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Improving

psyanic

pop a wheelie on a zeitgeist
1,284
Posts
12
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  • Age 27
  • USA
  • Seen Apr 10, 2023
As writers, we all start somewhere. Some people start lower than others, while other people begin at a higher level. But we're all writers and we improve gradually. So have you noticed yourself improve as a writer? Have you read any of your past works and thought to yourself, "Man, I seriously wrote this?"
 
25
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12
Years
I definitely think I've improved. For example, compare this:


"The boy pulls her ponytail, and the girl responds by punching him. They soon get into a huge fight, paying no attention to the other duo that comes up behind them.
'Mind if we take these?' A brown-haired girl asks. She's holding up the bag of food the kids have, dangling it in their faces.
"Gimme that!' The girl yells. She tries to grab the bag, but fails. The brunette laughs. 'You'll have to do better than that!' The kids stand up, too distracted by the brunette to notice her brother taking everything else the kids have."

To this:

"Conversation comes to a complete stop while we eat. I thought Volkner looked healthy and well-fed, but he seems just as starved as the rest of us. His Pokémon eat quickly and heartily except for Scarlet, who takes great care to taste every little drop. My stomach is full before the bowl is empty, so I hand the rest off to Scout. Volkner notices this and puts his bowl down in his lap, face covered in soup. 'Aren't you going to finish it?'

'Well, no. Not if I'm full…' he stares at me, looking somewhat disturbed. I try to explain, but he talks over me."

That's a two or three year difference in writing, and holy crap does it show. o.o;
 
117
Posts
12
Years
As writers, we all start somewhere. Some people start lower than others, while other people begin at a higher level. But we're all writers and we improve gradually. So have you noticed yourself improve as a writer? Have you read any of your past works and thought to yourself, "Man, I seriously wrote this?"


Funny you should ask because I was just looking over my 1st fan fic. I was a bit disturbed in the first chapter. Well it sucked in my opinion, It is not as good as I wanted it to be *sigh*

Aside from others who literailly pull you into thier fan fics in the first paragraphs. The problem I keep thinking of, is posting it on PC. Once readers get a general sense of:


"yeah, your fan fics left a bad taste in my mouth so I won't give you a second chance and read you later works."


I mean not everybody is going to follow you and watch you grow.

I was reading the thread
"things we hate seeing in fan fics" and it just shot me down. Especially I didn't even know the definition of "Mary Sue" before I was autually purposely aiming for that..Oops..Thinking is was..cool to have the main character get all the babes, lol.

For now I have grown, in common sense at least.
 

Misheard Whisper

[b][color=#FF0000]I[/color] [color=#FF7F00]also[/c
3,488
Posts
15
Years
Well, let me just pull out some excerpts from my first fanfic, which I happen to have a copy of right here. Actually, no I don't. I had to go find it. Ah well. Anyway, here's a snippet:

Absolutely not me. There's no way I wrote this. said:
The sun beat down upon me harshly as I stood at one end of the sandy arena, waiting.

The noise of the crowd, roaring in anticipation, was loud in my ears as I stood, waiting.

"Ladies and gentlemen, boys, girls and Pokémon!" boomed the announcer over the speakers. "It's the one you've all been waiting for! The Grand Final of the Kanto League Championship!"

I felt my breathing intensify and my heart pounding in my chest. This was It. Capital I, It. After months and months of terrifically hard training, I had made it to the Grand Final.

I admit I was surprised to be here. I wasn't sure my Pokémon and I could pull through, but I knew I had to have faith. In my Pokémon and in myself.
"Our first contender!" The announcer's voice jarred me sharply out of my reverie. "From Saffron City, it's Kenji!" I waved and smiled weakly at the crowd as my name was called. I was feeling decidedly nauseous.

"Aaaand, from Olivine City in Johto! Fresh from winning last year's Silver Conference – ladies and gentlemen, put your hands together for Cassie!" The crowd cheered again, a lot louder than they had for me.

I squinted through the dust haze at my opponent. I couldn't see much, but she looked about seventeen, her hair whipping around her face in the wind. She was confident. That much I could see.
That's the start of the fic, a oneshot for a contest. I had to write a 3v3 battle, and, well . . . ugh. Looking at it, there's not much wrong with it on the surface - that is to say, it's largely free of the errors that tend to plague beginning writers. My subsequent attempts at chaptered fics were the same, but oh hell, my style was just so darn wooden at that point. And that's where I think I've improved the most, to be honest. My writing's been relatively free of spelling and grammar errors for years, which is good. It's the actual tone of the story that's evolved the most - that and my ability to come up with a plot. For the life of me, I can't tell you how my first three (dropped) chapter fics were going to end, or even which direction they were going in. I just made it up as I went along. I still do that to a certain extent, but at least I keep some sort of plot in mind these days.

Comparing the actual battle scenes . . . guess which of these comes from my current fic and which came from that early abomination. It shouldn't be hard.

Fic 1 said:
Howling aggressively, Manectric charged up its electricity, a crackling aura of yellow energy building up around its body. With a final growl, it launched a sizzling stream of lightning towards its opponent.

Swanna took to the sky, leaping out of the way as Manectric's Thunderbolt attack zapped past.

"Again!" Ren said, causing Manectric to loose another bolt of lightning towards Swanna. Swanna was too fast for it, however, banking out of the way. We're never going to win from this distance, he thought. But Skyla has an advantage with Swanna's mobility. And why isn't she attacking? She must be sounding Manectric out, trying to work out how to deal with it. That means she's worried about it, which means I have a chance if I can figure this out quickly. Now what other moves might Swanna have?

Swanna dived straight towards Manectric, its graceful neck straight as an arrow. Skyla must have given some signal that he'd missed; he'd have to watch out for that in the future. Is that an Aerial Ace attack?

"Get out of the way, Manectric!" he ordered. It was too late. Swanna seemed to blur, its outline becoming indistinct, and a split second later, it disappeared from view entirely, crashing into Manectric as if it had been teleported and sending the Electric-type flying. Ren knew, however, that it had simply moved so quickly that it had disappeared from view. He remembered Winona using the same move in his battle against her to devastating effect. How did I beat her then?

The obvious way. "Manectric," he said thoughtfully. "Do you remember when you were training with Zangoose in the quarry the other day? I want you to apply that here next time she tries that, okay?" Manectric barked assent, keeping its eyes fixed on Swanna. "Good. For now, let's go with Thunderbolt again. See if you can't get a little closer this time."

Fic 2 said:
"Quick, Jolteon!" I cried desperately, "Use your Thunderbolt!" Jolteon charged up for a moment, glowing and sparking, and then poured 10,000 volts of electrical energy through Tyranitar. The big Rock type took a fair chunk of damage, but nothing like what Jolteon had.

"Come on, Tyranitar! One more Earthquake to finish it off!" came the order. I knew I had to think fast. If that attack made contact, Jolteon was toast! As Tyranitar prepared to launch its second Earthquake, it hit me.
"Jolteon! Get on top of Tyranitar!" It was our only chance. Jolteon understood. Using its speed and powerful hind legs, it raced towards Tyranitar, leapt into the air, and landed on the big Pokémon's head. Tyranitar's Earthquake couldn't touch it! I celebrated inwardly.

Once the Earthquake was over, I cried, "Now jump down, Jolteon, and use Double Kick!" Jolteon did so with blinding speed, slamming both of its hind legs into Tyranitar's body. Tyranitar stumbled and fell to one knee. I heard its Trainer shout something, but didn't hear what. All of a sudden, I saw bright white light starting to gather in Tyranitar's mouth. Uh-oh. The Hyper Beam. The all-or-nothing.

"Agility, Jolteon!" I commanded. I was starting to panic now. "Use your Agility to dodge it when it comes!"

Tyranitar fired. Jolteon leapt to the side with blinding speed. Yes! We had evaded it! I took advantage of the exhausted Tyranitar to order a Pin Missile attack. The glowing needles shot through the air, drilling into Tyranitar. The behemoth fell crashing to the ground.

Oh my. Of course, I'm still not 100% happy with how I write. That's part of the secret to improving, I guess: never be satisfied with what you can do; always believe you can get better.
 

bobandbill

one more time
16,876
Posts
16
Years
Heck yes. Apparent when I recently saw older versions of my first few chapters of my first fic (which I've only now nearly finished four+ years down the track) - some more elementry grammar/spelling mistakes (I didn't know how to do punctuation around dialogue for instance), and lighter and more telling on the description side. I think I've also polished my comedy as well since then.
 

Bay

6,381
Posts
17
Years
Indeed I have improved quite a bit. Used to keep making tense and awkward sentence mistakes, but I'm getting better at finding those in my writing (still feel I need a beta to check over grammar stuff though, lol). Also of course description. I still feel I could be better, but I''m at least content at slowly improving my writing style.
 
10,173
Posts
17
Years
  • Age 37
  • Seen today
My first fanfic was horrible. I have to specify "fanfic" because the original work I used to write when I was younger was at least salvageable. But my first fanfic... Yeesh. There was no description at all. I had pages and pages of dialogue but no narration or character thoughts. It was ridiculous.

Now, I focus more on character thoughts than dialogue. It was a complete switch-around.
 

Ayutac

Developer who wants your help
157
Posts
12
Years
Wouldn't say I improved over the last four years. I take critic and save it for later (when I'm going over the chapters again), but I'm often not able to find mistakes myself. Little mistakes, I may say, because I care a lot about logic in my stories. Like, I built a space ship by calculating how big it has to be to fit in N citizens. Therefore I'm just using the amount of space there is for residential area – because there is space needed for power plants, workstations, education, hospitals and the gravition generating core too – and how the gravitation should differ between the core and the outer bounds of the space ship.

Nevertheless I still laugh out loud reading my work from time ago, because for me it's still as ridiculous as it was way back.

Well, I somehow get the feeling I'm recieving too less critic. What could Ido to change this?
I'M SOO AWESOME!
Already working?
 
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