Cenonn's How to Holofic and Writing in General

Your voice is your own.

I'm going to talk about one important thing you should have as a writer: your own voice.

A voice is the unique detail an author will have, kinda like a fingerprint. There are two parts of a voice which are the writing style and tone.

What's a writing style? It's your own way of writing. Kinda like how you'll look at a drawing and immediately recognize who drew it. Writing is the same. Every author uses a certain style to tell a story. A writing style has a lot of elements which I'll discuss in the next few paragraphs.

First is the diction or the word choice. Do you prefer using "male" instead of "man"? Do you use "academy" instead of "school"? Do you use fancy words or simple ones? Your word choice is one of the most noticeable things in your writing style.

Second is the sentence structure. It's up to you if you keep on using long sentences or short sentences. Or if you use simple sentences a lot or complex sentences. Maybe you're the type who also uses fragmented sentences (while it isn't recommended to have fragmented sentences, some authors manage to get away with it since their execution is top-tier).

Third is the detail or how well you describe something. Maybe you are the type to write multiple paragraphs of a character's appearance. You might be someone who just goes "He is tall and handsome" and goes straight to the action. How detailed you paint the scene is a huge indication of your writing style.

Fourth is the usage of literary techniques. An author might be someone who uses symbolism, personifications, irony, metaphors, and similes. How often you use them is part of your writing style.

And the fifth is the rhythm. Rhythm is the "flow" that the readers would have depending on the writer's word choice and sentence structure. Are you the type who makes one simple sentence after another? Do you repeat certain words? Do you use alliterations? Do you make your sentences rhyme?

Now then... Your writing style is your own. Write in a way that will make your readers know that it's you who is writing and not anyone else. You may start with imitating someone else's writing style but try to make it your own. Okay?

Next up is the writing tone. A writing tone is the writer's attitude towards the subject and the readers. It creates the atmosphere or mood of the story. It can be humorous, sarcastic, passionate, and whatever. Depending on what kind of story you are trying to tell, the tone is pretty important.

For example, you have to make sure you are humorous and light when you are writing a children's book. But if you're writing a dark fantasy, then your tone would be serious and sometimes depressing.

Your choice of words will greatly affect your tone. After all, words have connotations. A certain expression can be considered as sarcasm but when you change the word, it can become vulgar. ("Poop" is funny but outright saying "shit" is vulgar).

Now then, I'll talk about how to have your own unique voice.

First and foremost, learn how to write properly. That means you should study grammar and be decent in it. An author who has bad grammar automatically has a bad voice.

Second is to expand your vocabulary. I said that your choice of words will affect your tone, right? By learning unfamiliar words and finding alternate versions of common words, you'll be having a different tone.

Third is to read widely and deeply. By knowing how others did it, you will have an idea on how you can execute your own book. That also means analyzing how successful authors' voices work and trying to take the best from them.

Fourth is to experiment with different writing styles. You have to vary your word choice and sentence structures until you find a style that suits you.

Fifth is to learn how to use literary techniques like figures of speech. Similes and metaphors make your writing much more colorful while symbolism and allusions make it meaningful.

Sixth is to make writing a lifestyle. Practice makes perfect so by having a habit of writing in a certain voice, you will make it into your own.

Seventh is to write in a way that is natural for you. You have to use your own style of word choice and sentence structure. You can't force yourself to be someone else.

Eighth is to learn about your target audience. Your tone will be dependent on who you want to read your book. Try to research your target audience and see what kind of tone will work best for them.

Now that I talked about the writing voice, I'll talk about some things you should look out for while writing.

First is the tense consistency. Try to be consistent with all of your verbs in your story. If it happened in the past, don't use the present tense. Let's take a look at the example below
[

Aki walked towards Mel. She smiles at her and gives her tomato juice. Mel will return the favor and give her apple the next day.

]

See? It's iffy. The first sentence is in past tense, the second sentence is in present tense, and the third sentence is in future tense. As a writer, you have to make sure your tenses are consistent throughout the entire story. To fix it, we could have everything be in past tense like:
[
Aki walked towards Mel. She smiled at her and gave her tomato juice. Mel would return the favor and give her apple the next day

]

Since everything is in past tense, it would give the reader a sense that the story already happened.

Next thing I will tell you about is parallelism. What is parallelism? Parallelism is a similarity of grammatical form for similar elements within a sentence or among sentences.

Single words should be balanced with single words as with phrases and clauses. If you don't have parallelism, your sentence might become awkward.

I can't fully explain it in detail so I suggest you try to look it up on Google. But I'll give you examples on how parallelism works so you'll have a rough idea.

Not Parallel: The criteria for Vtubers are: cheerfulness, sociability, and they are persistent.

Parallel: The criteria for Vtubers are: cheerfulness, sociability, and persistence.

Not Parallel: Sui-chan is known for singing awesomely, drawing nicely, and her cute smile.

Parallel: Sui-chan is known for singing awesomely, drawing nicely, and smiling cutely.

Try to find out more about tense consistency and parallelism since they are the common pitfalls of new authors.

Now then... I finished talking about how you should write in general. Now, I'll talk about one important thing in a Holofic or even stories in general: the dialogues.