General Discussion

life of you raise your hands.

So many low grades on creative writing assignments for not being flourishy enough.

/raises hand :'|

I want to get better at writing, but I'm so bad at structuring descriptive sentences that it's kind of difficult to practice. Nothing I put down sounds right; the word placement and choice always looks wrong.

I...am apparently very good a writing despite sh*t. I disagree. The trick, though, is to *cough* reread like hell and get everyone you meet to do it too - who cares if you end up boasting as a side effect! *cough* use short, basic sentences. Anywhere there probably should be a comma, use a full stop instead - unless that stops it making sense. Dunno, seems to work for me.
@Ningyo

It's weird. I have two habitual writing styles--past-tense paragraph and present-tense script. I can write detailed/descriptive things pretty well in my script style, but my para writing absolutely sucks.

-raises hand- ;;
it sucks.
I've been trying to get better at it.
Though that's going very, very, very slowly.

\o/
It takes me like an hour to write a few hundred words that isn't utter garbage. I tend to ramble.
Much worse when I'm writing at a computer though, since it's easy to keep it looking neat and I can write everything in the wrong order... which can get very confusing.

i got pretty into roleplaying for a while but yea, i was only ever good at on-the-spot fantasy type writing and it always took me forever

any type of writing that requires even an ounce of planning tho? yea nope. i panic, i just can't do it. i have literally never finished an essay in my life. the only reason i made it through ANY of my high school english classes was because i was good at tests

I can't write actual writing assignments (Like essays and discussions) to save my own soul from the fiery pits of certain flunk-dom. I hate college English so damn much. I hate writing essays. I can't even make myself care enough to bullpucky it. Takes my three hours to complete an hour of work. I need to figure out how to suck it up and just ground out vapid nonsense like most people, but it hurts and I don't wanna and I just want to whine because I am pathetic.

I do, however, love to "write" "write". I write stories, and poems, and boat loads of Trek fanfiction because I am trash. It's like any other art form for me, you get blocks, you get frustrated, sometime it doesn't work but it's still fun like all art is. I'm not bad on certain days.

To those having trouble with like, "creative" writing I recommend reading. A lot of reading.

Writing, even creative writing, it a technical process of putting words in a certain order so they sound good-ish. If you read a specific author enough you tend to pick up their quirks and writing style yourself and bringing more author's into that just broadens your own technique into something your own. If you need flourish, read flourishy writers and see how they do it. Trace the damn line art. I personally write to the tune of speech, if it sounds good when I read it out loud (In the voice of the character in focus) I wrote it well. If not I need to rewrite. Also, vocab will save you. Knowing ten different ways to say "disappear" will make everything easier because you can repeat concepts if needed, but in new ways.

[raises hand] this is why I stick to webcomics

i can draw out a scene and it'll look RIGHT DAMMIT

also god i suck at 90% of essays. mostly rhetorical essays. I just can't pick out the meaning of something in a way that makes sense. (Ironically my AP mock essay got a good score. It's a complete mystery as to how it did because I BS'd it in the last 20 minutes after panicking and jumping to open argument.)

I can kind of do it, or at least pretend that I can. I try to describe things cinematically when I'm writing a story, but I often screw up in keeping the tenses consistent and keeping the wording fresh. It's really frustrating because I have these amazing concepts but when I try to put them into words it turns to garbage.

I have no idea why it's so hard when it looks so wonderful in the form of a visual theory. You'd think someone with good literature and grammar understanding can pull it off, but writing is just as much an art as drawing is.