Your Flaw(s) as a Writer

My main flaw is that I can't come up with names to anything. I have fully developed characters and an interesting plot, but I have yet to name any of the characters or places.

Everything. All of my writing is a flaw. [/Shameless Self-Deprecation]

More realistically, I can't make writing a priority... it's starting to piss me off a little.

I truly wish I knew how to describe objects and people well enough to make it real.

@ Shmitty - Stephen King has been known to get names out of the phonebook. Personally, I use Google or 20,000 Names.com

edited 22nd May '11 10:58:21 AM by KarlKadaver

That works for people. Naming people is not particularly hard.

What if you need to name places?. What about events?, Let's take this Up To Eleven... What about stuff referenced in-universe, For Detail!

edited 23rd May '11 8:51:42 AM by SavageHeathen

Ah, ok. *strokes beard thoughfully*

For the name for my City of Adventure in one of my works, I asked people to send me names for a city and I combined my two favorites.

For events, I usually go with "The [Something or Someone] Incident." *shrugs*

I think I got down the most of them:

1. Obssession with making the main characters high schoolers. I blame that on my desire to make my work into an anime.
2. I suck at description and when I rarely does it right, usually when describing sceneries, I tend to go overboard and digress.
3. Dialogues. Not having much friends, I really don't know how dialogues between real people sounds like.
4. Obsesseion with research.
5. Lack of drive to actually write a whole lot.
6. Tendency to just handwave things in the name of cool.
7. Lack of originality
8. Illiteracy
9. The worst of all; lack of common sense. I sometimes don't know how some events are supposed to lead into other events logically. If I ever get my work published, expect to see a massive Headscratchers page and list of What An Idiot moments.

Come to think of it, should I even be writing...

being a pretentious twat

I think that's kind of harmful for writing.

- I flat-out suck at physical descriptions and have a bad habit of writing huge chunks of dialogue with very little in the way of action beats.

- I come up with lots of Neat Ideas for premises, but am terrible at coming up with actual plots. I just go for pages and pages on the theme of "let me show you my Neat Idea!" and then suddenly realize that several chapters in, nothing has actually happened (besides the initial event that kicked off the story).

- I enjoy ambiguity to an extent that sometimes crosses the line into lazy, confusing writing.

- If an idea is not completely, totally 100% original, I usually talk myself out of writing it before long. Which is a problem because nothing is completely, totally 100% original.

I think those are the big ones.

I am horrible at physically describing people or things.

Here's my private trick for coming up with really weird names.

• Take a VHS tape, one that has a program on it that supports closed-captioning.

• Go to the end of the program.

• Rewind it, while still in the program (without pressing "Stop", in other words) but with the closed captioning on.

• This should give you lines and lines of gobbledygook. Some of those strings of letters are bound to make for good names. Works like a charm for me.

This is gonna be a long list.

1. Resolving things too quickly/easily.

2. Failing to provide details of the surroundings in the story.

3. Failing to give the entire cast the attention that they deserve.

4. For my fanfics: Oo C behavior.

5. Schedule Slip. :(

6. Ass Pull.

I started writing a story that was supposed to be a straight anime style, Magical Girlfriend / Unlucky Everydude / Romance / Shonen...thing.

Somehow, it turned into a five (as of the time of this writing) chapter Deconstruction of what would happen if an Unlucky Everydude tried to intervene in a fight between Light and Darkness in the real world. Now he's tainted by the Shadow and the Magical Girlfriend character is nowhere to be seen. Ugh!

Anyway, my flaw is that this always seems to happen to me. My superhero story was intended to be a deconstruction/reconstruction from the beginning, but now that I'm aware of the Trope, I can't stop myself from letting it leech into my other works.

• Tendency to hyperfocus on minor details that probably don't matter.
• Tendecy to procrastinate.
• Tendency to second guess myself and have the urge to re-write what I've just written in case it isn't good enough.
• Being my own worst critic.
• Being prone to both writer's block and tapestry syndrome.
• Difficulty getting organised.

I tend to get started writing before making sure my outline and research is sufficient, it really slows things down when you have to chase down sources half way through your analysis section, also tends to lead me to write papers that are too long because I didn't account for the space needed to prove a point.

I've got loads of flaws. For instance, I can't write a query letter to save my life, and I'm weak at romance. But I was reading some earlier comments and wanted to make a few remarks.

An editor is never a replacement for the ability to use proper spelling and grammar. I worked for a publisher for two years and I learned a lot, foremost being that publishing is an extremely competitive business. No one will even look at your manuscript unless you demonstrate a real mastery of the English language. When it doubt, use spell check.

Or befriend and English major and make... I mean ask them to do revisions for you for grammer and prose...

@ MEPT 72

That poor english major. What a nice girl. You should pay her money for helping you. A lot of money. Also you should let her win a tickle war.

edited 1st Jun '11 1:39:57 PM by starmoonberry

Scenery Porn

I cannot do scenery even if my life depended on it. I envy those that do scenery well as I cannot even describe a chair.

• I tend to avoid dialogue, in that a lot of what I write is description.

• A lot of that description edges toward purple if I'm not careful.

• Gerunds and adverbs. Everywhere.

• And then my biggest problem, run-on sentences due to the over use of interjections. I use a truly insane amount of interjections.

• And, I've learned from the Shounen project that I tend to take over other characters, which is bad because they're not mine.

• Also, the inability to finish anything I start.

Oh, I do the run-on sentence thing too — I'm always using em-dashes to append one thought to another even though you're not really supposed to (and throwing in lots of parenthetical asides); I'm also inordinately fond of semicolons, and sometimes I use them multiple times in one sentence without noticing (largely because I've forgotten where the sentence actually started); this used to drive my English professors nuts.

I am a very good writer, except for the occasional long-windedness, although it's nothing a little line editing can't fix.

But that is all pointless because I NEVER FINISH ANYTHING!

Sometimes I don't even start and just write one hundred pages of notes, or I write ten first chapters but don't like any of them. Blarg. >.<

I can't world build for crap, something I've be trying to fix with varying degrees of success.

After some writing, I have determined one weakness I have is not knowing how to describe someone's eyes, especially as a way of showing how the character is, if he's healthy, happy, broken, etc.

@Away Laughing: I have the opposite problem. If we did a Fusion Dance, maybe we would make the perfect writer. :3

I rarely spend much time on surroundings, just like in my drawings... >.>

Sometimes I wonder if I put in too many characters and if give them any time to breath.