Talk:Stargazer/@comment-25941663-20180629092542/@comment-25941663-20180629092707

I am not saying this is a bad story, far from it, it was actually a pretty cool read. But there is the potential for so much more in here. Sometimes you go archaic, sometimes you go simple. Even though this contrast can do wonders for a story, here it seems more accidental than on purpose.

Since I have also dabbled in writing in archaic text (even though I haven't posted most of the stories), I will give you some advice that has helped me greatly.

If you want to go down the archaic route, I highly suggest you spend a lot of time hovering over your every sentence. Pick apart every word (especially the descriptive ones) and try to find a more eloquent way of expressing what you want to express with the word. Use a thesaurus, it will help you a ton. At the same time, be very careful to not overdo it, since you will surely tire the readers with purple prose. What I do is try to sprinkle the use of sophisticated words. I usually go first for the descriptive words, maybe even adding more in. Then I go for the nouns. Pay extra attention to not ruin the flow of your text. If something looks jarring, remove it. Read the text out loud if need be, and if it is hard to recite, change the wording since it will also be awkward reading.

Finally, I read again the text and if it is too purple, I tone it down. This usually means removing words as is, since using simpler words in their place may lead to the problem this current story has.

I know that this is a pretty slow process. But since we are both non-native English speakers, we have to compensate with more effort when writing in more sophisticated prose. As an example, for my story Of Gold, Blood and Holy Light, I spent hours and hours writing it. At points I spent more than an hour on single sentence, to craft them as best as I could. On this point, remember that you don't need to write everything down in the first draft. What I did if I was stuck on wording is to write down in simple words what I was trying to say and simply move on. I returned to it later.

Hope all this will help you when writing word-heavy stories. It may be that this is not what you ultimately went with in this story, but if you want to go there I highly suggest you follow my advice. It helped me greatly, even though it took a lot of practise and most of my tries are not even on the wiki.