Where are your weak spots?

[inkdust]

I've known for a while now that I struggle with grounding my scenes with setting details. I'm so wary of drawn-out descriptions of places and people that I run the risk of writing scenes that read more like dialogue scripts. So one element of tackling my second draft is consciously adding in more background details.

Where are your writing weaknesses? What do you do to try to overcome them?

Comments

[agilebrit]

Same for me, and I think it stems from being a fanfic writer before I started writing original fiction. In fanfic, your readers already have pictures in their heads of what things look like, and it's actually considered a faux pas to describe the characters (I've seen it complained about at fanficrants, in fact).

So transitioning to original fiction has been a challenge in that way. I've gotten better at it, and making it do more than one thing, but it's still a struggle. Not only that, I write short fiction, so I'm pressed for space anyway.

I especially struggle with describing my first-person protagonists. I think you get one "mirror scene" in your whole life...

[inkdust]

Character description is even worse for me than setting description. I can give a character a line or two of description if my protagonist is meeting them for the first time, but otherwise my characters tend to run around as blank slates with one or two features I managed to squeeze in mentioning without feeling ~so obvious~. My protagonist? Forget about it. Even in third person, the perspective so clearly belongs to that character that I search for tiny opportunities to mention a feature without cringing. ...I may be over-sensitive about character descriptions.

[sarillia]

What I've found works for me is having my first-person protagonist compare other people to themselves and having not just a description but a reaction to what they look like. Saying that she couldn't imagine having hair as long as the woman she just met, her shoulder-length hair is as much as she can manage. Or that the athletic man in front of him made him feel self-conscious about the way he's let himself go in recent years. Or when she meets someone as short as she is she thinks about how nice it is to not have to look up to look them in the eye for once.

[inkdust]

I definitely see comparison as the best way to describe a protagonist. I was really pleased in my current story when my MC saw an old photo of her mom and aunt and I was able to say that they all had the same color hair. Her relationship to them is huge in the story, so it was even significant to the plot :D

[serria]

Oh, that's a really good point, too. I think the transition from fanfiction to original comes with a lot of obstacles... actually, this would be a good topic on its own, but basically. Yeah. As you said, character descriptions are pretty unnecessary in fanfiction, unless one character is introduced to another for the first time, and his/her first impression is really important to the scene. There's other things, too - when I write fanfiction, I'm complementing the original series, and when I have a character do or say something, the audience knows the context and background of that character making a choice. In original, you aren't playing off of anything, and I think that makes for some legitimate differences between writing good fanfiction, and writing good original fiction.