User talk:Wrongness
This is my talk page, you can talk to me there.
It's always good to see a new writer on the site. We do things a little differently here to keep things from having problems. One thing that you have not done, that NEEDS to happen is that all the pages of your story (which means all the links you put in the story) need to contain the story title. This keeps each page unique to your story so pages don't accidentally cross between stories. Please read the Format Rules to get all the details. I am now fixing the issues, and you can use those edits as your guide. Welcome to the site, and thanks for contributing. --Elerneron (talk) 11:08, 20 May 2017 (CEST)
Jemini
Hey, I just saw your story, The Kidnapping. After also seeing your User page, noting yourself as "an aspiring writer," I felt like talking to you (doubly so beings the admin is busy to the point he didn't get the chance to give you the site's standard greeting.) At any rate, I am someone who has essentially become something of a veteran writer due almost entirely to writing erotica on sites like these. I feel it is the job of the more experienced to give pointers to the less experienced, assuming you want my help that is. As for your story, it actually does look pretty good for a 1st work. It is not quite as good of quality as it could be, but it is formatted in such a way that actually favors writing appropriate to your skill level. It takes someone pretty aware of their own skill in order to come up with something like that. (In my case, I was over-eager when I started out and started writing something formatted for a writer far above my ability. It did help though, it forced me to improve fast.) Jemini (talk) 00:57, 20 May 2017 (CEST)
Well, at this point I would say the best advice I can give you is to follow the 2 standard general tips that are given to every starting writer. 1st, more details. After that, even more details. After that, never too many details. There is always a way to add more details to a scene, and your scenes are still at the point where more will improve them. (It is a matter of developing your skills in order to figure out how to transition from one detail to another in a way that feels smooth and relevant.) For instance, maybe add a little about how the girl struggles as she is taken into the van, or perhaps talk about how the girl and her friend interacted before they parted. There is always a way to add more detail to the scene.
2nd. Edit, edit, and then edit again. Every time you edit a piece of writing, it will get better. A piece of advice I got when I took my English 101 class in college, and this is a piece of advice that turned me from a struggling English hater who could barely write at a C level into a straight A English student who loved writing. This advice was that a good writer does not just sit down and produce a good piece of work. A good writer is someone who writes a crappy piece of work, and then edits it repeatedly until it becomes good. There is a trick to editing though. Editing is best if you spend about 2 days away from your writing without even looking at it before you go in to edit it. In a pinch, it is possible to get the gap down to 1 day, but you need at least that. If you go any shorter, checking it over will only really be good for spelling and grammar corrections. If you want to make the big changes like changing your phrasing or adding, removing, or re-writing entire sections you will need to spend at least a day away from it and preferably 2. After this long, you can find the errors and/or ways to improve it mostly on your own. Although, it is helpful to get someone else looking at it and pointing some things out around the 3rd or 4th draft. (Personally, I would recommend with this story since you are so early in it that for your 2nd draft you just re-write each scene without even looking at the original you have posted right now. Since they are so short, it is quite possible for you to do this, and I grantee from my own experience that this will cause the 2nd draft to be very different and improve much faster than if you were looking at the original as you write the new version. I actually did this with the 1st 4 drafts of a book I was writing, and these huge massive re-writes were several chapters long. This should be easy by comparison.)
I think it is best to just leave you with those two general tips for now. I have confidence with just that you will have the story so far improved by so much by the time it has been through 2 re-writes that I really won't have much to call out. (I like to leave my specific critiques minimal anyway, don't want to make the work no longer seem like it is your own.) Jemini (talk) 13:31, 20 May 2017 (CEST)
All right. Learning a lot about everything (Such as my comment about the 4th amendment in the discussion section of your last post) is another thing that is always going to be an author's friend. However, the reason that wasn't in the last list of general tips is because that's something no where near as immediately implementable. Basically, just know a lot about a lot of varied things, at least enough for you to remember it exists so that you can go back and reference it later. There are a few key subjects such as human anatomy and physiology, human psychology, and the law of wherever you are basing your story that are going to be the most useful in the most situations, but the more subjects you know about the better. Those are just good ones to start with due to how likely they are to come up. Jemini (talk) 21:47, 20 May 2017 (CEST)
Well, it's been a couple days. I think if you are interested in me continuing this farther then I will give some more specific tips after your next round of re-writes. I found that's about the point. You can come up with 2 re-writes worth of material yourself, but after that you often need some direction from outside eyes critiquing your work. And seriously, I would recommend the blind re-write, just don't even look at what you have now and re-create the scene from scratch. It is the more difficult but more rewarding method, and the difficulty in implementing it is a lot lower for you with this story since you are so early into it and each post is so short. Jemini (talk) 21:39, 22 May 2017 (UTC)