how to write goooder

[seppuku me senpai]

i thought it would be fun to share writing tips, as our platform really encourages a unique genre of collective creative writing.

share your HOT writing tips! favorite words you like! what even is a semi-colon? lets get nerdy.

please avoid giving advice on how to write a character/plot/story, the purpose of this thread is to talk about writing itself, not storytelling! please be nice to each other

some of my tips
disclaimer, I am not a professional, just passionate.

1.) Do you really need that adverb?
Adverbs are words that modify an adjective or verb, expressing a manner, circumstance, cause, degree, etc. modifying words are sometimes important, but over-use of adverbs such as "just", "only" "slightly" can end up weakening your narrative voice. "Just" and "Only" are the worst offenders to dampening the strength of your sentence and weaken your intent. Try to notice how often you incorporate adverbs in your writing- do you really need it there?

2.) I don't think that word means what you think it means.
A handful of pesky words and their definitions.
Bemused (adj): puzzled, confused, or bewildered.

Likewise, bemused can mean confused, but it also means mild amusement, or amusement from something preplexing, which is how people usually use it.
According to dictionary.com,

adjective
bewildered or confused:
a bemused expression on his face.
lost in thought; preoccupied.
mildly amused, especially in a detached way.

And according to Meriam-Webster (with examples too!)

Definition of bemused
1: marked by confusion or bewilderment : DAZED
… he was fumbling with the sheets, and looking down at them with a slightly bemused expression as though the stuff before him was in a foreign language …
— Robert Penn Warren

2: lost in thought or reverie
… as distant and bemused as a Professor Emeritus listening to the prattling of his freshman class.
— Michael Straight

3: having or showing feelings of wry amusement especially from something that is surprising or perplexing
This is not another of those now popular books about a bemused outsider's sojourn in rural France, brimming with colorful locals and heart-warming anecdotes.
— J. D. McClatchy

Nonplussed (adj): Surprised/confused so much that they are unsure how to react. (In north american informal speech, it can mean not disconcerted, or unperturbed.)
Infinitesimal (adj): very small in number or degree.
Ingenuous (adj): Showing innocence, or lack of worldly experience. Pertaining to being openly straight forward; candid.

3.) Need a rhyme in half the time?
https://www.rhymezone.com/
the HOLY GRAIL of finding words that rhyme, for the next time you have an epic slam poetry contest.

4.) Brevity equals clarity.
Purple (or overly descriptive) narratives can be fun; but keep in mind that the more time you spend establishing imagery, the further away from the movement, or intent of the narrative, you go. Which is a long way of saying, if you spend a lot of time waxing poetic, you'll lose the audience's attention to the important parts. Atmosphere is second to the movement, or what is going on.



I'm looking forward to hearing from other literature nerds about tips and tricks they have for writing.

[Party in the forest at midnight]

Where are you getting your definitions from?

According to dictionary.com ingenious is,

adjective
characterized by cleverness or originality of invention or construction:
an ingenious machine.

cleverly inventive or resourceful:
an ingenious press agent.

Obsolete.
intelligent; showing genius.
ingenuous.

And according to Merriam-Webster,

Definition of ingenious
1: having or showing an unusual aptitude for discovering, inventing, or contriving
an ingenious detective
2: marked by originality, resourcefulness, and cleverness in conception or execution
an ingenious contraption
3obsolete : showing or calling for intelligence, aptitude, or discernment

Likewise, bemused can mean confused, but it also means mild amusement, or amusement from something preplexing, which is how people usually use it.
According to dictionary.com,

adjective
bewildered or confused:
a bemused expression on his face.
lost in thought; preoccupied.
mildly amused, especially in a detached way.

And according to Meriam-Webster (with examples too!)

Definition of bemused
1: marked by confusion or bewilderment : DAZED
… he was fumbling with the sheets, and looking down at them with a slightly bemused expression as though the stuff before him was in a foreign language …
— Robert Penn Warren

2: lost in thought or reverie
… as distant and bemused as a Professor Emeritus listening to the prattling of his freshman class.
— Michael Straight

3: having or showing feelings of wry amusement especially from something that is surprising or perplexing
This is not another of those now popular books about a bemused outsider's sojourn in rural France, brimming with colorful locals and heart-warming anecdotes.
— J. D. McClatchy

As for a word often used incorrectly, people write TENANT instead of TENET.

TENET is a belief.

noun
any opinion, principle, doctrine, dogma, etc., especially one held as true by members of a profession, group, or movement.

TENANT is someone who rents.

noun
a person or group that rents and occupies land, a house, an office, or the like, from another for a period of time; lessee.
Law. a person who holds or possesses for a time lands, tenements, or personalty of another, usually for rent.
an occupant or inhabitant of any place.

verb (used with object)
to hold or occupy as a tenant; dwell in; inhabit.

verb (used without object)
to dwell or live (usually followed by in).

If you are writing about your religion, you want to use the word tenet.

[seppuku me senpai]

How embarrassing!

Thanks for the clarifications I was using an out-dated dictionary it seems. Its interesting to see that words have been adjusted to reflect how they are used now. But also confusing when the new definition is the opposite of the old... These are important developments to keep up with.

[neverwinternightly]

Where are you getting your definitions from?

According to dictionary.com ingenious is,

OP defined "ingenuous" not "ingenious". Slightly different words.

Good shout on the "bemused" point though. I wasn't actually sure of that definition pertaining to amusement, so I avoided using it in that manner previously.

[Party in the forest at midnight]

Where are you getting your definitions from?

According to dictionary.com ingenious is,

OP defined "ingenuous" not "ingenious". Slightly different words.

Good shout on the "bemused" point though. I wasn't actually sure of that definition pertaining to amusement, so I avoided using it in that manner previously.

LOL I didn't even notice that, oh my goodness, I can't read. Thank you for pointing that out.

[Kessarin]

1. Capitalize and punctuate.

2. Bookmark https://www.dictionary.com/ and https://www.thesaurus.com/. On my bookmarks tab, I have those two as well as aforementioned https://www.rhymezone.com/.

3. Learn the difference between IT'S and ITS. The former, IT'S, is a contraction of IT IS. The latter, ITS, indicates possession. "It's a good day for the bird to sing its tune," is the same as, "It is a good day for the bird to sing the tune belonging to it."

4. With very few exceptions, apostrophes do not make nouns plural. Incorrect: "I sold three orange's to the traveling monk's for five coin's." Correct: "I sold three oranges to the traveling monks for five coins."

5. Think of A RAT when spelling "separate." Sep a rat e.

6. For RP in particular: while one player is thinking of what to type, other players are waiting. Consider breaking dialogue into shorter bits instead of one big block of text so that others have an opportunity to interact.

7. The word is JUSTICIAR, and it is pronounced as FOUR syllables: juh-stish-ee-er. No one is driving "justicar" here; such a word does not exist.

More when / if I think of them.

[Pincushion]

Try not to repeat the same word in a sentence twice, unless you're doing it for emphasis. I'm guilty of this on occasion when I'm trying to convey something quickly and I make myself cringe.

[magistrasa]

while one player is thinking of what to type, other players are waiting. Consider breaking dialogue into shorter bits instead of one big block of text so that others have an opportunity to interact.

I feel like this right here is the most valuable lesson this thread could possibly come up with. By taking the time to type out huge blocks of text, you sort of hamstring your ability to react to the world around you, putting you in a constant game of catch-up as things happen that you simply don't have the speed to keep up with. I'm always saddened by phenomenal roleplayers who never seem to be able to keep pace with the conversations they're part of. Hit that enter key after one sentence, as often as you're reasonably able.

The word is JUSTICIAR, and it is pronounced as FOUR syllables: juh-stish-ee-er.

And this is the second-most important lesson.

[Skibbles]

Fake it 'til you make it.

It's okay to look at other player's styles/vocab and adopt some of it into your own if you feel it really expands on your ability. Pretending is still practice!

I've learned so many words here over the years!

[Eira]

while one player is thinking of what to type, other players are waiting. Consider breaking dialogue into shorter bits instead of one big block of text so that others have an opportunity to interact.

I feel like this right here is the most valuable lesson this thread could possibly come up with. By taking the time to type out huge blocks of text, you sort of hamstring your ability to react to the world around you, putting you in a constant game of catch-up as things happen that you simply don't have the speed to keep up with. I'm always saddened by phenomenal roleplayers who never seem to be able to keep pace with the conversations they're part of. Hit that enter key after one sentence, as often as you're reasonably able.

STRONG Ditto on this.

Spelling and punctuation help with aesthetic, of course, but the true thing that will mean I remember another player as a good roleplayer is their level of adaptability to a scene. Shorter messages, with being able to react to what's around them. It also means someone can interrupt you, as is natural in the flow of a conversation.

If someone is silent for 5-10 minutes because they're typing out paragraphs, I'm dying to leave this scene because I don't want to just stand there in silence.

Fake it 'til you make it.

It's okay to look at other player's styles/vocab and adopt some of it into your own if you feel it really expands on your ability. Pretending is still practice!

I've learned so many words here over the years!

Learning from others is a great way as well. If someone has a style that feels very nice to read, I take a look at how they structure their writing and adopt parts of it.

Personally, I also read a lot of Very Bad writing in novels and the like, so I learn what I dislike, and through it, how to write what I DO like.

I am a fan of subtle emotes that focus on the small details of the face. Lips twitching briefly, or a slight cant of the chin as the character thinks. Stiffening of the shoulder or jaw. Think about physicality and representing it in little ways that can tell a lot about their emotional state. Thus you can avoid the adverb pitfall (though they have their time and place) by naming what makes up the representation of an emotion, rather than the emotion itself, and you can leave the other person leeway to interpret it, just as they do irl.

[Skibbles]

One thing you can do while waiting for someone else to speak, whether they type slow or English is second language or they simply do text walls, is pre-type conversational emotes that serve to insert just a little life into the RP and put your character's mannerisms on relatively consistent display.

Many times I'll have an emote fully prepared in advance and only need to add text to it.

Sometimes it needs to be altered slightly, but rarely does it need to be wholly deleted unless the other character is talking too fast, but then you aren't having the trouble of waiting in that case anyway.

[I will never sleep]

Biggest tip I can give for writing pleasantly reading things is to avoid redundancy and repetition unless it is for an effect. One too many of the same word? Replace it. Find yourself using the same phrase to describe things a lot? Change it up. I used to use 'as if' a lot when emoting, but I noticed that habit of mine and curbed it, and I feel I improved as a result.

Note I think 'signature emotes' are fine and can be very character defining, but as a general rule I try to avoid repetitious and redundant descriptions and dialogue.

"This dragon's scales seem to absorb light instead of reflect it- giving it a distorted incorporeal appearance. The entropic nature of the plane affects this beast differently than its more material cousins, irradiating dark wispy strands from its maw when it is in full view."

Is a lot more interesting than:

"The shadow dragon appears nothing more than a billowy mass of shadows. It's breath is nothing but a current of shadow that drains the life of anything it touches."

[Xarge VI]

Rhythm is often important in enjoyable rp. This comes from many sources but I think it has two major aspects:

The instinct when to write a long and descriptive emote and when not to is definitely something to learn and I think practice is the best teacher in that. Personally I often do what Skibbles described and often write the emote while the other one is writing their answer. And in cases where there are two fast writers rping emotes can be very short or non existent as the conversation goes on and its perfectly fine. With some of my favorite rpers there are hardly any emotes after the characters delve deeper in the conversation. Sometimes emotes are relevant, sometimes not and recognizing the relevance/nonrelevance is a skill as any.

Also instinctive response. Like in a real life conversation people get weirded out if you spend 5 minutes thinking about your answer. I understand everyone may not be a fast writer, but in game situation nothing is more infuriating than regularly waiting a 5-10 minute silence and get "I see, it must be so" as a response. I can speak only from personal experience but I think most players can answer instinctively for their characters and by cutting the consideration of "Is this stupid, idiotic or false information" will cut the response time a lot and allows your character to embarrass themselves.

Of course thinking about an answer for a long time is a perfectly valid action in rp. But what I would do is emote it, that way the counterpart can react to it without the expectation that the game is 'paused' as you consider your character's answer and it doesn't break the flow. It needn't be anything elaborate, even *He processes in silence* or *Thinking* will do just fine.

Feel the flow, feel the rhythm. Sometimes we stumble and it's alright.

Oh also. And this is important: Capitalize the first letter in a sentence.

It may or may not seem like small thing to some but it goes a long way in giving that precious first impression of you as an rper.

[-XXX-]

Walls of text often equal to uninteractive speeches that put the surrounding characters into the role of the audience. The waiting time put aside, this is still obnoxious as the underlying message reads "you're here to cheer, not participate".

Same goes for splitting the speech into smaller sentences but simply spewing them out while disregarding what the surrounding characters do or say.



There needs to be a balance between acting and reacting. Too much of the former makes the character appear selfish and trying to make everything about them, too much of the latter makes the character passive and boring.

[Dreams]

My writing tip is very specific, it is for you bards out there that do your best to pump out original content:

Rhymes are not songs.

If you really want to succeed at writing a good song, then you need to be able to write with the timing of the song in mind. This is a hard thing to do but you can easily liken it to how poetry works in terms of beats/pace. You can use stressed/unstressed syllables to create a pattern of timing, even if there isn't music (and in most cases for a song written for an online game there won't be).

The fool-proof way to do this is to pick a song that already exists. Listen to that song as you write your own and try to think about the timing of the lyrics. Write your own lyrics to match the same timing. This kind of practice will help you a lot, you'll probably get a few great parody songs out of the practice, and most importantly you'll improve at writing musically.

[Anomandaris]

Don’t write walls of text. Let others get in replies, conversations are dynamic. Learn to type faster but also be patient and create openings. Don’t monologue unless the situation calls for it or course.

[triaddraykin]

It feels like I'm in the minority here, but I enjoy longer poses/entries, and find the shorter rapid entries annoying at times.

Dave: Hey Magister

Dave: I ran into Mac earlier.

Dave: He wanted to speak with you.

Dave: Something about ogres on the road.

Dave: There's been trouble with them.

Dave: But also something odd.

Dave: One of them was trying to talk to the soldiers.

Dave: He got ran off.

Dave: It seemed really odd, they said.

I get that this mimics natural speech and allows for interruptions, but I'll find myself needing to scroll up, ESPECIALLY if there's another person in the area doing the same. There's always a minimum of two lines per entry, so I'd personally find that a happy medium here is to at least use those two lines, maybe three.

[Inordinate]

Like with all things there is a happy medium you can fit into. Read the room and adapt to the flow of the area.

[LovelyLightningWitch]

Try not to repeat the same word in a sentence twice, unless you're doing it for emphasis. I'm guilty of this on occasion when I'm trying to convey something quickly and I make myself cringe.

To be frank, that's just realistic conversation.

We ought be wary of trying to make spoken word too perfect - doing so removes the organic nature of things, and one could argue - the realism. It's all too often people will start a sentence in meatspace, change it as their thought pattern evolves and it will turn into something grammatically incorrect at best, absurd at worst. Word repetitions are one very very common aspect of this.

Personally, I only go for gramatically & orthographically correct phrasing with my PC when she is trying to show off her better education to someone she thinks below herself. Otherwise, I stick to a flawed and casual grammar that's equivalent to what you'd hear "irl."

Emotes are a wholly different deal, and for such - grammar and writing advice is justified.


As an amusing aside, a server I played on before this within BYOND was very, very fanatic about long sentences. And shamed people for writing short thingmajigs. It can be hard to adapt between different communities.

[Seven Sons of Sin]

TV and movie screenplays are a better aspiration for Arelithian RP than novels.

Watch a good scene from your favourite HBO-ish series, and use that as a better tool of discovery and dialogue than fiction.

[Anime Sword Fighter]

Frequent text-waller because I write fast and describe things at length sometimes; I try to change it up by shifting the rhythm that I send messages depending on how I want the rhetoric to "translate" into the imagined character's speaking voice. So sometimes I may send a few short messages if I want to emphasize that they are also speaking quickly with certain intonation, other times I send a longer message if I want them to be speaking in a monotone for explanatory conversation. Does this make sense?

[Maladus]

So I believe this has been considered a personal preference in the past, but it's one of the things that really irks me every time I see it.

Hooded Drow: *he'd look at the female with contempt*

Drowess: *she'd return his glance with a look of her own*

The contraction "he'd" is short for "he would" and the contraction "she'd" is short for "she would" or "she had." Both of which are future participles, I think, I'm not a scholar. This means that the two characters in the above scenario would look at each other given there is a condition to be met afterwards. So when I see this, I think, he would look at her if what? What would cause him to look at her? In the given scenario, nothing has happened because the condition that would cause either character to look at one another didn't occur.

I tend to phrase all my emotes in the present tense.

Hooded Drow: *he looks at the female with contempt*

Drowess: *she returns his glance with a look of her own*

In this way, there is no conditional requirement to be met for the emote to happen, it just happens because it's occurring right now.

Thank you for coming to my TED talk.

[MissEvelyn]

It feels like I'm in the minority here, but I enjoy longer poses/entries, and find the shorter rapid entries annoying at times.

Dave: Hey Magister

Dave: I ran into Mac earlier.

Dave: He wanted to speak with you.

Dave: Something about ogres on the road.

Dave: There's been trouble with them.

Dave: But also something odd.

Dave: One of them was trying to talk to the soldiers.

Dave: He got ran off.

Dave: It seemed really odd, they said.

I get that this mimics natural speech and allows for interruptions, but I'll find myself needing to scroll up, ESPECIALLY if there's another person in the area doing the same. There's always a minimum of two lines per entry, so I'd personally find that a happy medium here is to at least use those two lines, maybe three.

I agree wholeheartedly with this. It's so much harder to read when there are 2 or 3 or more conversations going on in the same area, and the people are writing like this.

I'd much rather wait for someone to type out a longer text that is way more coherent to read.

That said, I personally allow for my character to get interrupted if I'm typing out a long response and in the middle of it the other person says something, or something happens that would warrant my character to be interrupted. I do it with a "–" at the end of the sentence.

[Techne]

Stop thinking too much when you're writing.

Xarge said mostly what I was going to say, but I'll give my point of view on the matter. I understand some people need to think, especially if English isn't their first language. But the more time you take thinking about what you want to say in RP or what you want to write about in that essay, the more your internal critic is going to pop up and say

"OI STOP WHAT YOU'RE DOING THIS WRITING IS TRASH."
____________________

This last bit is of advice is mostly directed at RP, but can be useful when writing.

Ignore your typos and grammatical errors if they are minor and if someone reading it would have no trouble understanding what you are trying to say. Not only is this good advice when writing a paper or essay for school or work (a first draft is rarely perfect), it also in RP slows the flow of conversation.

Taking time to out of your writing to say *Ahems* (correctly spelled word) *Ahems* brings attention to your mistake when most people aren't going to call you out on your grammatical mistakes. Or in real life applications, taking time to fix your grammatical mistakes when writing a paper slows down your work flow and makes your internal critic wake up and start questioning your paper.

[Party in the forest at midnight]

To build off what others are saying, I don't want people to feel intimidated by this thread. I legitimately do not care how people spell or type as long as they're telling a good story.