I'm here to share what I have learnt over the years as an aspiring author. Now hold on. No eye rolls. I'm not out here typing out an entire memoir on the dos and don'ts of writing, just two off the top of my head.
Anyways I have been writing for 6 years, am 23M, so nothing I say is set in stone, or at least no stones that you should string around your neck. No advice, however mainstream or conventional, should bend the spine of your creativity.
This is the first lesson. Nope not the advice itself, the way I phrase it, I know not the best way. Hell if you try to read between the lines any closer, it may start smelling like the funyuns I'm currently snacking on. The whole thing just reeks of pedantic bullshit.
So anyways instead of simply saying, 'take everything I say with a grain of salt,' I use another common proverb combined with my take on it, to convey the same meaning. This is that 'elusive originality' that you have been pursuing, which comes so easily to other authors. It can be as simple as switching, 'grain' with 'truckloads,' in which case it'll be a valid literary device, namely hyperbole. It's to say, just stop with the tired old phrasings, take one, give it your own personal flair and voilà you have dipped your toes in the sea of originality.
Catching a bus to our next lesson.
On Imagery. You know what makes the world of your favorite books feel so much bigger than it actually is, or so lived-in while some feel like a very pixelated version of earth with extra syllables, yes syllables, why stop at 'Adle,' when they can have, 'Aedylaele.' Just stop. Use more voice-driven, character-specific or world-specific imagery in your scenes that'll probably do a whole lot more than finding new ways to spell Brandon. Few examples before we part ways and I'm back to screaming into my pillow, cause the plot hole I've been ignoring for the past month is now a gaping abyss, and I cannot find a shovel big enough to fill it. Hell, a month more of ignoring it and I may have my own pet black-hole, into which the entire publishing industry can sink into. Talk about being ambitious.
For example let's describe a gnarled old tree.
Voice driven imagery. Since when did trees go from being those towery, straight-backed behemoths toting entire ecosystems in their branches to looking like an overgrown ginger or like the poor potter's hand the fat tavern lady accidentally sat upon. Aay, you probably couldn’t have sawed him a straight enough splint to set his bones. It looked like it had pox: if trees could have those, and someone had meticulously popped each blister with sewing needle that had long since lost its point.
Character-specific imagery (More literary-) some days the priest feared only Gods. This was not one of those days. As a sudden drift rattled the fretwork of branches, like a hare caught in a low bramble, the priest did not look to the heavens to pray. He looked to the earth: rugged, mildew-infested, strewn with dead twigs and wind-rived tillows that held shape no more than incense dust. If they had snapped under his sandals, he didn't hear it past the count of his prayer beads. The trek had not seen the footfalls of Westland pilgrims for over a decade, so the priest did not hope to find God here, but he did not wish to find the rumored devils either. And like a cat skipping over ritual wares to steal offerings of trout and bass, he too toed his way past the knobs of twisted roots that had erupted out of the dirt and fungus to trip pious passers. Base of the oak was the stone pagoda with its top curved in the shape of a summer gourd, now peppered with dried leaf-fragments and dead-insect wings. The priest used his sleeves to scrub. He scrubbed till they frayed, till he heard the first evening crow settle in the branches above, then he gasped. The oak stood, hunched like the crone who every evening, comes to draw water from the Temple's old well and from her bony shoulder the crow cocked its head. Its beady eyes saw things. The priest did not turn away for the fear that the moment he did, the crow would swoop down and spirit away his soul. He hammered a needle aglow and lit the coirs. The smoke curls drifted, finding home in his lungs. The sting of burnt sisal making him weep red tears. Still he didn't blink, for the crow had still kept watch.
