Or “The Guide to Making People Think You Know What You’re Doing”

Because half the time, writing is just managing to vomit up some words in a way that actually looks good. Basically, this guide is designed to provide hints, tricks, helpful methods, and other things to aid in producing something nice rather than the steaming heap of garbage that is known as “the first draft”. It can also be helpful for the role players since I intend to cover such things as character and world building.

Every writer has their own style and methods of development. This is simply what I’ve learned that works for me. You might find that some of it helps you, but some other method you use works better than mine. That’s fine, there’s really no wrong or write way to write.

Except Purple Prose. No one like Purple Prose.

1. The First Draft of Hell

Some of the issues with the first draft can be attributed to trying to write when your brain/muse/creativity has gone on a 3-week bender to Cancun. It’s not going to happen and most anything you try to write is going to come out bad. I highly, highly, recommend the idea of having a “drabble document”. This is basically just something where you can, essentially, free form write. Dumb idea where the characters are wildly out of character? Drabble document. Idea that might work for your main story? Drabble document.

It also helps to do quick, one shot ideas. So, take a word or phrase and writing a short story around it. For example, I took the phrase “eating ice cream out of the carton” and wrote an 800 or so word short story involving the idea. Or, if you have an idea that’s bouncing around in your head, write it down. It might be something you never use, or it can become a rough draft of its own for something you work on down the road. In either case, it gets it out of your head and lets you focus on other things.

Writing, as with any art form, requires practice and the only way to practice is by actually writing. So, employ the drabble document I mentioned above. It can also help to have someone read over what you’ve written. Either they’ll slap you upside the head, ask what the hell you’re thinking, and proclaim the story to be gold, or they can give you some idea on where the story’s weak points are at.

It does help to have a rough idea of who your key characters are, what your general plot idea is, and your general setting(s). This is helpful so you don’t write yourself into a corner and try to figure out what to do. Being stuck in a corner results in Jupiter sized plot holes and dues ex machinas. At this same time, having everything firmly planned out with no room for deviation can make for a rough time because it makes it hard to add in your Utterly Awesome Terrific Idea. So, it’s a balancing act between planning and being able to veer off course for a chapter or two.

A word of caution. When you really, really get into writing a story, make sure you take breaks to work on other things. It’s very easy to pour a lot of work into a story and burn yourself out to the point of not wanting to work on it (see: Game of Thrones). Personally, I have a few different stories that I rotate around on. It keeps things fresh and interesting so I don’t get bored.

Unfortunately, sometimes a first draft is a turd no matter how much you try to polish it. At that point, it can be helpful to set it to the side and work on something else. Then, come back and visit it to try and dissect on what you dislike about it so much. Many times, you can take that unpolished turd of a first draft, do a 75% rewrite and turn it into something glorious. It can be as simple as the story needing a different setting, sometimes, it’s a total rewrite and you keep the spirit of the idea.

While more geared towards the role players, story writers can also benefit from this since it also goes into readability. The biggest issue I see is people just doing the basic action and that’s it. There’s no detail on anything else. For this reason, I want you to keep the acronym FART in mind.

Feeling: what are the character’s emotions? Are they angry, scared, anxious?
Action: how are they moving? If they’re walking is it a quick, fast stride? Are they lumbering along?
Reason: why do feel the way they do? What caused them to react the way they did?
Thoughts: what are they thinking? What’s their thought process concerning something?

FART basically is something I think of when I write a character. It helps create something organic. So, let’s build a post! The setting is a space ship and we’re going to be following Clayton around. He’s not a morning person, doesn’t sleep all that well, and has an upcoming bounty hunt. He’s also half alien.

Clayton got out of bed and walked to the window.

Okay, basic idea of what I want him to do, but it’s…Bland. It’s the bare bones of anything. So, let’s apply ‘Feeling’.

Clayton got out of bed and walked to the window, feeling anxious.

Still kinda bare bones. He’s already doing an Action, but we can add more!

Clayton got out of bed and walked to the window, feeling anxious. Behind him, his tail twisted up.

Already, we have something that’s twice as long as when we started. Let’s add ‘Reason’.

Clayton got out of bed and walked to the window, feeling anxious. Behind him, his tail twisted up as he went over his plans for his upcoming bounty hunt.

This leads into an excellent place to sprinkle in some of his Thoughts.

Clayton got out of bed and walked to the window, feeling anxious. Behind him, his tail twisted up as he went over his plans for his upcoming bounty hunt. He knew the place would be heavily guarded, but hadn’t found a good entry point yet.

Look at that. We turned a basic 10 word post into 45. Now, something I want to point out before I continue. Read the paragraph out loud, notice how it flows? Flow is good. It means better readability and it’s just nice and smooth. I often see people doing the following:

Clayton got out of bed. He walked to the window. His tail twisted behind him and he went over the plans for his bounty hunt. He knew the place would be guarded. He hadn’t found an entry point yet.

Read that out loud. It’s jarring, isn’t it? It has a lot of hard stops and isn’t very readable. Commas and semicolons are your friends. Join short sentences together, make them all cozy with each other. Your readers and role play partners will thank you. Now, we have a decent post, but you’re here for something impressive, yeah? You’re not limited to doing one or two actions per post. The more material you give your partner, the better grasp they have of your character and the better their character can react. Let’s keep applying FART, and remember: you don’t have to use it in order, or the entire acronym. It’s just something to help build up your writing.

Clayton got out of bed and walked to the window, feeling anxious. Behind him, his tail twisted up as he went over his plans for his upcoming bounty hunt. He knew the place would be heavily guarded, but hadn’t found a good entry point yet. Without a good entry point, he’d encounter heavy opposition and potentially spook his target. He rubbed his face with his hands to try and wake up, but it didn’t do much good. Finally, Clayton simply sighed, then trudged out of the bedroom and into the living room-kitchen area to make himself a cup of coffee.

Better, yeah? But we’re still missing a lot of things. Description, being the chief thing. So, let’s add that in with some more FART.

Clayton got out of the bed that’d been covered in a mountain of blanket and walked to the window that overlooked a gas giant surrounded by glittering ice rings. He hated feeling anxious first thing in the morning, knowing it’d set the mood for the rest of the day. Behind him, his tail twisted up as he went over his plans for his upcoming bounty hunt, still feeling unsatisfied with what he had so far. He knew the place would be heavily guarded, but hadn’t found a good entry point yet. Without a good entry point, he’d encounter heavy opposition and potentially spook his target. After pushing up the sleeves of his oversized, dark blue sweat shirt, he rubbed his face with his hands to try and wake up, but it didn’t do much good.

Finally, Clayton simply sighed, then trudged out of the bedroom and into the living room-kitchen area to make himself a cup of coffee. The whole area had been designed for someone with a tail, from the backless stools around the table to the couch with the lower part of the back removed. Unfortunately, the rest of the galaxy usually didn’t accommodate him so well. Automatically, he worked on making his coffee and sleepily shoved the grey mug under the coffee machine’s spout; no sugar, just black coffee. Faintly, he smiled when he finally smelled the fresh coffee.

And 10 words goes to two paragraphs. I could make it even longer by going into Clayton’s physical appearance or the descriptions of the rooms, but I think you get the gist at this point. Description, adjectives, and FART will go a long way in making lengthy posts. It can be hard to do, at first, but writing is much like exercising: the more you do it, the better you’ll get.

This leads me to the actual grammar. I’ve already covered flow, but spelling and grammar is just as important. Spellcheck your work. Make sure you understand the difference between they’re/their/there. It’s/Its is trickier and I’m pretty sure only grammar professors are going to know the difference. Use ‘an’ in front of words with vowels. Last, but not least, try to keep the same tense.

Meaning, if you’re using third person past, don’t suddenly switch to third person present. I.e “She was scared” and “She is scared”. Exception being, dialogue. Which causes me to jump into, you guessed it, dialogue! Dialogue is how the characters communicate and how one characters tells another that they’re being dumb and need to stop pining over someone. Don’t make your characters talk the same. Everyone has their own little verbal quirks.

Some characters might be verbose and use fancy words. Others might talk in short, clipped sentences. It can help to sit down and watch some show you’ve watched a thousand times before and pay attention to how differently the characters speak. This can also be useful for figuring out how to write facial expressions or body language in posts.

Essentially, there’s a lot of little things you can do to beef up your posts, but most of it is gong to be in the description of what your character is doing and feeling. However, don’t add in fancy, flowery words. That’s called Purple Prose, i.e calling “eyes” something silly like “oculars”. If your reader has to google or use a thesaurus to read your post/writing, or you’re doing the same to write it? You’re very likely doing Purple Prose and it significantly reduces the readability of your writing.

Post claim, too

And a third for good measure

Thank you for this!

I think the title was meant to be grammatically incorrect as a joke. No need to criticize, Eury is helping writers across HEE, and it was so nice of them to take the time.

That said, thank you so much, Eury!

Entire books are written about how to write "good". I don't think it's realistic or fair to expect Eury to cover ALL of that in a single forum post 😂

But how good is those books wrote