Technique

What are you good at?

6 Comments

To round up our week of inspiration, I thought it’d be nice to have the chance to share what you’re good at. Come on, you know there’s some aspect of writing that you’re pretty good at. You can claim that your critique partners say it’s good, or you can say that you’re pretty good at it on the second draft (first drafts don’t count here anyway), if you feel like it’s boasting, or you can qualify it with what you’re not so good at yet.

Personally, I’m pretty good at dialogue—or so I’m told. (I know a couple things I can work on in that area, of course, but “good” doesn’t mean “perfect on the first draft.”)

So what are you good at?

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6 thoughts on “What are you good at?”

  1. I’m good at dialogue and action. I love lots of action and movement, but I also add as much humour as I can get away with. Now, what am I bad at? Well, um, varying my sentences. I have a bad habit of making a pattern, then I have to edit until I get it right. My critique group often point that out. I also have a habit of overusing the word ‘Then’. I often have to edit them out too. Actually I see one of the little suckers above. LOL. Not! 🙂

  2. Personally, I think I’m pretty damn good at describing the environment and the world in which my characters live. However, I have a bad tendency to let that description go on and on. And on. And on. I’m constantly stripping out massive blocks of text from my work. Which is strange since I used to be a screenwriter and would write nothing but dialogue. I just can’t write dialogue in novel form, so whenever I get stuck I revert back to Final Draft and then copy and paste it into my novel in Word 🙂

    Trish, I’m also shite at varying sentences. Just about every bit of description/action begins with “She/He”, and almost all dialogue starts with “You/I”. Most of my sentences also contain a variety of contractions, gerunds, and totally made up words (or words made up by pop culture – like “frak” or “gorram”). And it’s really hard to remember not to do that since that’s how I talk regularly. I just get the dialogue down as I hear it, then translate it into the way my character would actually speak on a second read-through.

  3. I’m told I’m good at pacing and dialog, though I’ve also been told my ‘lower class’ folk’s poor grammar is too exaggerated. I found that funny because the characters’ speech patterns are copied from my Texan niece’s, but I did tone it down.

  4. Dialogue seems to be theme. When I’m struggling with a particular scene, I will often jump to the dialogue. Sometimes I can feel my frustration dissolve as the writing starts to flow. I then go back and build the rest of the scene around the dialogue. James Dashner once praised my dialogue in front of about 200 people. That felt pretty good! I’ve been told that I have a talent for brevity–saying a lot with a little. There’s also a downside to that where people look at me and say, “I don’t get it.” I sometimes rely too much on the reader to fill in the blanks.

    I can see it in my head, why can’t you? 🙂

    I’m reminded of what OSC once said when asked what is the single most important thing he could advise a young writer. “Clarity. If your reader can’t understand you, then they stop reading.” He finished that thought with, “Faith, Hope, & Clarity.”

  5. When I get right into my characters’ heads I’m told their dialogue is good. Sometimes, however, my own voice gets in the way so I really have to watch out for that. I like description and do it fairly well, but too often I forget to include it because I have the vision in my head and forget that the reader isn’t a mind-reader. LOL

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