Thread:Joanne Maniago/@comment-29570797-20160821000649/@comment-24965192-20160929061130

I'll answer Solon's question first.

The very first part of why your writing became sloppy is the way you present Michelle's thoughts. Massive over-usage of ellipses and stuttering/stammering makes reading awkward. One major point is that they don't convey pauses or stammers as you would think they do in real life. If you want to make a pause, narrate it using a dialogue tag. Or, if you're creative, add a bit of information that drags—where the reader knows that there had been a pause in thoughts. Digression: too much dialogue tags are bad too, because tags tell, not show. (Don't hang too much on the "show; don't tell" rule.) The way people would read with all these punctuation, it'll seem like you're trying to tell them Michelle sounds like a kid in her mind. Sure, regret and sadness at all, but that's not the way to do it. OOC (Out Of Character), I'll call it. One major flaw is that thoughts don't stutter/stammer, unless you're whacked in the mind. In story narration, the text is the character's thoughts—first person or no.

I'm not going to lie: you restricting yourself and the way you write did make your writing more junk that before. Don't restrict yourself on anything. Only limit yourself. Those words you restrict yourself from may be filler words—but they are also simple words that you can use to convey a quick informative message that readers can understand upon first read. Suspense-filled scenes and quick-paced scenes all use simple words for this particular reason. No one wants to stand up and look up the big word in the dictionary and stray away from the story. Besides, restricting these words doesn't help you, in any way, stop you from alienating your words from the character's thoughts. It's the way you write that sees if your words connect your character's hearts. Even if you don't write in deep POV, it's still possible. Just put yourself in Michelle's shoes, her thoughts become your thoughts, her actions become your actions, then write. Just remember don't go OOC.

Your main focus of the story was Michelle's death, not her past. Don't mix it. And I can tell that both you and the anon misinterpreted the actual meaning. Let me explain. Yes, it's right to give a bit about her past, but look at it from a larger angle. You have only the beginning and ending bodies of paragraphs denoting her death, and everything else in the middle is about her past. What you're doing is having the readers care about Michelle's past rather than Michelle leaving the world for good. That's not right; that's not what you want to convey, isn't that right? By doing this you're confusing your reader and some might not know where they should start caring about the character. It's going all over the place, basically. I notice that you've crossed past and present a few times, but they were really, really short compared to the amount of backstory you gavev—it's unbalanced. Not good. Also, the backstory may be a good read, but it's becoming an obstruction, not an explanation of her thoughts. Besides, as I've mentioned a lot, no one likes a story dragging—especially not if it's diverting the main focus of the story.

I'll keep it in a way that's easy to understand: don't overuse and don't underuse. Writer rules are there to help new writers get a grasp on how their language works, but the true writing rule is that there aren't any rules. They're meant to be broken and bent. That's how literature works wonders.