Made rebloggable on request (grumblegrumbleTumblr).
From yuutfa:
W-what? ; // A // ; W-well thank you! I’m really flattered that you think so. I’m honestly very happy that you responded to me, lack or essay or not. Thank you also for checking out my tumblr, it means a lot to me. Though I have so much to improve on… As for a different goal, ha ha… You have such an eloquent and confident writing style, you can’t fault me for wanting to aim towards that.
“Eloquent and confident” – I can only be flattered that you think so! It doesn’t feel that way to me, but then we never quite know how we’re coming off to others from the inside, do we? Which is why I do things like check out peoples’ writing blogs and leave comments. ^_^ It’s so insanely useful to get feedback on how others perceive you.
You know what, I have some shareable tips I’ve learned for improving my writing (here’s a secret: most of it happens in editing!), so I may as well share them. When I’m doing my initial writing, I (try to) focus on getting the ideas down. I’ll get tied up forever if I try to worry about making them sound good on the first pass, so I do my best to combat my natural urge to tinker, and just put things down however they want to come out, even though sometimes this feels a bit like taking sandpaper to my brain. Sometimes I have to actually grit my teeth and say to myself, “This whole paragraph sucks, but NBD NBD, I’ll fix it in editing” and make myself move on.
BUT once I hit the point where I start rewriting, here are some things I do:
1: I try to switch out passive voice for active voice wherever possible. Passive voice isn’t always evil—sometimes it’s exactly what you want—but if you use it where you don’t need it, it saps that sense of the dynamic from your story. Also, if you’re writing and you can’t shake the feeling that your main character is coming off as a swooning maiden, it’s probably because you’re writing in passive voice and haven’t noticed. When you’re rewriting, it’s not all that hard to switch out a lot of the passive voice for active, and it’s like magic: suddenly the story comes to life and starts to draw you in.
2: Starting sentences with ‘it’ – I do this all the time and it’s a terrible habit. You know, that construction where you write things like, “It didn’t occur to Roger until later…” As my English teachers used to say, “If you can’t point out what ‘it’ is referring to, ‘it’ shouldn’t be in there.” So in rewriting, I try to do away with as many of these as I can. Again, the results can be pretty impressive for a fairly low amount of effort: eliminating one ‘it’ can suddenly make a whole paragraph scan better.
3: There’s an English writing…hmm, tense, I suppose you’d call it? or maybe it’s a voice, called E-Prime. In E-Prime, you’re forbidden to use any version of the ‘to be’ verb. No be, being, been, is, are, was, were, etc. It’s more of an academic exercise than a real-life thing, because it’s functionally almost impossible to achieve, but I’ve discovered that when I’m rewriting, trying to turn my story into E-Prime as much as I can does absolute wonders for forcing me to tighten up sloppy sentences and inject some variation and creativity into my sentence structures.
All of these force you to exercise a bit of creativity in rewriting. You have to come up with different ways of phrasing the idea, and sometimes the solution isn’t instantly obvious, but you’ll almost invariably get a better, more compelling sentence as a result. They’re also a matter of going for the low-hanging fruit. You don’t have to achieve a 100% success rate; just go through and knock out the the problem wherever you see a way to do it easily. It’s not like you’re being graded on this, after all (augh, look, there’s an ‘it!’); there’s no need to labor obsessively over a sentence that resists rewriting unless you want to. But the more you use these, the better you get at them, and they’re great techniques to help you push back the boundaries on your writing style, especially if you’re starting to feel repetitive.
(In other news, hah, I got the essay up!)