Best writing tips that saved your life?

[Anonymous No.21628583]

Looking to improve…


Example of my current work:

>A clandestine percussionist splashes the audience with an auditory trigger of two sixteenth notes and an eighth note on a cymbal’s bell from which a droning frequency reverberates crescendo into an anxious static. Simultaneously, the camera digs with an intimate angle centered on an individual bleached in a wraith-white motif, forcing an element of chiaroscuro with the dark red background out of focus. Painted white hands rest interlinked, hiding the figure’s face, yet soon, with the anticipation of the ring, his fingers unlock to tremble in sharp, nervous twitches, not unlike a suffocating victim. The mouth quivers, slipping from the weakening grip of a pointed upper lip into an exaggerated frown before stretching into a screaming posture. The figure remains mute. His shakes become more violent. The pupils of his eyes remain glued just under his stretched eyelids as the figure retracts his skull to point his gaze toward an unknown object to his upper left. A chest lifts and crashes in a gasping rhythm as a menstrual-pink tongue writhes like a serpent. Sirens whip into earshot, layered over the ringing.

[Anonymous No.21628699]

>>21628583
TLDR

I don't even try to spell correctly I just let spellcheck fix it for me

[Anonymous No.21628710]

>>21628583
>not unlike

[Anonymous No.21628727]

>>21628710
You don’t like DFW?

[Anonymous No.21628737]

>>21628583
Try to work on rhythm

[Anonymous No.21628746]

>>21628583
This excerpt isn't vivid enough to justify its density, but I'll leave that for somebody else to critique.

The best piece of writing advice I can give you, which applies to all art forms, is that you have to be true to yourself. Don't try to sound like someone you aren't. Your writing will come off as soulless and/or corny.

What if you let your real voice shine through and your writing turns out to be shit? Well then you need to work on educating yourself more and gaining some life experience first.

[Anonymous No.21628773]

>>21628583
What is the name of that female author that Tolkien and SC Lewis criticized for having too purple a prose? It's like that.

[Anonymous No.21628795]

>>21628727
Never read him.
Anyways, OP, I concur with >>21628746; methinks you have no voice; you lack vision as well, perhaps even emotion. It may be that this means many things to you or that perhaps there is some general essence in these many moments and many words which grope after some being you want so much to relive, but if there is, I struggle to find any vestige of any sort of being in this writing.

[Anonymous No.21628798]

>>21628773
Found it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amanda_McKittrick_Ros

[Anonymous No.21629164]

>>21628737
Are there any good examples that I can use as a reference?

>>21628746
>>21628773
>>21628795
>>21628798
Purple prose… okay, I’ll look into restricting my writing to a more calculated approach like how Gosling said he only keeps the lines that invoke joy. Also, the example I listed was from a uni assignment in which I had to describe a scene from a movie. Greentxt below is an example of my creative stuff:

>Lexi halts just shy of the forest to steal a look at the park’s main recreational area buzzing with families of multiple children and pets. Couples chitchat, holding leashes or pushing strollers. Gaggles of children flock around the playground, swinging from bars and yelling down slides. In the distance, women slather spreads on different breads as men fetch children, who seem to be now playing a degraded form of hide and seek in which children play dead under the skirts of parked cars. The men pool near the jagged jungle of autos, standing wide and surveying the lot only to break focus for a terse nod to with whom they accidentally make eye contact.

>One unsuspecting lady carrying a crockpot almost flattens a kid's nose as she hops out of her blue sedan. She, the woman, shrieks and sways in a motion that looks like a kick. The driver of the sedan is a middle-aged man, slightly balding, spotted in khaki shorts and a white polo matched with white sneakers. The two appear to be a couple, though Lexi can’t really tell. The woman seems to be looking for the past kid’s mother, aimlessly gawking at other pavilions and the rows of picnic tables for the perp’s face. The man almost gets steamrolled by running children. He twists up and huffs with a jaw movement to maybe say something. If he is, the children dismiss it.

[Anonymous No.21629184]

be sincere

[Anonymous No.21630380]

>>21629164
Second graph better, you’re getting somewhere and not on purpose. First graph the same as the rest, as if you get distracted from your own sentence?

why u use words like that?
Look. simple I type, but you know what mean.

Dunno dude, try writing like a caveman and see if it cures your underaged adjective run off. Reminds me of the “creative writing” types in uni that would pepper their prose with slutty amounts of words. I decided to not go for a duel major in english after seeing the work of my peers. You are conveying the same hopelessness, go read a fucking poem and shut up until you start thinking without trying so fucking hard

[Anonymous No.21630509]

>>21628583
There's something off about your tense. Why are you mixing in past tense for present action?

[Anonymous No.21630512]

>>21628583
Pic.

[Anonymous No.21630521]

>>21629164
Too descriptive and not enough representation of action. Describe with acts (by representing action), by making the scene and characters do things, and leave a degree of ambiguity and suggestion (point to something, rather than tell what that something is) so the readers imagination can paint the action, rather than instructive description that instructs the reader what to see, which is bland and boring because it instrumenalises the mind to the text's instructions rather than setting the mind free in flight (transport) of fancy.

Pic is an excellent history and guide to neoclassical and romantic litcrit. Northrop Frye is also a must read. M. H. Abrams (Mirror and the Lamp) is worth reading too.

[Anonymous No.21630537]

>>21628583
Too many full stops interupt the flow and building of tension, and the resultant sentences are of mismatched length so as to break up the building of the scene. Replace every full stop with a comma from at least "Painted white hands" and the tension-building and flow returns.

Write with the concept of flow in mind, the train of thought you want the text to create in the readers mind. See Longinus>>21630512

A book on literary devices like pic may also help you to understand what tricks of arrangement and form can be used to create which mental states in the reader, which will impact your writing even when not using explicit devices.

[Anonymous No.21630656]

>>21630512
Seconding this. Very dense and to the point. I would go so far as to say it's really all you need if you read it thoroughly and put its points into use.