User blog comment:Gideoncrawle/Writer's Workshop/@comment-1153194-20100418034614

Finally. Good job on this, I know you did a lot of work on it. Will there be more lessons? I know I get a lot of questions as to how I keep a story going, keep wanting to write it, or how I think up plots.

I know there's a lot of stuff I could learn, but my mind simply does not work on poetic metaphor, unfortunately, so it feels forced when I try that. I also could use more description, but I recognize that I'm a "Just the facts, ma'am" kind of writer. Maybe in one of my next stories (as to avoid making my current stories feel disjointed part way through, like I did with the transition from the minimally eventful Total Drama: Boney Island, to the deeper, and more wordy Total Drama Reality) I could try harder at that, but again, I'm not detail oriented, and like to give the reader some leeway with how a scene would play out.

One major tip that I think would compliment your workshop nicely is for people not to rely on a thesaurus to add a complicated word into their story. It feels unnatural to the flow of the story and fairly out of place if the rest of the story is more simple. Personally, I try to write at a vocabulary level that most younger readers could get through without a dictionary, but include some words younger users haven't heard, because I can't think of a simpler way to word it. Think of your audience for the type of story you write. If its a light, entertaining, TV show style story (which is what I go for), there's no need for the language to be complex (though no need to extremely dumb it down). But for "real writer"'s stories, I'd say the more complicated wording works better.

Hopefully that advice is somewhat complimentary.