Story Regrets

dark.:

That happened to me too.
And since my brain works in weird ways when it's under pressure I always get English or French words thrown into places where they shouldn't be.

And I love my language... I try to make up for it by reading a lot, but I don't think I'd be able to write anything readable in Romanian now. And at least here, there's always been a fight to preserve the language because German and Hungarian were official languages and blah blah blah, I feel like a traitor.
O_O

Yeah, English words tend to sneak up on me all the time.
When I took classes in several different languages it happened that I said sentences mixing Swedish, English, Spanish, Latin, German and Japanese.
Nobody understood a thing I said. x]

I’m even more of a traitor. I don’t really like reading books that are in Swedish. If they’re translated. If they’re written in Swedish I love it but there are so many badly translated books that I really rather read them in the original language if I can. >_O

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I just recalled another mistake. I never proofread enough. I need to read chapters/standalones over several times, carefully, to get rid of all typos but I never really did that for the longest time. I also never had prewritten stories. I do now and it works a lot better for me. This way I can polish it until not only errors are at least kept to an absolute minimum but every word is just right. I posted half-finished chapters before but I would never do that now. I used to never edit, I’d backspace and rewrite when it came to chaptered stories. Granted sometimes that’s a necessity still, but being able to edit something already written is great.

I think the biggest mistake I made was trying to find an "easy fix" for conflict. Everything would somehow turn out okay (usually) in an unrealistic time frame, no matter what the characters had been through. And, to add to that, I wrote very soap opera-esque stories; something dramatic would always follow a resolution to a previous problem.

Using parentheses to give out messages in the middle of paragraphs.
I don't do that anymore.

Some more mistakes I made were writing male characters as if they were females and focusing more on using flowery language than telling the actual story.

I rushed things and made things awfully cliché and horrible in my story If You Get To Heaven. Not to mention the fact that Frank is way too much of a girl.

IN my planning of Hard As Nails, I would have made it less cliche. But it's been around for a year on Halloween and I've fallen in love with it. I don't think I'll ever change the story.

I'd of fixed my voice when I started. I had good ideas and decent characters, but the way I worded things was (and still sort of is) rushed and flowless.

I wouldn't make my first character ever a Mary-Sue. And I wouldn't have called the story a "Legolas Love Story", since I really hadn't written Legolas into it much. But I'm rewriting it and posting it here (at some point), so we'll see how that goes.

I used to rush things a lot, or never write it out and just think it'll come by itself (I actually still do that and I need to stop it).
I looked back and realized that one of my stories that I thought was good, most likely wasn't good at all.
It was too rushed, and I made a character go to a concert just after she had been raped.
I could tell that I might have rushed it too much after I wrote it, but I think I just wanted to get it out there to see what people thought.
I think I'm still learning what my mistakes are, actually. I'm still making mistakes, but I'm trying to get better at them.
I know I need to work on actually planning out the story rather than just relying on one certain part of the story to make it the story, and that I don't need to rush things.
I have found out that I seem to write better in third person, so I guess that's an improvement.

I tended to rush stories, or glamorize any of the rare self-insertions I did. I don't write them anymore.

My worst habit was and is over describing unimportant things like food. It's really not interesting. And there's really only so many things you can write about putting a pizza in the oven.

I rushed all my writing!
Now, I'm just editing my old story slowly.

I think one big thing I regret from one of my first stories was rushing things and trying to update according to my readers' schedule. My first story had a fairly complex plot that would have definitely benefited from me taking my time with it, from developing the characters to drawing out the plot better. I made the characters bond and moved the plot along way to quickly, and the ending was terribly abrupt.

But I learned a lot from that story, I learned to take my time and really develop a character's personality so that when events take place in a story, each characters' reactions and actions make sense. I also learned that when you rush a story, it will never really flow well because it ends up developing unnaturally.

I recently found old stories on my computer from years ago and they were just, oh god. Terrible. Mary Sues everywhere, and me trying too hard to make everyone seem hardcore and shit. Ugh. I kind of feel like I know what I'm good at now, but I'm not sure. Considering how young I am I'll probably look back at some of my current stories and think "WHAT WAS THAT KID THINKING?"

I learned very quickly to not try and have a huge cast of characters that were all equally developed. Like, I know now that it's okay to have a lot of characters, but please, only completely develop a handful. And give them their own personalities, for the love of Holy Dumbledore

[/personalrant]

Audrey T.hor:

I think one big thing I regret from one of my first stories was rushing things and trying to update according to my readers' schedule. My first story had a fairly complex plot that would have definitely benefited from me taking my time with it, from developing the characters to drawing out the plot better. I made the characters bond and moved the plot along way to quickly, and the ending was terribly abrupt.

But I learned a lot from that story, I learned to take my time and really develop a character's personality so that when events take place in a story, each characters' reactions and actions make sense. I also learned that when you rush a story, it will never really flow well because it ends up developing unnaturally.

This. To this day, to some extent, but I'm getting better at it.

I definitely regret just focusing on the two main characters. I feel like some stories are really limited if only the few mains are examined and the supporting characters are only given surface information and only exist to relay arbitrary information.

Overdescribing things, trying to cram as many metaphors as I could into the space of a chapter. This generally bogged down the story and got me distracted from focusing on the actual plot.

Reading over The Mighty Mosh recently made me realize that switching POVs back and forth for every chapter is not fun. Especially when the same events are happening in each chapter and they're just being described in two different POVs over again. I'm not doing that again hopefully.

I regret trying to start a story twice with a road trip as the main plot. Never again should I incorporate road trips into stories, no matter how much I want them to work. IT JUST DOESN'T WORK FOR ME.

Also, changing POVs. I do this way too much and now it just drives me insane. I regret writing stories with different POVs because like the road trip thing, I tend to lose inspiration quickly in them too.

When I first began writing, it was Green Day bandfiction. However, my roleplay partner loved MCR too, so we did a crossover story where Billie fell in love with Gerard. I regret every word of that bowl of bullcrap.

I also regret trying to sound hardcore. I ain't hardcore, I'm a science nerd.

I've rushed a lot of endings just to get things finished. Especially in group writes.