#its very difficult to shape vague feelings into a coherent sentence

[retrograde-eyestrain]

abt art advice. i took a very very long break from art for similar reasons and what helped me to get back was just telling myself that it was okay if it turned out bad (i had some more arguments for myself but that was the main part). i also thought abt art pieces that were "imperfect" anatomy or composition wise that i still really liked as insp. about how conveying some idea is the most important part.. 6_6 and i started really simple, with MSpaint bc having few brush etc options helped

ah yes thats true. logically i know i dont actually have to draw at all so i shouldnt get upset about not doing it or it looking bad, but i actually want to draw! the thing is i wouldnt be so bothered by my needing long breaks from art if it didnt take me so damn long to finish one piece. i draw suuuper slow. imagine how long you think slow drawing is and then imagine it slower, its so frustrating when im drawing something and i lose interest in it before im half way through.. not to mention how discouraged this makes me from starting a new idea when i havent finished the last 10 pieces (and dont get me started on the amount of times i started a drawing and before i could finish it someone else posted a drawing very similar and i dont wanna seem like im "copying")

but uh yea there are older pieces that i have that arent perfect and i still really enjoy them, youre right. im glad other people like them too! its just my pacing thats the main problem i guess, perhaps im having trouble working on this current piece because ive lost interest even though i still very much like the idea behind it

[radmissfliss-blog]

Often I worry that, in my writing, my descriptions will come off as "clunky" or cumbersome to read- do you have any suggestions for more streamlined prose?

This is a lovely and difficult question. I think what makes it most difficult is that I’m operating without a sample of your particular writing so I’m not sure what about your style might be considered cumbersome to read, and I’m not sure if that means you’re being wordy, your word order is a little wonky, or you’ve got a pacing problem. It could be some combination of these things, or something else entirely, but I’m going to answer in the best way that I can.

The first thing that I’d do is ask what draft of your piece you are on? If you’re still writing your first draft, and you’re just testing the waters to see if the idea is solid, then that’s the kind of feedback you should be looking for. You can always come back and fix problems in later drafts - what you want to do first is get it finished.  Remember it’s always easier to pare down than it is to build up!

Assuming you’re revising a complete draft, you want to look at your descriptions and determine their relevance to the story. Some authors can get away with adding quite a bit of detail, and some can get away with adding very little detail. Your level of detail will vary, but finding the right balance can be tricky. You want to include descriptions that conjure up an image in readers’ minds but that don’t slow down the pacing of your work.

Pacing would be like the heartbeat of your piece - it speeds up when there is action and slows down when there is downtime. If it slows down too much, then the reader runs the risk of getting bored and putting your story down for some other activity. That’s why activities such as evacuation and rest are usually cut from stories. You can alter the pace of your stories in a few key ways.

Short sentences are a great way to increase the pace of a scene, especially when there are two characters engaged in snappy back-and-forth dialogue.  I feel the best action scenes are ones that make use of short, guttural or impactful sounding language. She thudded to the floor. He withered shuddering blows. They skidded to a halt.  Thudded, shuddering, and skidded all kind of have that onomatopoeia which is nice in the imagination.

Conversely, longer sentences can slow down the pace of your work, particularly when they lead into drawn out exposition or non-sequiturs. Using long sentences can be particularly useful in capturing certain stream-of-consciousness moments, or in giving lush descriptions of your setting. This gets complicated in its own right, though, and again largely leans upon personal taste. Essentially, you still want to keep your descriptions concise. Try to describe a scene by just talking about the things in your mental image of what’s happening that would immediately stick out if you were watching it in a movie or reading it in a comic book.

As an exercise, take a scene from a movie, preferably an opening wide shot or even the whole “Concerning Hobbits” sequence at the beginning of The Fellowship of the Ring (2001 Wingnut/New Line) and try jotting down notes of the first things you see in each shot. You probably won’t get much of a detailed description and that’s all right. You can probably get enough information to start writing a coherent description with no more information than you need.

The sky over the green rolling hills of the Shire shone a bright blue. A road, winding round Bag End’s garden fence, led straight to the old gate that sported a sign reading “No Admittance - Except on Party Business!” On this day, though, none were on the road, for they were instead in the fields preparing decorations and setting up tents - at the speed with which Hobbits accomplish such tasks - to get ready for Bilbo Baggins’s one hundred and eleventh birthday party.

Tolkein would have, and did, handle this scene very differently. Of course I omitted Gandalf, who was the one who was present in the movie to perceive the sign, but this was more about the exercise of translating what you jotted in your notes into something on the page. I still urge you to try this and see what you come up with. It doesn’t have to be from Fellowship of the Ring!

The reason I bring up this particular work is that Tolkein quite notoriously gets away with having several-page-long non sequitur backstories about this event or that item or that Elf’s long lived lineage and service in the War of the Ring.  For that reason, I was never personally able to read The Lord of the Rings. But I’m not so brazen as to suggest that Tolkein was a poor writer for doing it! Some people really dig that level of detail. So remember who you’re writing for.

If you’re being too wordy, then it might be the number of adjectives you’re using, or the number of verbs you’re including in your sentences (if you’re describing an action scene). The verbs are largely a concern of pacing, and shorter more digestible sentences, especially in earlier drafts, will help make the action you are describing much clearer. Take, for example:

1.)

They somersaulted into the room while drawing their katanas, slashing expertly at the three ninjas who were pouncing through the air from above in a triangle death noose and stabbing with their finely sharpened sais. Their attack successful, the ninjas tumbled through the air, blood trailing from where they had cut open the stomachs of two of them while the third one smashed headlong into the wall.

2.)

They somersaulted into the room. Three ninjas armed with sais pounced on them as they entered. They recognized the attack immediately: it was the triangle death noose! They slashed expertly with their twin katanas at the ninjas, wounding two and sending the third tumbling into the wall. Traces of blood spattered onto the ground as they stood up to reposition for the next attack.

The second example is much more concise, flows better, and uses choppier language to set the pace. There’s no extra information in there, but you can get a pretty clear idea of what is going on. It’s okay to let the reader’s imagination run with the concept for a while.

Remember it wasn’t until Harry Potter and the Cursed Child that Hermione was finally portrayed as the woman of color she was supposed to have been the whole time - most audiences imagined her to be white. Some of this could be blamed on JKR’s description of Hermione, but by not pegging Hermione as a woman of color she kept the focus of her character on her intelligence and natural abilities - not these things because or despite the fact that she’s a person of color. Hermione wasn’t meant to make that kind of statement, and so her representation was subtle. To some extent, so was Dumbledore’s homosexuality. The difference being that there weren’t many situations where Hermione’s being a woman of color in magical England would likely have been an issue in the story - or at least that is JKR’s contention.

Another example of someone who was vague on descriptions is H.P. Lovecraft. He is famously bad at giving detailed descriptions, particularly in his early work, where you get babbling about pseudopods and formless shapes and sights that are indescribable (so indescribable that he won’t even try).  Later in his work he calmed down and started giving his nameless horrors names, I think in large part thanks to the influence of his wide epistolary network.  But Lovecraft is best known for using very ostentatious language. He was inspired by the late 19th century authors, particularly Edgar Allen Poe, and so mimicked that style more into the early 20th century when such ostentation was falling out of vogue with the common reader and you could pick up a weird fiction magazine for a nickel on the street corner.

So there is a lot to be said for style, and the authors that influence you, and how those things come together. An old Pixar trick is to take things about stories you like and didn’t like and determine what it is you liked and didn’t like about them - and if you didn’t like them what would you change to make it a story you did like. You can do the same thing on a smaller scale by looking at a paragraph or a sentence and figuring out whether you like or dislike a sentence and why. That’ll tell you a lot about the way you prefer to write.

Word order is something you should pick up from a style guide. I’m bad at describing it and okay at doing it. A bit dated, but Strunk & White’s The Elements of Style is a good book to read for any/all of this stuff. It’s not even very long, or at least the one I picked up at Half Price Books for $4 isn’t. It’ll be the best book on grammar you ever purchase.

Hope that answers your question! Let me know if I can provide any more follow up information!