Young Writers Society

I feel like I'm a fairly decent writer (cough) but I have tendencies of perfectionism. Each time I try to write something it has to not be cliche or unoriginal and every sentence must sound good, to the point where I spend more time staring at my paper than my hand does writing. When I get into a rhythm or groove it just all comes at me but at the beginning...ugh.

And also, when I write descriptions about things I tend to overblow it. As in like:

The sweet, bright autumn sunrise crept like a menacing temptress into the closed eyes of a young man, hanging over a baby blue sky.

Y'see.

I hate these two things whenever I write, but I can't avoid them. Help!

Perfectionism is every writer's biggest downfall. Nate recently made a post in the YWS blog about it, I recommend looking at that. [/I'm lazy]

Also, Snoink put something in the knowledge base titled "Boring is Good" which might help you get over the overdescriptiveness. Is that a word? Meh. Too sleepy to care right now.

Linkage: article19443.html

It may or may not help. The real point of the matter is to quell those instincts and "silence" your inner editor until you're ready to edit the entire piece. Makes life way easier because then you have all your ideas down and you can focus on just improving them.

-St. Razorblade
The Official YWS Pirate

The over description: it happens. Either you can think before writing about using adjectives as sparingly as possible, or just let yourself write and then attacking it in the editting process. Details are best made out of nouns and verbs; adjectives can help, but too many will turn a sentence into a soup. Fand's tutorial should also be helpful; it has examples and an editting exercise in there, so you can actually do something with the information.

Beginnings are hard. For the most part, anyway. I personally stew over the first paragraph of any story a week before I actually write it, getting a vague sense of clever things I'm going to say in it, the beautiful description I'll write (yet not overdoing it) and a flashy character that captures the reader by the first sentence. Beginnings should be short, to the point, exciting, with the perfect dash of description, and well written. This is your story. The reader doesn't care about 'menecing temptresses'! They want you to put them straight into the action, straight into to the middle of things. Suck your audience in! This can be done with dialogue, short, clever description which not only gives your reader immediate impressions about your writing style but also your character's personality. Everything revolves around the character. Period. And if your character has no conflict in his life, or at least something happening to him by the first paragraph, your reader will yawn, or worse, put down the story. That's bad.

Summary: Start a story with your character smack dab in some sort of conflict. It could be an argument, a shoot-out, a hunt, or whatever. But your reader needs to either A.) care about what's happening or B.) care about the character.

Desciption is something else altogether. The answer to this question is: read other stuff. Mimic your favorite authors. Describe only the things they describe. Check out Cal's 'Histrionics' article for more info.

Anyway, hope something I said helps.

-Kylan

Here's what I do:

Tell yourself "It doesn't have to be perfect....I can always edit....I can always edit.....I can always edit!!" over and over again. Remember, chances are you'll have to go through and nitpick anyway at the end. You can catch everything then. Just start to write, and don't care too much, at that point, how it sounds. Getting it on paper is the important thing.

Perfectionism changes for everybody, so just do what you like. You should probably cut down on the adverbs and resort back to the KISS principle. The words you used in the above quote can be cut down because many of them carry enough weight themselves not to need another adjective or adverb.