Writer Flaws (Working and Becoming Better)

Hi, my name is Bryony and I write books. I'm querying agents and writing two other books. I'm a great surface writer but I'm terrible at depth.

Introduction over. But that's what it feels like sometimes. Especially at this point: at the end of April, I finished an edit on Imperial Infiltration. Now I'm trying to get back into the swing of writing and it's hard. I'm surprised at hard it's actually proving to be, creating words again, creating outlines to work to (more on THIS) after working for a solid month with words already there. There's a quote something like: it's easier to work with a page of words than a blank one. And that's meant to be writing encouragement. But whilst editing has been a royal pain in my backside sometimes and made me cry reading over my story, writing is proving difficult. It is much, much harder to work with a blank page that I have to fill. That said, it's way harder for me to not write. So I'm working and so far, I'm onto Day Eight of my new project and I've gotten just over 11,000 words done. Not great. Ideally, I wanted to work on drafting quicker this time round. But it's some sort of progress so can I really complain? No. I just want so much more from myself.

Whilst trying to get back into writing, I've had frequent thoughts that I'm only a good writer on the surface, that when it comes to depth in my story, I'm actually quite bad. I don't know if it's a side-effect of struggling to write again because it's only since editing that I've had these thoughts. And I want to write depth, obviously. So I made a small list of writer flaws that I know (or think) I have so I can work on them and focus on becoming a better writer with broader stories.

1. Terrin and Derek (THC). Lucas and Emily (THC). Reya and Aritha (II). Con and Caiden (II). Sen and Sar (Untitled).

These names are the main sibling relations I have in my stories. Aside from Sen and Sar, they all have something in common: they have no peace. Usually, as well, they're torn apart due to some sort of personal decision. The elder had everything surrounding them, whether they are the heir to the throne or the better huntress or the one who wanted to fight. With Reya and Aritha, they actually nearly killed each other. See the pattern? Their situations are different but they always have the same non-peaceful relationship. That is terrible. Only delving into my fourth (unpublished) book have I learnt to write a nicer set of siblings, which is Sen and Sar. Angry siblings are always an on-going theme in my books and I need to work on that. They're always incredibly deep and dramatic, but they're always broken in some way.

2. Family! (Again). This is proving a bad reflection on my own family but everything usually just fits when I create these stories.

For non-royal characters, their parents are either dead or escapees. If they have someone, it's always a "father figure" who torments them or they hate to no end. Switching to the royals, the father, usually the king or emperor, is a tyrant. I will hold my hand up and say that I cannot write nice father characters. I struggle a lot, and I need to work on that too. I can't have every sibling wanting to kill the other and I can't have every father dead or hated because they're awful people. That's bad writing. It's not even a niche thing; it's just bad and unimaginative. I'm trying to convince myself that if I can envision fights and grand palaces and such developed storylines, then surely I can imagine a nice father character at least once.

3. Tense.

This has become a thing of stress for me lately. It's actually become apparent that I tense completely wrong, and it's made me very paranoid. There have been about five recent incidents where I've been corrected on my usage of tenses--even in my query letter when I got people to help me out, this was commented on most. There were about two or three occasions of corrections needed in that letter. It was only a page. I dread to know how many is in a 350 page novel. But that's what critique partners are for! That's what beta readers are for; dragonspells (twitter follower) and Dayna, I'm looking at you amazing people. These are the only two people (aside from agents) who've properly read any of this story. I've shared small paragraphs on Twitter, but I've not opened those up to critiquing (obviously).

4. OUTLINING.

Here's another bad secret: I never outline. I've written books and half-books and short stories but I only did my first outline for a story late last month. It felt a lot better, in all honesty. I usually delve into writing with a loose knowledge of the timeline and what will happen, a few random parts of dialogue or description scrawled in a notebook, and everything else usually came to me messily. That usually led to a lack of a reliable draft to further work with. But for the second book of the Imperial Infiltration duology, I actually outlined. For my new story, I'm outlining. So it's nice not to go into writing as blind anymore.

Somebody once told me that writing is easy. It's not. It's really not. Editing is not easy. If you think it's easy, you're quite delusional, sorry. Even published authors don't consider it easy, if their social media posts are anything to go by. There is very little about writing a novel that is easy. It requires concentration, focus, major thought, time, effort, planning. It's cancelling plans because there are goals you want to reach, it's saying no to going outside in the garden because you can't see your laptop screen in the light, or it's encouraging yourself to get out for the day to spend a few hours getting at least something down in a coffee shop just to get some fresh air. It's cramped fingers and aching arms from being in the same position for a very long time. It's getting headaches from staring intensely at a screen. Writing is not a walk in the park by any means. It's forgetting to properly hydrate yourself sometimes because you're too busy completing a chapter. But when you have a full, finished story, all those factors are worth it. Because you may have something that looks and reads nicely for all your struggling.

But now I've assessed some flaws in my writing, I know I can work on them. Perhaps there'll be a change in the story directions in the future. After Imperial Infiltration and Book Two of that, and Tollen's Story (which I haven't properly introduced), I have a few more ideas lined up. So I'll be trying to adapt some changes to those stories.