Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-33803324-20191017132724/@comment-28266772-20191031131359

So mechanically you’re fine. But stylistically you’re shooting yourself in the foot. You’re writing like this is a movie. But it’s not a movie: it’s written word. When writing you’re meant to use words to put an idea, or an image, into someone else’s mind. The trick with writing is keeping things brief: words, unlike the details in a picture, are consumed one at a time. There’s a rhythm and a pace that means you have to select for details but present them in a way that doesn’t overextend the pacing or else people get bored.

With a movie, you can physically control every detail and let the audience choose what to focus on, knowing/hoping that the overall effect of each shot will achieve the desired goal. Want a stormy scene? Shoot a stormy scene: maybe the bins blow over, an umbrella flies past the camera, rain and wind whip past, flags on poles go crazy in the gale, leaves and other detritus are tossed into great big whirlwinds. You capture it all, put it on a screen, and the audience absorbs it in a fraction of a second and they do so automatically.

But with writing? You don’t have that control. No one will read the same paragraph and construct identical mental images. What you have to do—and this is the challenge—is you need to use words to put the overall idea of what you want and you need to do so quickly. An important concept is “trusting your audience”. You can go into agonising detail but you’re going to bore the shit out of people pretty quickly. So let’s say you want to convey an old house: pick two or three details and then move on. Don’t stick around. Yellowing walls, creaky floorboards, patches on the wall where photos once hung but now lie smashed on the ground. That’s it. That’s all you get. You start prattling on about skirting boards, curtains, individual pieces of furniture, lighting, fireplaces, mantles, hearths, rugs, and I can guarantee you, people are switching off and reading something else. Pick two or three details and move on. Get going. You have so little time to grab someone’s attention you can’t sit around painting every agonising little detail just because you have an image in your head and you desperately want it to go into your reader’s head exactly the way you want it.

That’s never going to happen and pursuing it will destroy your reader’s interest. In this case here, you are trying to exact incredible control of the minute details of a person’s habits, movements, and speech. It’s boring.

As a writer you have surprisingly little control over the image in someone’s head, but you do have a lot of control over the emotional content of a scene (something movies can’t do as well). So use that emotional content to shape the image, not the other way around.

So here’s what you actually have.

''My roommate called me into his room to show me a clip of a girl with dark hair, blinking at the screen. ''

So that’s a great introduction. Everything else? Filler. The verbal equivalent to potpourri. Go back through this story, take a handful  of details, and put them back in. The orange tongue? I liked that. Details like that, slipped in here and there, will work wonders. You just need to be about 95% more ruthless about you do, and don’t, choose to let in.

Also that’s not even touching on your propensity to overcomplicate things to the point of sheer silliness:

I stuffed several triangle-shaped snacks into my maw -> Dude’s eating nachos and he’s described it as “triangle-shaped snacks”. That’s a bit much, don’t you think?

Not trying to be a dick here. You’re a talented writer, you just need to chill out and get to the point. Remember, every word you write needs to do at least two of the following:

Develop character

Advance the plot

Establish setting

Create mood/atmosphere

Go back, carve this thing to pieces, put it back together at like 2-300 words and then write the rest of the story. Let’s see what you’ve got. You’ve got some decent talent, and I’d like to see you back here with the rest of it.