H_Faith_Marr

Pay attention to what you like in other writing. Then sit down and figure out how the author did it. Everything is on the page for you to see, but it takes some mindful dissection to figure out how to incorporate techniques back into your own style.

My general strategy: when I finish reading a book/short story/fic, I pause to ask myself what I liked, what I didn't, and for the latter, how I would have done it "better". Get in the habit of teasing things apart and trying your own hand at them.

Experiment with tense and mix up your sentence structure. Present or past tense? Even if your english teachers condemn(ed) it, try out using sentence fragments for emphasis and length difference between full stops. Use three commas in one sentence and none in the next. Slowly make your sentences longer one by one as you increase the tension in a scene so your final, cumulative sentence holds the combined tension of all the others before it.

Play with genres and see if you can incorporate an element of one into another, or mesh two or three of them together. 

Shift your balance of dialogue, description, and exposition and find the ratio you like best. How much does your character think? What do they decide to say out loud? How observant are they of their surroundings?

Ask yourself questions while you write. 

What’s happening behind the scenes? What kind of foreshadowing can I slip in so in hindsight, the result is obvious? What kind of side lines did I write before that could actually help tie in with a larger event?

What does my character want? What’s stopping them from getting it? How far will they go to surpass that obstacle? Why do they want what they do, and why does the reader care?

Personally I think that last bit, about character, is one of the most important. A good story can die because of bad characters, but good characters can carry the most poorly thought out plot.