Every writer needs to know whether his writing is effective, or is his writing good?
Why it is important for a writer?
“I still suspect that most people start out with some kind of ability to tell a story but that it gets lost along the way. Of course, the ability to create life with words is essentially a gift. If you have it in the first place, you can develop it; if you don’t have it, you might as well forget it.” ― Flannery O’Connor, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose
A writer can sequence sentences together, but it may not be enough to achieve writing qualitative heights. It needs to be intelligent and insightful. For most of us, recognising weaknesses and flaws in our writing may be difficult. Despite that, our writing needs to be as good as it is comprehensible without punctuation and grammar mistakes.
- Fiction writing is the composition of non-factual prose texts. Fictional writing often is produced as a story meant to entertain or convey an author’s point of view. The result of this may be a short story, novel, novella, screenplay, or drama, which are all types of fictional writing styles. Wikipedia
For a professional fiction writer, pro-level writing is the ultimate goal. It requires time and practice to learn fiction writing layered with many necessary elements. As you improve and learn, it can achieve quality with a balanced perspective. The reader should able to catch a breath with your description of action scenes stuffed with many turns, chases of different kinds, and explosions. A scene blooms as if combined with all elements pieced together, like baking a tasty cake. All fiction techniques and ingredients need to be balanced perfectly to raise interest and irresistible for the reader.
“Action is the pulse of any good story, but the character is the heart. If the action has no consequence to the character, the story loses heart.” ― Linda Yezak
Fiction writing may please one reader while it may look grimace for another reader. Fiction becomes bad writing if it does not generate a reader’s interest. Any writer needs to have a perspective on his writing quality to attract a professional market.
“The trouble with writing fiction is that it has to make sense, whereas real life doesn’t.” ― Iain M. Banks
Fiction writing should not look offensive, lecture, or pretending to be story writing or preachy. The best way to check if your writing holds valid merit, initially, is to set it up for criticism. So put it to a critique for his opinions. More detailed the better. However, you can disagree with their opinions. If critiques pointed many flaws in your writing technique such as ‘sentence structures too similar’, ‘your dialogues too bland or unnatural’, ‘use stronger vocabulary’, etc, you then need to improve your writing.
You need not disappoint with the critiques’ comments, but focus on genuine feedback that is valuable to you. If you feel the comments are mostly negative, you can choose to ignore them. You can take an exercise yourself to reread your transcript after some time and see if any comments of critiques hold water according to you. If your critiques did not point out technical weaknesses, then your writing is good.
Try to use less passive voice, sticky sentences, repetitions, too many sentences of similar length, amongst other areas. Sometimes your writing might be good technically but fall short on execution that might be off-target. So review to find red flags on execution targets and improve them. Try improving your script on all levels. Remember offensive or gratuitous writing or poor writing or combination of these will not receive approval of publication. If a publication sends you a note saying that the ending did not look good, that means your execution of the fiction is not on target.
Writers need to understand that an ending is one of the structural weaknesses of incomplete story writing or an execution flaw. It is about putting the right information at the appropriate time so that is intriguing to the reader for making the end make sense. For this, the story writing should include the basic structure of the story involving characters, goals, turns, and twists in the plot.
The reader should empathise with the characters or connect with them, and then only your story writing looks emphatic. Use commonsense yourself to judge standard of your writing, but critiques are dependable to know if your fiction writing is well effectively.
Learn the fundamentals of writing engaging fiction in this helpful course taught by an award-winning novelist and instructor at America’s top writing school.