standing, and I imagine that my brothers were seeing her almost as a roommate. As kids, we had only a pathetic capacity for sympathy, we never considered once the feelings of obsolescence that must have rushed in at her, watching us cook and care for ourselves, all the signs, the imperceivable sense that we all just thought of her less often. We couldn't see the smallness she reduced herself to; we hadn't developed a reference scale to recognize it, we didn't know to look.

Her brother went missing as we some of use were finishing their first quarters at college, and others getting ready to start their first."

This was all off the top, and was really just me exploring some feelings about the sadness of induced smallness. Writing this way establishes a sympathizer character, a character whose love and care wasn't needed but was necessary to share, and even possibly a goal for that character to strive toward that may NEED her, her missing brother.

>>9992442
and then from here, I can fill out the perspectives of her siblings, uncle or aunt, how those people feel about this sister who I have called "Meredith Klemens". How they all see each other and small details of their lives come from these first-person perspectives, and that's material to work with.

>>9992051
Not that anon but I've stumbled upon this a few years back and also see that helps me a lot with character building. In my case I write a scene with the character I want to flesh out more or better but sort of from the standpoint of the other person that's interacting with them. For example, a juvenile delinquent from the POV of the tired clerk that has to write him into the system.

Interestingly enough, it's kind of like
>>9992442's style, only I usually mix up first person with third person. That could relate to a more extroverted or introverted approach to character building though, I'd guess.

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>>9991787
Read shit. Here some stuff to read

The Elements of Style by William Strunk Jr.

On Writing by Stephen King

Wonderbook: The illustrated guide to Creative Imaginative Fiction by Jeff VanderMeer

Theory of Prose by Viktor Shklovsky

The first three can be found on Library Genesis.

>>9992736
Alan Moore's Writing for Comics may also interest you.
It is short, but it goes over conceiving a plot and how a theme or conflict is so important to that. There's an essay at the end that basically says "All of that is for babies, practically useless by the time you write your first sentence," and then it swerves more into the integrity of a writer, and why they write. It was inspirational to me, maybe it'll help you.

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Suggested for short stories:
>"Notes on Writing Weird Fiction" by H. P. Lovecraft

For constructing a solid basic novel and avoiding shitty pitfalls:
>"How Not to write a novel" by Mittelmark & Newman
>"How to write a damn good novel" by James N. Frey
>"How to write a damn good novel II" by James N. Frey
>"Self-editing for fiction writers" by Browne & King

For writing poetry:
>"The ode less travelled" by Stephen Fry

"Motivational" whatever:
>"Zen in the art of writing" by Raymond Bradbury
>"On writing" by Stephen King

Academic procrastination:
>"The hero with 1000 faces" by Joseph Campbell
>"The golden bough" by George Frazer
>"The morphology of the folktale" by Vladimir Propp
>"The art of fiction" by J. Gardner
>"The book of legendary lands" by Umberto Eco
>""The elements of style" Strunk & White

Autismal worldbuilding procrastination:
>"The language construction kit" by M. Rosenfelder
>"The planet construction kit" by M. Rosenfelder

Actively avoid:
>"The writer's journey" by C. Vogler
>"How to books" anything with a logo that looks like pic related.

For anything of genuine worth:
>Be a naturally good writer, work hard at it and read widely.

That last one is the most important. Read and write a lot and actually think about how the text you're looking at is constructed as you do - you'll notice that the billion-word ridiculous fanfiction shit that gets written never really improves and this is because they're not reading other things and they're not really thinking about the text itself.