oubii asked:
would you have any small writing tips to share with others who are attempting to write their own stories?
ask-whitepearl-and-steven answered:
Sure.
Disclaimer: This is not a full on tutorial on how to write. These are just tiny, tiny little grains of wisdom of things I realized here and there. Do not eat this advice like a full course meal. It isn’t one. It’s just a dusting of some spices, and I am salt bae-ing them over you, but they are not calorically relevant without a story.
1. Help your readers read your story.
AKA: If you want your readers to build a house, you better take them to a Home Depot and teach them how to use a screwdriver first.
You want your readers to read your story easily? You gotta make your story easy to read. That means learning how to make sentences easier to understand. That means breaking up walls of text into smaller bites. That means - yes - spelling words consistently and using accessible (not Correct, necessarily, but ACCESSIBLE) grammar!
You want your readers to understand your world? You gotta give your readers tools to understand it with. That means explaining new concepts! That means describing stuff a lot! That means using visual language if you don’t have actual visuals!
Your readers will not read your mind to know what you MEANT to say. You have to say what you mean. You have to mean what you write. Learn to write clearly. Learn to help your readers.
2. Something that takes you a month to make will take your audience ten minutes to read.
You want to spend an hour drawing one comic panel? Great. You wanna spend an hour writing a single paragraph? Fantastic. You wanna use up a week perfecting a script? Amazing!
Your readers will still glance at that panel for a second before moving on. Your readers will still eat that paragraph in a bite. Your readers will skim that script. If you’re lucky.
You cannot control how much your work is appreciated. But you CAN control how much of your time you sacrifice to make it.
Balance the scales.
3. You are not talented.
Neither am I. Nor are any of us.
Listen to me. Listen.
Talent is a beautiful, useful word. But it often lies to us. It suggests that we are born better than others.
This is not often accurate. What talent hides within itself is not pre-ordained inherent skill. It is not something you are birthed being. It is not a statistical difference of physicality.
Talent starts with passion.
Maybe you have passion for stories - so you beg your grandfather to read to you before you can recognize words, and you write a lot in every school assignment, and you pay attention to EVERY story you watch in school plays, and you observe all the characters you see in movies, and you CARE. So. Much. And this moves you to try to write, and then to try again, and then to try harder.
Talent does not exist, because no amount of ‘you were made for running’ can make you run. No amount of 'you were the son of great authors’ can make you write.
But inherent curiosity can push you forward. Inherent curiosity can make you watch, and observe, even before you understand you are observing. Inherent curiosity for your personal interests makes you a fan of writing, of drawing, of world-building. It makes you research how to be a great author before you even know what research is. It auto-tunes you to what you know is good about these things, and it gives you the necessary tools to know what will work and what won’t.
So when you think you are talented, understand that this is not something that was done to you in the womb. It was something you raised, and watered like a seed, before you even knew what you were growing.
Don’t rely on talent. Understand that you got this far because you CARE about this thing. And don’t forget to care. Because that’s what has carried you this far, and it is the only thing that can carry you even farther.
also, cringe is dead.







