Is this writing good enough? Looking for some opinions. :)

News & General Discussion
1

Hello my name is Matt and I am considering enquiring on the commercial work part of the forum whether anyone would be interested in writing services. I have had reasonable experience with Unity and other 3D programs as I wish to get a job in the industry when I am older. Due to be being too busy my current projects are currently on hold, however I feel that I would still have time for some writing which has always interested me. My current projects are far from text rich so I have written some pieces below, I have written both of them in a fantasy game style.

The following passage assumes that the player already knows the identity of the enemy mentioned in the text. The player knows “Alandi” as a powerful ice king, someone to be greatly feared.

You look down to inspect the weapon in your hand. You have a firm grip on the hilt of your blade, it is light and it has been well sharpened. You conclude that you wasted no coin in the market as your armour is most defiantly fit for battle. However despite this you cannot help being apprehensive, as for in the room ahead your foe can be clearly seen, standing tall and proud, clad from the ground up in his signature dark clothing. You can see little of his face as it has been hidden by the shadow of his hood but it is clear he can see you, why has he not already approached? Then you hear it. The chilling voice of Alandi.

The next piece shows an example of speech mixed with narrative. The player is currently with an ally (Eysa) and a potential enemy (Warbin). You are in what appears to be a study; there are several bookcases around you and a dark wooden table in the rooms’ innermost position.

Warbin snatches the parchment from Eysa’s hands and quickly let’s his disgust become obvious, “Bah, these words are worth no more than the scraps they are written upon. You assume I am stupid but I am far from it, I will not lead my people astray. I suggest you return to your masters and tell them I refuse.” Eysa takes a seat at the table that lies in front of you and quickly responds to Warbin, “I’m afraid you have no choice in the matter, either you accept these terms. Or we will bring about your demise.” Warbin becomes infuriated, pulling the letter in two and sweeping the table clear of the items that lay upon it. “You do not scare me.” Warbin retrieves his axe from behind him and swiftly turns to take a swipe at Eysa, who in turn ducks and rolls over to join you next to the window. You draw your sword, managing to halt another strike from Warbin. Immediately responding you drive your sword towards him.

Hopefully you are fond of what you have read; I look forward to hearing some feedback from people.

Many thanks,

  • Matt
2

Not bad, but your writing seems much to stiff and forced. You’re trying to be more articulate than most people ever would be, so it feels unnatural. Be comfortable with the fact that you have an arsenal of vocabulary, but don’t try to shove it in the readers face.

“The best weapon is one you never have to use.” :wink:

EDIT: Some examples.

There are a few grammatical errors and typos. “defiantly fit for battle”, should be “definitely”. This kinda hints at the fact that you ran a spell check on a word and took the first suggestion.

It may be proper, but no one actually says “upon”.
(THRILLED to death that you used the appropriate “than” rather than “then” though.)

Keep at it!

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Thank you, much appreciated :slight_smile: I’ll try and keep it more relaxed :slight_smile:

4

English is not my native language, but honesly, the answer to your question is: not yet. And I don’t mean this in a discouraging way. Writing is a matter of skill, imagination, knowledge/culture, and experience; so the more you write the better you’ll become. Since you’re interested in it, I suggest you write write write.

A few hints about some of what’s not “good enough” in what you wrote:

  • Grammatical and punctuation mistakes. If you’re posting something whose writing is important, make sure there are none. For example, “…either you accept these terms. Or we will bring about your demise.” has a wrong dot. It should be “either you accept these terms, or we will bring about your demise.”. Another example is “quickly let’s his disgust…” should be “quickly lets his disgust…”.
  • The verbs are sometimes used in a weird way. For example, “You can see little of his face as it has been hidden by the shadow of his hood” has a weird and uselessly verbose verb. Using an “it’s” would work way better: “You can see little of his face as it’s hidden by the shadow of his hood”.
  • Also, you should work more on the different moods of what you want to convey. Drama needs more drama, action needs more action. Each has its own way with verbs, punctuation, and choice of words.

Again, I don’t know since how long you’ve been writing, but these are all things at which you’ll get way better via more and more writing. So keep up :slight_smile:

5

Sounds good maybe shorten it up a little
But then sometimes that gets tough since you don’t want to leave out too much of the story or a hint to the next mission/quest

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There are a lot of spelling and grammatical errors. I find the misuse of commas disturbing. :wink: If you were solely doing the writing and they had someone else who was working as an editor to proofread and fix mistakes, you might be fine, but most indie teams are not going to have an editor. They’ll rely on you to be the person with the best spelling and grammar; as a writer, that’s one of the things you must bring to the team. No one is going to want to pay actual money for text that they’ll have to proofread and possibly rewrite, just like no one would want to pay for a programmer or artist whose work they’d have to constantly review and fix. So, I would say you should read up on grammar and study some style guides. It may not be as much fun as the creative side of writing, but creativity alone isn’t worth much; the ability to actually produce a high quality finished product is what matters in the end.

7

The wording sounds somewhat reminiscent of a thesaurus. Also, your grammar and punctuation was somewhat painful to read. There are a lot of missing commas and comma splices. Your grammar also is not great.

For example:
“You have a firm grip on the hilt of your blade, it is light and it has been well sharpened.”

The comma separates two completely separate clauses without any preposition connecting them. You could use a semicolon, but then the second clause would be somewhat ambiguous, as you wouldn’t know if it were the grip of the blade that is light and well-sharpened. The reader could of course assume from the context, but it would still be ambiguous.

It should be:
“You have a firm grip on the hilt of your blade, which is light and has been well-sharpened.”

8

You used sentences, full stops and capitalised I. Well done, you’re better than 95% of ‘professional writers’ advertising on forums. That said, there’s a plenty of room for improvement - I suggest finding some sort of writing class/community/mentor to improve it. For example:

You conclude that you wasted no coin in the market as your armour is most defiantly fit for battle.

Is pretty redundant and tells me little about the armour - unnecessary duplication is evil :stuck_out_tongue:

Also, why is someone checking out their arms and armament in sight of the big baddie? Unless being a rushed novice is part of the story line - anyone with half a braincell tests their gear well before battle.

With the narrative section - read up on the rules of spoken lines. IIRC you should start a new line every time a new person speaks.

9

I’m no professional, but I do have a hobby of storywriting. Something that I see a lot in newer writers (aside from bland characters, illogical actions and overall butchering of the English language) is something called “Show, don’t tell”. My understanding of this is rather than just telling readers what is going on, an author describes it using a range of senses. This makes the reader ‘experience’ the story, rather than just read it.

I couldn’t help but feel that you were leaning too far toward the tell side, as most lines could be summed up as “You did this”, “You felt this”, “Character X did that”.

I’m not good at explaining things, so you might want to Google it, just in case I have no idea what I’m talking about.

10

Thank you for all the feedback! For a start I should probably not write anything that is going to be judged in the early hours of the morning, perhaps then I would have avoided some of the more obvious mistakes. Although it’s now clear my writing may not be at a good enough standard just yet.

However in response to npsf3000 I did not go into much description about the armour or the atmosphere as I was assuming that since this would be going into a video game the player would already be able to see the world around them. I agree that a character checking their armour right in front of an enemy was a bad story decision, not entirely sure what I was thinking there. :stuck_out_tongue:

In response to Blacklight I think I know what you mean, I need less instruction to show what is happening. :slight_smile:

If anyone else would like to continue posting feedback I would be happy to see it. :slight_smile:

11

What are writing?

If you’re writing a story - either to the end user or as part of the design of the game then you need to be thinking of detail. Not necessarily make the paragraph longer, just use the words better. If you simple want to say what happened, and leave a lot of the detail to others then may I suggest looking into movie/play script writing? I did a little bit as a hobby, and found it useful.

12

Writing isn’t easy. I’d recommend you envision the scene in your head first and fantasize about the details of that scene. Then you must somehow weave together information relevant to the plot and information describing the current situation.

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In response to npsf3000 -

I imagined the first text to be displayed in a quest style window. The player may have had a quest to reach a certain point; once the point was reached the window would appear with the text.

The second paragraph was more a description of what was happening in the room, the text could appear in segments as each action from the text was played out in the scene. I will not ignore the fact that you think I need to add more detail though, detail is always important. :slight_smile:

As for the movie/play script writing I may be doing something along those lines next year with some friends. I just wanted to see people’s opinions on these forums to see if anyone would be interested in a writer for a game, as well as to see if I am a good enough writer. Which I get the feeling I am not. :slight_smile:

Thanks again.

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In response to Khyrid -

I’ve never had a problem imagining the details of a scene, I can picture everything myself. It seems my problem is turning these ideas into writing. :slight_smile:

15

This sentence made my morning.

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For the first passage, the second person point of view is jarring. It reads and feels strange. It’s not often used, and many find it strange. If you’re writing a story, this is normally considered abnormal. If you’re writing descriptive text, i suggest you remove the second person references.

For example:

recommend something like this (1 minute work, of course I’m not saying it’s better, just that I think the style is better):

The second passage is better (third person is nearly always better). But you should break whenever the subject or speaker changes. And then you slip into second person at the end. Recommend keeping it third person.

17

Also, I’d agree with others that aside from grammar, you’re using too many words with not enough description. For example:

All I get out of this is that I’m holding some sort of blade… a dagger? Or maybe a sword? And that I have some sort of armor. You don’t really need to say that a blade is sharp and that armor is good for battle; that’s a given. If you say “guy with blade in armor” people are going to automatically picture that his blade is sharp and his armor is decent. You’d only need to describe if the blade was dull or the armor was falling apart, since that goes counter to what most people would instinctively picture and actually helps form the scene. If you want to focus on the weapon and armor for some reason, it would be better to describe something about them that isn’t true of pretty much all weapons and armor. For example, the blade could have an onyx skull on the pommel, or maybe the armor is fine golden chain with a red cloak, or the blade is a curved, serrated scimitar etched with glowing runes. That sets up a descriptive scene, rather than just explaining a generic guy with a generic weapon and armor.

18

Thanks for all the comments! It’s clear my writing needs some improvement. :slight_smile:

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This sounds fun, mind if I have a go? Been a while since I’ve written anything fictional.

I’ve taken some creative freedoms with your stories and settings, hope you don’t mind :slight_smile:

You look down at your clenched fist, your knuckles white from grasping your trusted sword. The polished dwarven steel shines brigtly in the glimmering light reflected off the icy walls of the chasm you are standing in.

As you peer ahead around the next corner, you can see the mighty ice giant standing tall. His face is covered by the shadows of his pitch black hood, but his metal plate armor is shining as white as the bright white snow on the ground he is standing on.

He has clearly spotted your approach. As you begin to wonder why he still hasn’t made his move; he speaks.

Warbin snatches the parchment from Eysa’s hands, turns around and throws it violently into the blazing fireplace. The paper curls and crumbles in the heat as he yells out, “Do you take me for a fool? I will not send my troops on a suicide mission!”

As Eysa opens her mouth to respond, Warbin interrupts in a scornful tone, “I suggest you crawl back to your precious Lord and tell him I refuse.”

Eysa takes a seat opposite you at the table, and gives you a disheartened look. She responds to Warbin, “I’m afraid you have no choice in the matter. It’s either this, or we will be forced to obliterate both you and your troops.”

Warbin sweeps the table with his arms, dishes and cutlery crashing to the floor, plants his hands firmly in the table with a loud thump and leans over Eysa angrily grunting “You do not scare me, witch.”

As he stands back up, Eysa quickly tumbles out of the chair and takes a step back, anticipating Warbins attack. He swings his giant battleaxe, barely missing. Eysa rushes to your side, as Warbin prepares for another swing. You draw your sword.

I don’t consider myself a great writer by any means, but maybe this can help you get a different perspective.

A few suggestions I don’t think have been mentioned yet:

  • Adjectives. “Glimmering light”, “Scornful tone”. There are hardly any adjectives in your texts, and they really help in creating an atmosphere.
  • Comparisons. “White as snow”. Helps to form images in the readers mind.

Also, try reading your text out loud (or inside your head, but act like it’s out loud), and really try to tell the story, not just read the words. This should give you an idea of how your story creates anticipation and relief, and if it doesn’t do that enough to carry the story forward, rewrite your text.

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they are always looking for writers. Just something that might be intersting for writers here.