This is NOT a quit entry or I will blog less entry. Before anyone thinks that this is a quit post by me, I assure you not. It’s an amusing thought whenever people read a title such as this, they immediately associate it with quit threats. Crusader immediately gave me a private message on Yahoo Messenger stating that I am “not allowed to quit” before he does. I guess I will be an eternal slave to the blog.
This entry is a challenge to myself and all the bloggers out there who are unhappy with the end result of your entries. This is a reflection to all who are thinking about whether their writing is good enough to attract others to comment. This is a rant about how to give enjoyment to our beloved readers and commentators. This is in essence an entry that talks about writers and the dynamic relationship of bloggers with readers.
This is an entry about you and mainly me.
This entry came about because I was very unhappy with my writing, both in the blog and also in my academic writing. In the blog, I didn’t feel that my heart was completely into the writing of the entry. When I was reading my Koihime Episode 9 entry, I feel that it could be been much better. The jokes were not enough to stimulate laughter. It didn’t feel like I am creating more discussion or interest to readers. It was depressing. It was annoying and most of all, it was simply bad. Perhaps, I have a huge expectation of how I should be writing, and it just didn’t feel like I have hit the right spot recently.
As a writer, I feel that I have not done my best to convey my thoughts, my anger, my happiness and my heart into the words I wrote. It just feels empty when you know that you can do much better but somehow misses the mark. For some of you, it might not matter but I always wish to bring entertainment and spark some discussion about anything in any entry I write. Most of you consider anime to be entertainment, and blogging about it should entertain you. If not, I will merely be blogging to a wall of text, and that is NOT FUN. I am sure many of the new anime bloggers will understand how it feels to be “ignored.”
It is the same with my academic writing. I seldom talk about my real life events, because My professor has said in no certain terms that my writing is bad, and he feels somewhat embarrassed to associate my writing with him. Despite my rather depressed outlook on writing, I know that writing as a skill is something that takes time to nurture, and “my progress is very slow.”
I am unhappy with my writing, but that does not mean I do not want to write. I want to, yet I do not want to simply write some verbal rubbish. This is NOT WRITER’S BLOCK by the way. If you have faced it, how do you solve it? When you are repeatedly told that your writing is terrible, and you are not good enough compared to others (and your livelihood is based on it), how do you handle it? This is a question I am still asking myself, and I will continue to write, improve and write more to find the solution to this.
34 Comments
Maybe it’s the content that doesn’t allow for stimulating writing? In need of good verbal influence, just go browsing through IKnight’s/coburn’s archives and read everything…
Also, why the hell are you blogging something like Koihime anyway? I think I skimmed through the first episode and it doesn’t seem like something that warrants much intellectualism…
As for your professor calling you a bad writer, maybe that’s a foreign thing us insipid Americans cannot possibly understand but I’ve never been called a “bad writer”. In any case I don’t think you’re a bad writer…but maybe it’s the self-imposing restrictions you yourself establish on THAT (why must we episodic blog anyway?) that create your self-fulfilling prophecy of high expectations not being met. Just my 2 cents.
Well find your operative emotion and run with it. Mine’s anger and hate, what’s yours?
It’s much easier to blog about something you have a passion about, may that’s what your missing a good series.
You could post more, practice does make perfect…
As William K. Zinsser, author of On Writing Well, says: Writing is hard. I think beating yourself up over it just adds to the difficulty. Sure, there are times when beating yourself up is justified, or even necessary, but for the most part it’s just a whole lot of uselessness. That being said:
Try reading a little of someone who writes in a form you enjoy before you write something. The perfect cadences of E.B. White, or even those of the much more modern Stephen Chbosky, whether or not they suit the task at hand, have always helped me get in the mood for writing, and even write better as long as I’m consciously not trying to emulate them. Because that would be bad.
‘course another reason could be what Crusader and lelangir have said already: maybe you only think the writing’s bad because it lacks passion for a, how you say, not so great anime.
Bet it’ll be better if you blog something better!
By writing and reading you get better.
I need to sit down and take a real look at what I want to tell my readers. Mainly now when i start writting I lose the red thread somewhere along the way and instead of just saving the post I publish it excusing myself that I lost the red thread.
I do enjoy writting and I want to share my views on stuff with people or have them read the few ideas I have for stories.
Excitement over a theme is important if you ask me. I can´t sit down and write a post about something that I really dislike. It just doesn´t work. The post will be short and not that well written.
If there is something that I do enjoy on the other hand well then we´re back to the red thread and that I lose it a lot of the times I´m writting
But keep up the good work Impz. Cheers for more comments to us all
Your posts are fine, but you sound like you want to improve them, which is great! Here’s a few thoughts…
Describe what you would do to improve the anime. This is probably the best way to get people interested. Flaunt your opinion on how it should have been done and why your way is better. It’s easy to say “I hated it”, somewhat harder to say why, and really difficult to say how you’d do it better. However, it’s your opinions that people come to read, more than the scene-by-scene breakdown.
For every point you want to make, there is a story that can be told to illustrate the point. For example, when I want to explain how the Japanese language is different, I tell people it’s “Yoda Speak” because they put the verbs last, just like Yoda — “Strong in the anime you are!”
BTW, personal stories, even if somewhat mundane, make more of an impact. You can also use other people’s stories if you can make them intimate enough. Look to any newspaper article and you are bound to see a individual story to “give life” to the rather dry article.
Less is more in blogging. Don’t kill yourself with long posts unless you really have a lot to say. Pick the scenes that fit with your point, then make it using your opinions and stories to explain why it was good/bad/indifferent and how it could have been even better.
Finally, here’s a challenge for you (and perhaps everyone at THAT): What’s the smallest number of screenshots and text that you can use to still make an accurate blog entry about the subject. Can you get away with one screenshot to make your point? How about three? How few words? (I’m one to talk here, having rambled on…) You get my point, though…
Good luck and Happy Blogging!
I’m relatively new, but I don’t take that as a bad thing really, I may not get lots of comments, but what matters to me is if I find what I like and hit it hard.
Find something you like and roll~ with it. THAT gets a wide enough audience as it stands.
As for your professor, well, I cannot say, but we all encounter a little educational adversity every now and then, here and there.
The best way to improve your writing is to read. Just read all sorts of things, newspapers, books, blogs – try though to make sure the author is a native speaker of the language in which you are trying to write.
The second best way to improve is to have people edit what you’ve written. It’s amazing what another pair of eyes can do; everything we write, other than diaries, are to be read by someone else, so why wouldn’t we let others tell us how we did?
I personally never post anything that I haven’t edited several times myself, and I always have at least 3 other people read my stuff as well, to avoid mistakes that I miss. It does add quite a bit of time to the creation of a post, but I’m all for quality over quantity – though I know many who disagree with spending several hours to write one post.
I don’t think your writing is bad, and for a professor to tell you that is quite odd from my cultural perspective. [as an aside, he told you "in no uncertain terms" - peer review FTW
] Did he at least give you some advice on the areas that need work? Improving writing is not terribly hard, it is a skill to be learned like any other. I know I am always willing to review anything you or anyone else here has written, and I’m sure the other authors here at THAT feel the same way.
Always remember that writing exists as a way to convey ideas, so think about the audience. The best praise a writer can receive is when his intended audience understands what he was trying to say.
If it’s not working for you, don’t write about anything then. Take a break, and let inspiration come to you, not the other way around. If you force yourself to write, it almost never ends up the way you want it too. And echoing what others have said, write about stuff you feel like writing about. Nothing gets you going like something that you like. :3
I could add another “but…you’re writing’s fine!” but in all honesty reassurances from other people can only go so far. Even though I’ve been complimented in my blogging over the years I’m still not 100% happy with what I write, no matter how much other people try to convince me otherwise. Being self-critical does however help you strive to improve: every post I write is written with the intention of being more interesting, insightful and generally better-written than the previous one. I guess my mantra is “I plan to suck less today than I did yesterday.”
I don’t know about you, but it does make the process of writing posts much longer and time-consuming – I can spend ages tweaking punctuation and turns of phrase, to the point where it takes much longer to get a post out into the open. I call this situation ‘blogstipation’. I didn’t realise until recently that UrbanDictionary already has an entry for it though…
For what it’s worth, your writing IS fine but take a break if it helps ease the tension. I agree that reading other people’s writing is a real help as well actually.
Taking previous comments into account, I’ll allow that there may be cultural differences at play here when you describe how your adviser attacks your writing ability. But really, that sort of unscrupulous insult is rare within U.S. academia. Those remarks are completely out of line and, quite frankly, he (she?) sounds like an asshole. Any fool can fling criticisms without meaningful suggestions on how to improve. Close your ears my friend and keep up the good work.
That said, although I am usually more apt to listen and less so to offer advice, I’ll violate my own standards and deposit a few suggestions:
1) Keep in mind that writing is almost always geared toward an audience. It occurs within a specific context and often fulfills a specific purpose. Your academic writing is one type of writing and your blog entries are a another type of writing; don’t get the two confused. Don’t let insecurities about your academic papers contaminate your feelings about blogging. Academic authorship demands different focuses than do editorials. Keep things in perspective, and direct your efforts accordingly.
2) There is a notion some people refer to as ‘creative discontent’ (I am confident you’ve heard of it.) In my understanding, it is a very natural sensation. For your creative impulses to replenish and continue, they cannot *ever* reach a point of culmination. If you were ever completely and utterly satisfied with anything you created, you would stop creating. But thankfully, there is always room to improve, always an opportunity to write again, to create anew, and we humans are acutely aware of that fact. Don’t preoccupy yourself with the past. Write, edit where necessary, note on where to improve, and then don’t look back. Don’t let the impulse consume you. Fire managed is a tool. Fire mismanaged is a threat.
3) Remember that words are merely a tool. *YOU* are what makes your writing interesting, not the words. There are probably scores of blogs floating around the Internet that follow the same shows that you do. I read your posts because YOU write them, not because of the subject matter. Personality, individuality, uniqueness are, above all else, what inspire. Words are simply a medium by which to convey the immensity that a person already is without the slightest effort. Perhaps you have heard the expression, “find your voice.” Literally–express yourself. (You already do that anyway ^^) Some people believe that technique must be developed first and later, a voice. I say that the voice has always been there and simply needs to find the right words to make itself heard.
4) Lastly decide how you truly feel about writing and keep moving forward. Everyone has the potential to improve. Forget about what your adviser says. If you are sincere, and dedicated in your totality, you will move mountains.
I’ll be very satisfied if even a single letter of this is useful to you. If you think it is garbage, by all means–place it where garbage belongs ;- ) Looking forward to your next post!
A real winner is defined by what he does AFTER he falls down. Either you can be Mike Tyson, invincible until one punch, or you can be Muhammad Ali, knocked down many times but just as many he gets back up.
So you feel like you fell down, maybe even got sucker-punched by your professor, but I say, kiss and embrace all your bruises and use them as a rebound board to launch yourself forward.
What I usually do when I’m in a slump is to go back to my first love, my first reason to write, and then start from there again. Slowly but surely, it always gets me back on track.
1 – Reading others is good, because you can copy an adapt good ideas.
2 – Bloging good anime is easer for get compliments and improve your self-image.
3 – Take a breack if you are burned out or to stressed for other problems.
4 – Maybe is a good chance for try something different from what you do right know. Another material, another style, if evolution is stucked, try a revolution or just show to your critic that you can do other things whell. John Carpenter director of terror movies made the movie The Thing and critics almost killed hes carrer. Then he made something really different like SF Starman. I dont know if he liked making a SF of Peace & Love, but he made good money and got more jobs.
@Crusader
Thats creepy, it get the “you are biased” answer spamed. I like you more when you are in the Irony & Cinism style, is more elegant and really make me laugh. For the record, I started reading That for your blog of True Tears.
Find better subjects to write about.
It’s difficult to write about something that’s lackluster/uninteresting to you. If you’re not enthusiastic about it, nobody else is going to be either.
well… i’d go with the suggestions about finding yourself some good prose for inspiration. unfortunately i havent been reading much beyond, uh… internet forums, textbooks and your blog, so i dont have anything terribly good to suggest. i also go through periods on my own tiny little bitch-about-my-life blog when i dont even feel like clicking the post button because the words feel raw and shapeless. but push forward anyway, and look for that inspiration.
as an off-topic, what exactly are you studying whereby your professor takes your writing ability so personally and seriously?
Impz, many competent people feel insecure. Recognition of your shortcomings shows that you have room to grow and improve. What matters the most is your taste of what good writing entails. You’ll keep seeing a gap between you current skill and your potential, but it will vanish almost completely with time, given sufficient effort. One of the most reliable methods to narrow that gap is to produce large volume of work and feed yourself with good literature as well as books about writing.
As for the audience, it is a tricky business sometimes.
“The relationship between the public and the artist is complex and difficult to explain. There is a fine line between using this critical energy creatively and pandering to it.”
Andy Goldsworthy
There are a bunch of helpful tips here, but the biggest one of all is to just keep on writing. There are no tricks to writing well. With practice, you’ll develop your own unique style. Personally, I really enjoy your writing. Stay optimistic, all things worth having are worth working for. d(^^)
Don’t be afraid to just try new things in your writing simply for the heck of it; your readers may actually exhibit a highly positive reaction to something you never thought would gain such attention. Heck, my propensity for sociological tl;dr came about when I first threw in sociology and Freudian concepts merely for shits and giggles, and I’m still surprised how much attention it got.
With you, more often than not you’re only lacking the correct arrangement and usage of words necessary to make a piece of good writing, which is a relatively easy problem to fix. You don’t lack the passion, knowledge or competence necessary for making a good piece of writing, and those are much harder things to come by than pure technical writing skills.
I say all that with confidence, having read your entries since the very inception of this blog.
Read good writers, novels or otherwise; read writers whose writing style enraptures you. If you pick up a book and the next thing you know the sun is rising outside, go read it again, but this time try absorbing into your very being the styles and essence of the writing. Go look for phrases that you find memorable, sentences whose beauty shock you, passages that struck a note with your heart, and learn why that happened. Is it the particular words used? Is it the rhythm of the words? Read over the sentence in your mind, then read it aloud. See how the sentence is pronounced. See how it flows. Then try to apply that to your own writing. I recommend starting with Steven Pinker – he has a way of making the most technical and boring of material easy to understand and a blast to read.
I know you can do it.
P.S. To keep up with my accepted internet persona: LOLOL OMG IMPZ U SO EMO LULZ GO CUT URSELF.
You’ve touched on it for me. This partly makes up the reason why I’m not writing.
But I understand what you’re talking about – I hate writing verbal rubbish, and nowadays, my stuff almost always seems this way. It’s up to you, now, to jump over this hurdle – and when you do pass it, I believe your writings will transcend to something even better. Besides, even if YOU dislike it, I think your posts are well-written and well-thought out. I didn’t mention THAT as my influence for blogging for no reason, now, did I? :]
I love your wirting. You are one of my favorite bloggers. I really didn’t feel any withdraw in your blogging. As for the koihime issue, I already said my opinion.
>>When you are repeatedly told that your writing is terrible, and you are not good enough compared to others (and your livelihood is based on it), how do you handle it?
This is somthing I can very relate to, and the only solution I know of is to be encouraged by the people you care about and are close to you. I know it’s very hard to receive sympathy froms others, and near impossible on the internet, but keep in mind that there are people who do enjoy your writing as it is, and don’t expect you to be perfect, only to hear what you think and feel about things and enjoy a discussion with you.
For me, anime is more then entertainment, so seeing someone writing about it seriously and cares about his writing, warms my heart.
My writing professor once scolded me in front of the close because of my writing skill. “Your essay is bland and colorless, maybe that is how your personality is.” He is evil.
To you, just continue writing… I also feel the same every now and then, and I notice I feel this kind of feeling whenever there is a decline in my blog’s readership.
This is what I’ve found to work for me:
1. Write.
I started writing since I was a boy. I started thinking I was the bees’ knees when I opened my first weblog back in ’99, but when I look back now at what I thought was the bomb I feel as embarrassed as if I had stripped naked on video and sang the Titanic theme song which was then uploaded on YouTube to become the most watched video of the year. But the fact that I can see how bad it was is a sign of how much better I’ve become.
2. Write A LOT.
The great Golden Age Warner Bros. animator Chuck Jones once had a teacher tell him that everyone has a certain number of bad drawings in them, and that the faster they drew them out the faster they’d get to the good drawings.
3. Read the greats.
Whenever I need to remember why I liked writing in the first page, all I have to do is thumb open a favorite author and go; “I want to write like THAT when I grow up!”
4. Learn from the best.
Stephen King’s On Writing is seminal.
Hope that helps, my fellow writer.
THAT needs a new leader. Crusader should take the mantle and finally reorganize how things are done here.
hehe…joke.
Impz rules!
Good day!
If you’re being told your writing is inferior to the others around you, study what they write and see if it’s true (better grammar, stronger arguments, better organization, etc.) or if it’s just 1 person’s subjective opinion. If it’s the former, it’s easy to fix. If it’s the latter, that’s going to be harder.
Koihime is BAD for your health, Impz T__T;
I suggest you blog (or at least watch) Natsu no Sora instead, I think you could relate well with episode 7…
I’ve experienced the same thing you are, since I’ve always had inferiority complex since who knows when. In blogging terms, I compared myself with the likes of you and other bloggers and I’ve often told myself that I’m no good… but thankfully enough, my mindset has changed over the months I spent in blogging.
In times like these, I think it’s best to keep in mind that criticisms can only make you better. Other ones before me already gave their advice, and I can only add more to the “Believe in yourself” chanting.
I’m not sure if you’ve read this before, but I dedicate this post to you, Impz… may you find your true blogging voice
I love you Impz. I think you write just fine ;P
*sneaking in from work…*
I totally understand the whole “my writing is bad” thing. Like you, my livelihood is based on writing. Like you, I often think that I don’t have any particular skill in writing.
When I realized that, I started reading the articles that my colleagues have written. And start picking up their way of structuring and organizing, their ways of getting the readers to feel and empathize. I find that it’s very useful.
And on a related issue, you do realized that if you write academic papers like you write blogs, I’ll understand better why your professor said what he said. Because writing academic papers like writing blogs is totally not done. Or should not be done. Is it possible that your blogging have affected your academic writing style? That might be something to look into.
Also, if you feel empty of what you have wrote, could it be that you don’t feel anything of what you are watching? I’m not sure about academic papers, but for blogging, that makes a lot of difference between having a great blog post and having a well written but essentially soulless post. And for academic papers? If they are anything like writing news articles (as opposed to writing comments or blog posts), I can say that passion doesn’t count as much. There is a certain formula to writing all those stuff, and well, as soon as you catch the trick of doing them (the trick that would satisfy your professor/editor, anyway), the rest would come easily.
My opinion? Find out what your professor likes and write what he likes. You can express your individuality in blogs, but in the academics, especially when someone is grading you? Well, it’s much like work, and that is what I’m doing right now.
You just need to feel the enthusiasm in you. Maybe the topics you have been writing about do not interest you.
Reread your classics. Perhaps you’ll find this one inspirational?
Well, it doesn’t really matter whether you are writing good or very good articles on this blog – I know how does it feel not to be satistied with your writing, and I know it’s a very important thought for you to perform better, but still… there’s no point in improving your style if it’ll change during the process.
What I mean is, when you are witing an article, you are not only putting work in it, thinking about it and creating it wholeheartedly, but you are also enclosing your very own emotions and the way you perceive the thing you are writing about, in the text. Even if you are not able to feel it with your heart as much as you want, it will, it surely will, be perceived as wonderful if you want it to be good.
The perfectness cannot be obtained here – you can strive for it, but the thing you should do is to encourage yourself to feel that your writings are wonderful – if we were all to write “perfectly”, then our textx would be pretty much the same, so reading it’ll be very boring after some time.
Of course, there’s no reason to write “verbal rubbish” you’d mentioned in your article, but the only way not to create it is not to want it to be bad.
But there is one thing I’d like to recommend to you – if you fele like you are not good enough to write great articles, then just try to write something else; don’t write something with different style, but just something that is different by itself – a poem, an unusual story, maybe even a song. Just try to enclose the most of your emotions you can into it, and then try to do the same with your articles (I’m recommending it because it’s a little easier to put your very own emotions in something that is intended to carry them).
“If you feel happy, may your writings rise people’s souls to the sun and warm them little by little, until the moment they start to dream.
If you feel sad, may your writings pour a cold, yet gentle rain on them, until their tears merge with rain.
If you feel angry, may your writings scream violently and loudly, until they start to scream for the same reason.
There’s nothing other in writing and reading but keeping feelings and perceiving them.”
Saying that, I have to go and study for my tomorrow exam, but I hope anybody’ll find it useful…
Well, that really depends with the person, I mean, if he does not like how you write, well screw him! Some things are bad to other people because the cannot relate to it in some sort, and let’s admit it, Koihime Musou… I don’t find it appealing anyway, but I do read your post about it (considering I am a blog lurker)..
So don’t you worry about it. There are phases that humans and anime-bloggers (it’s like they’re 2 different things hehe) go through, wherein they somehow lose confidence in what they do, and eventually it turns into negative thoughts, so don’t you worry, you’ll get over that phase…
i can actually understand what you are saying, connect with it i mean. your’e not alone, and if, maybe, in some corner of the world where you live, you have found a solution, i’d love it if you could get back to me.
prth.srdhrn@gmail.com
thanks.
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