Really what is the secret, everytime I write a piece of my mind into the draft,it become somewhat weird,like it doesn't mix well with the sentence, as if it was too forced,can you seasoned author tell me how to write beautifully?
No,wrong question,what I mean to say is,can you seasoned author tell me your secret to writing your character reaction,and the rules behind it,so it can be made beautifully. I really struggled with it
Ok. Well, there's no single element to getting good at writing. It's all just practice, practice, and a WHOLE FREAKING LOT of practice.
But, there's a few things you can do to guide your practice and help yourself improve faster. I'll give you a rank order list of the most to least important.
#1: Learn the ground-rules concepts
Like people said before, just learn what kind of spelling and grammar you are supposed to be using, and a few basic concepts of what makes a good story. It's super basic, and I would think a lot of people might have already checked off this step. But, it is still an important foundational step, and if you do not have this down then you will not be able to inform your path to improvement and the later steps will be useless to you.
#2: Read case-study books and other works in your preferred genre
Whatever genre you're going to be writing, you want to read what other people have already written. This is to help you learn the conventions of the genre, and also to help you see good examples of the literary rules followed and implemented well so you can use them as role-models.
There are also a few more general case-study books that are examples of just plain excellent writing, using a literary technique to a masterful level, that is at such a level that anyone writing any genre could draw inspiration from it.
One of my favorite stories to recommend as a case-study is Ascendance of a Bookworm, but I also see a lot of people online talking about Avatar the Last Airbender. Those are both truly excellent stories that you can stand to learn a lot from no matter what you're writing.
#3: Just write.
Like, actually write. It doesn't matter how good it is, just do it. Go ahead, give yourself permission to suck (because it is going to suck) and just do it. You cannot just suddenly be good at writing, no matter how much theory you study. You need to actually do the writing in order to gain the experiences necessary to improve yourself that little bit at a time.
I cannot stress enough how important it is to just push out some work. And, it can't be something like forum posts either. It needs to be written with a mind-set that you are actually trying to release it, either as a story or as an essay. That's the level of writing you need to do, and you need to be doing a lot of it.
#4: Edit your work
I can already hear you. "Yeah, of course! I've heard that. Editing your work is supposed to make it better. If I go through and correct my mistakes then of course it's better!"
But, this misses the point. Editing is not just about catching your mistakes. It's also about becoming more familiar with what your mistakes are. The more that you go over your work and edit it, the more familiar you become with your own mistakes, and the more it will improve the first drafts of your future works. Making a habit of always editing is the fastest way to improve your overall quality of work.
#5: Edit other people's work
Yes, editing other people's work is actually a very good way to improve your own work. Reason being, in order to do a good job of editing, you also need to give feedback and say exactly why it is that this thing is an issue. This helps you to learn what the rules actually are for yourself way better.
In fact, between editing your own work and editing other's work, I'd say editing the work of others is actually way better in terms of speeding up how quickly you improve yourself. The only reason this is put a rung lower than editing your own work is because you can actually use the post-edited product and post it, and if you edit every time then it's a really good way to improve your work quickly. It's a multiplier on the quality of your base work. But, editing the work of others may not see direct benefits, but over the long hall, it will improve the base quality of your work very quickly.
It is usually better if you have someone ask you to help edit their work and you have an open two-way channel of communication with them, but you don't actually
need to get that. You can also just copy-paste someone else's work into a word document and then edit it just as a private writing exercise for yourself. If you want to improve the effectiveness of the exercise, add commentary to the edit explaining why each thing is a problem to an imaginary made-up version of the author of this work.
#6: Look for and accept critical feedback
Critical feedback, that is feedback that is looking at your work through the eyes of an editor looking to find problems as opposed to a more general reader who will give a basic comment like "Oh, it's good," (maybe even when it isn't,) or "I didn't like it," (without telling you WHY they didn't like it,). This can help you better discover where your problems are.
If you have good enough intuition developed through a lot of work reading other people's work and self-editing your own work, this step becomes less necessary, which is why I placed it so far down on the list. In fact, you can even skip this step entirely if you do those other two enough.
The conventional way to get this kind of critical feedback is to get someone else to help edit your work. (I'm sure you can see the pattern here. Best is edit your own work, second is edit the work of others, and least helpful of the three is getting others to edit your work.) That said, while I rate this the least of the three, it actually is still very important and very helpful, especially early on as a writer, and ESPECIALLY if you don't have the foundational basics from #1 fully mastered. This can be a great way to have someone else help point out the flaws in your basics so you can close those gaps.
#7: Research advanced writing techniques
You can go on to some of the many writer's youtube channels where skilled writers or people doing literary analysis of other people's work are all over the place. Just get into the writing side of youtube and start greedily consuming that content. There are some that are better than others. Overly Sarcastic Productions is the best at literary analysis hands down, and Terrible Writing Advice is quite good at providing anti-examples, examples of all the ways that writing can be done wrong, so that way you can presumably do a better job.
Tale Foundary is good for their community building. You can get good advice in their writing community. But, I wouldn't really recommend their actual videos. They are... Ok. They
sound like good advice. But, compared to others who do the same thing like Overly Sarcastic Productions, they just pale in comparison.
Which brings me to...
#8: Join a good writing community
I will start off by being straight with you. Scribble Hub forums are a
TERRIBLE writing community. People here are just as likely to tear you down and make fun of you, make back-biting comments when you're only trying to help, and ignore you when you come in honestly asking for help. You need to find a writing community aside from this place.
Royal Road forums are better from what I've seen, but the best I've been a part of is on the 4thewords community section. The people there are actually really helpful and give really good tips and advice. I believe a very large part of this is because 4thewords is a writing game that's all about self-improvement to begin with. You are able to read other people's works over there if they decide to make them public, but first and foremost it is more about writing than it is reading.
As such, this will naturally attract a different kind of crowd. It really is just a better community. And, they have also finally introduced a free user tier to the site, so you don't have the fee to join that they used to have going on.
(That fee may also have been involved with why it was such a good community, the kind of person who pays money for a tool that helps them write is just not going to be the same as a lurker who's hanging around a novel posting site in terms of what they have to say. But, somehow I still don't see the quality going down even with this free tier introduced.)
#9: Research subjects pertinent to your writing
Bringing in real world knowledge about a variety of different subjects can go a long way to improving your writing. For instance, if you're writing about sword fighting, you might want to research a bit about how real sword fighting is done. The HEMA community on Youtube is pretty good for giving you a primer on the topic, and if you really get into it then you can go an actually join some kind of sword fighting class yourself. (It's also worth noting that a lot of the more famous HEMA youtubers are writers as well.)
Research in a topic is good for adding depth to your story, and depth helps engage the reader. A skilled enough writer does not actually need to know all these topics. There are writing techniques to write around a lack of knowledge and still have it perform incredibly well, but it also helps if you as the author actually know about the things your characters are doing and can speak with expertise in your writing. In fact, it can give your story just that little bit of extra spice that can hook the reader.
A warning, this kind of research and expertise cannot take a bad story and make it good. It can only take an already very well written story and bump it up to make it that little bit better. It's not a valuable investment if you're still trying to learn the basics, it's the kind of thing you do to sharpen yourself up when you're already doing very well with your writing. This is why I placed this one at the very bottom of the list.
