III.  Miscellany

Poets: Stop trying only to capture emotion.  Any thirteen-year-old having a bad hair day can write with emotion and add line breaks.  Since we all share the same small set of emotions, why should the reader care about your love when they have or had their own?  Make the emotion new and different; set it apart as something unique.  Emotion plus unique (non-cliched) images, metaphor, and maybe symbolism and/or an idea behind it?  Tightly-knit nouns and verbs light on the modifiers, articles, and other filler?  All this and sound devices?  Now you’re getting somewhere.

Prose writers:  Keep it simple.  You are the only one who cares that your character has seven piercings and a birthmark shaped like Mickey Mouse behind her knee, or that everyone in Walla Walla Blinkerville speaks Wallawallese.  If you can tell the story without backstory, do it.  If you can rewrite the chapter using half the words and saying the same thing, do it.  Give characters names that your readers will be able to pronounce, or they will stumble over the name every time, disrupting the ‘flow’ of your writing.  Use the active voice instead of the passive.  If you don’t know what that means, learn it.

Revise.  Erasers aren’t just on pencils for the artists.  You can always go back to an earlier draft.

Set goals for yourself.  What do you want your writing to be like?  Would you rather have a description-rich, metaphor-heavy style like Raymond Chandler or would you prefer something more like Hemingway’s sparse prose?  Do you want to learn how to use the long line like Whitman and Ginsberg?  Do you want to keep a conversational style or transition to a more formal one?  Are you going for sentimental like Brideshead Revisited or matter-of-fact, like 1984?  Neither?

Hold yourself to a higher standard.  Hold your peers to a higher standard.  If you want to be a published writer, you’re going to have to write better than 95% of the writers on dA.  If you want to be a great writer, you’re going to have to write better than at least 99% of the writers on dA.  If you settle for average writing, you will fail on both counts.  You should always be looking to improve, by reading, debating, critiquing, and writing.  Since you’re critiquing, you will be helping your peers, too, and they might repay you by critiquing you when you need it.  Everyone wins.