User blog comment:Bocaj910/Bocaj's 13th Birthday 4000th Edit Spectacular!/@comment-1874924-20100912031924

In the blog post, Bocaj called me the wiki's best author. In a recent comment, he suggested that I am merely the best writer. This is actually an important distinction.

To be honest, I don't consider myself the best author here. I may very well be the best writer, but that's not really the same thing. Being able to write well is critical to being a good author, but it's not enough. When writing fiction, you also need to be able to devise and develop an engaging plot, develop your characters--part of which is to resist the temptation to have them behave out of character merely to advance the plot--and so on.

I think, and I suspect most people here would agree, that I do a pretty good job of developing plots and characters. My difficulty lies in coming up with plots and characters to develop.

Bocaj also states that I am only as good as I am because of my "high knowledge, vocabulary, ect. [sic]" This is also an important point, and one I myself made back in April when I hosted the first Writer's Workshop, but it bears repeating here: it took me decades to acquire the vocabulary and stockpile of metaphors that largely drive my writing style. A 13-year-old cannot expect to reproduce my level of learning overnight. To all the teen and tween writers here, writing as I do is indeed within your reach, but you need to accept that it will take time. In the meantime, keep writing. You won't get better if you don't practice.

Another thing about my writing style, which I didn't mention in the Workshop but bears mention here: some readers, most notably Shane, have remarked on how realistic my story situations tend to be. There may be several reasons for this; but I think the biggest is that, for most of my life, I was strictly a nonfiction writer. Not that there's anything inherently wrong with a story having cartoonishly unrealistic situations. If there was, after all, this wiki wouldn't even exist.