I have very little technical ability, will this hinder my ability to tell a story and how to improve?

You are nowhere near as technically poor as you think you are. I can tell just from reading your question. It's clear, it makes sense, and is far better constructed than a hell of a lot of the writing I've seen self-pubbed on Amazon (from people who genuinely think they are amazing).

Hardly anyone actually does know what a participle is. You don't really need to unless you are arguing with a copy editor over changes they've made and need to use the correct grammatical jargon in order to argue your point convincingly. Likewise with semicolons -- if you aren't comfortable using them, you don't have to use them. They don't make anyone's writing any better purely from being included. Comma usage and so on can often (but not always) be a stylistic choice, so there can sometimes be several "correct" ways to use commas in a sentence depending on what the effect you want to create is.

Having said this: the most important thing that technically proficient writing will do for you is get your point across clearly. Clarity is really important because if there is a way in which a sentence can be misconstrued, then someone will misconstrue it. You don't want someone momentarily thinking that the fridge is talking if it isn't, for example. (Honestly, things like that can and do happen).

So definitely write if you want to write. Just check over your work afterwards to make sure that all the verbs are referring to all the right nouns, that you don't use the word 'it' if you're talking about something plural, and so on. You can break down your sentences into small chunks of meaning and then check that they make sense when combined as a whole.

On a slight side note: there's absolutely no point studying English grammar if you don't want to because it's pretty dry, but the thing that most improved the technical quality of my writing was learning foreign languages, because they work differently to English and it gets you thinking about the ways things are structured in language generally (in terms of words having to agree with each other in gender in French, or in gender, case, and number in Russian).

Sorry if this post was far too long and nerdy but I hope at least some of it was helpful! If you don't intend to publish anywhere or show anyone anyway, you know what you meant to write so technical ability doesn't matter too much. Good luck!

posted over 6 years ago

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skandaj‭

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Your initial instinct is correct; who cares?

My advice is to re-read some best selling popular fiction. Stephen King, JK Rowling, Orson Scott Card, Dan Brown, or others you like.

But switch off your brain's entertainment mode, and do this with an analytic eye. See how they mix dialogue and action. See how they handle "fast" action, like a fight. See how long they go without describing something visual. See how long their visual descriptions are.

Heck, use them for your punctuation reference, how to do quotes and where to put the commas in dialogue.

Write like that. Even if you are doing it for yourself, so when you come back to it and read it cold someday, it won't seem like crap, and you will like the story.

posted over 6 years ago

CC BY-SA 4.0

Amadeus‭

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