 What's shaking? My name's Cam. Welcome back to another video. I'm gonna have to break a lot of hearts today, so I apologize in advance. So as we all know, I am objectively the best writer. I'm the best there is, probably the best that there has ever been, but I don't want to be presumptuous or anything, but probably ever, probably ever. However, and again, I'm sorry, I do have some weaknesses. It's not optimal, but unfortunately there are some areas in the realm of writing where I could stand to improve. I'm still the best though, of course, of course. Here is proof. Okay, you get you get the point of the video. Today I'm talking about my writing weaknesses. Hey, after the video, I'd love it if you let me know if any of these are weaknesses for you as well. That way I can know that I'm not alone in having these flaws and I can feel a bit better about being slightly less than perfect. Is it weird to hear me like even sarcastically hyping myself up after what is it like four years of doing nothing but absolutely shit talking myself? I am notoriously an underwriter. It was always really weird for me among like writing groups and writing communities when everyone would talk about how in the editing stage or the second draft how they would have to chop a lot out or cut it down a bunch and just really slice down the word count. Or it was weird for me to commonly hear famous authors talking about how you would have to always chop it down as well. And then I'm sitting here with like a 10 page manuscript thinking to myself, if I cut a literal word from this, it's going to be a pamphlet. I struggled quite a bit when it comes to pacing a long narrative. Short story is not so much. In fact, I think I might even have a little bit of an advantage there, but with longer narratives, it's a bit difficult for me. Pretty much any story that I start outlining, no matter how ambitious or how epic it is, will usually hit like a 70,000 word maximum. And then I have to try and add to that. In this case, I know what the issue is. The problem is that I focus a lot more on the action or the events or the driven moments of the story that push the story forward in a big chunk. I focus a lot more on that stuff and perhaps not as much as I should on the slower moments, like character development and you know romance and emotional stuff. All the lame stuff. Cringe, cringe alert. I'm putting more attention into the faster paced moments of the story, rather than the slower, more developmental parts. Now that wasn't that much of an issue when I was writing, you know, adventure YA urban fantasy, because not only were those books quite short, they were like around 50 to 60,000 words, but they were also inherently fast paced. That's the thing with kids nowadays, the attention span. It's just, you're probably not even listening to me right now, are you? That's not particularly what you want with psychological horror though, and that's the trouble I ran into when I was writing this one here, Welcome Descent. I knew that with this story in particular, developing the character Joseph was absolutely essential. Being that it was psychologically driven, you had to be really inside his head, you had to know Joseph. Otherwise the reader didn't have any reason to care about him, and then anything that happens in the story isn't going to matter, because it all revolves around him. What I will say is that I think the character development in Welcome Descent, that book I just had there, is perhaps the best that I've ever written. I'm actually, I'm pretty proud of it. I know I still have work to do, but that's still the best I've done so far. Although I do feel like I might have overcorrected with my pacing and dragged out some parts of the story much longer than I should have. It's really difficult, and unfortunately it's not something that can just be fixed with a piece of advice or a writing tip, it's just something I have to practice. I think pacing and getting a feel for word counts at the end of your finished book really comes down to practice. Finding the balance between action and depth is a huge part of what makes writing a competitive art form. On the plus side, like I mentioned before, it does give me a bit of an advantage I think when it comes to short stories, especially horror short stories. Personally, if I can toot my own horn, I think I'm pretty good at getting to the point and sucking in the reader when it's a shorter narrative. This is another thing that I think probably just takes a lot of practice and I know that I'm not that great at it. I don't think I'm horrible, but when I write the first draft of a story, it's always really really heavy on the telling rather than the showing. Joe did this, then Joe did this, then Joe walked over to here and did this. That's not a problem necessarily because that's the point of a first draft. You want to just finish it, you just have to let your mind get it done the way it feels is most comfortable. Then you go back and polish it and fix it up and make it sound better on the second draft. That's when you or that's when I start changing a lot of the telling to showing. It comes back to what I mentioned before though and that's balance. It's hard to know when you are over explaining things or when you are under explaining them. It's cool to be poetic about the moonlight reflecting through the wine glass, but if you do it too much you will bore the reader and you'll sound like a douche. Some writers are incredibly straightforward and action driven like Stephen King or Brandon Sanderson. While others are more flowery and immersive like most of your literary fiction, Tolkien or if we want to talk about a newer age author, Jay Kristoff. I think personally I'm more of an action driven writer so sometimes to push the story ahead I will be pretty direct about what is happening without fluffing it up with you know pretty language. Although on the flip side of that there is a lot of my prose that I'm kind of proud of as well. There's been instances where I'm reading back what I've written and I'm like that sounds pretty nice. Maybe I'm not a complete piece of shit. That's something I intend to work on anyway. I'm never going to be as flowery with my writing as Jay Kristoff, but I do want my writing to be more interesting. On a side note though I do want to say something really quickly in regards to readers and I'm saying this as a reader not an author. I'm talking about reviews I've seen of books I like over my years of being a reader. I've noticed this quite a bit and it's when readers go a bit overboard with the expectation for showing rather than telling. They take that rule or that advice as absolute gospel when in reality it's meant to be a balance. Sometimes if a reader spots even one sentence that is too direct or could have been more descriptive they'll slam the book down and say, hey show don't tell. But that's not what I want as a reader. Not all the time I mean that's how you end up with something called purple prose. Stuffing your story with long-winded explanations of absolutely everything that's happening can be super obnoxious and can bring the story and the pacing to a grinding halt. That's my thoughts. Anyway, what do you think? This one's just a bit funny to be honest. I'm not saying that I suck at writing mystery as a concept. I've had some mystery in my stories that I think was fine. I'm referring to the actual sub-genre of mystery like writing an entire mystery book. Some of my favorite stories are mystery in particular crime mysteries like Sherlock Holmes. For nano-rimer years ago I had this really really cool idea for a story. Like a really great idea for a story. It was a weird kind of cross between like Stranger Things, Friday the 13th, The Sandalot, but I was writing it for adults and I had most of it locked down. I had the characters completely developed. I had the villain completely planned out. The location was perhaps the easiest part and one of my favorite parts to plan and I even knew what the twist would be. However, when it came to the other bits, basically everything in between, particularly how I would make this a compelling mystery, that's where I was stumped. I brainstormed for literally weeks and I still think about it a lot to this day and I've still come up with nothing. I made absolutely no progress. Every idea I had either sucked or I knew it was boring. Nothing made the story mysterious. I've since had ideas for plenty of other mystery stories but I keep running into the same problem. How do I make the reader look one way while I'm doing something different with this hand? You know what I mean? The biggest problem is that every time I'm doing a little bit of foreshadowing or leaving a clue like mystery stories are meant to do, they always seem either way too obvious or just too convenient. I really do want to finish that mystery story one day because I think there's something really kind of cool there but for now I'm just going to leave that for future Chad Cam. Sex. Now I have your attention, sex. It's difficult and a bit awkward for me to say that writing sex is a weakness of mine because I know there's going to be at least one person who watches this and goes, he can't do the sex. And I can, okay? I've knocked boots. I've been naughty before. I'm sorry for saying that. It's just weird to write about, okay? I'm talking about writing like graphic sex like you know that you get it. See I can't even like describe what I'm trying to... I also understand that this is ironic considering that I've technically written an erotica before. Even though it was for a goof there is graphic sex in that book. I mean technically I don't, it's not really a book. It's like a short story. There is graphic sex in it. I think funnily enough the fact that some of the participants or characters in that story were not entirely human made it a bit easier. I know that sounded weird but there's literally no way for me to structure that sentence and not have it sound weird. Just look, just watch the video if you want context. I'm not a prude. I know what goes where. I know what noises to not make now but when it comes to including a sex scene in a serious part of the story I just get to in my head about it. Not saying I get turned on quite the opposite. I actually I try to imagine what the characters would do rather than just what two people having sex should do if they were good at it. Would those characters be good? What would they say? Is the shy timid romantic lead suddenly going to turn around and say yes spit in my mouth? I don't know. It's just it's a whole thing and I imagine one day I'll be a lot more comfortable writing sex but for now I usually just imply that the characters are about to have sex and then I move on. Although again it's kind of weird because in welcome descent there was like a demon blowjob but that that might need that needs more context as well. Those are just four of my writing weaknesses. Despite being the worst example of perfection that you've ever seen I do have quite a lot more weaknesses but I think I'll save them for a part two. You should subscribe if you want to see that and now it's your turn. What are your writing weaknesses? Don't be shy. Expose yourself in the comments. I mean like expose your weaknesses. Don't like literally don't like expose you. Thanks so much for watching especially for watching through the whole video. I really do appreciate it. Thank you. See you in the next one. Catch ya.