“Whenever the English say my name,” Grantaire mutters, “it always sounds like they’re asking me for permission to breathe. ‘Grant air’, they say. Lucky for them I am a magnanimous man.”
this is good
I keep on seeing people making these posts like “OMG I just read such a wonderful story, my writing will never be that good, farewell cruel world throwing myself down a well!” So I’m here now to just toss out the idea that, short of certain types of major problems with your writing (incomprehensibly bad grammar, stories that are all about your own highly specific and bizarre set of kinks), your writing is almost always going to be much more enjoyable for everyone else than it is for you.
Think about it: so much of the beauty of good writing comes from surprise. Not, like, a SHOCKING TWIST, but that little jolt of surprise and recognition that you get from a well put-together metaphor or turn of phrase, or how the punchline of a joke startles you into laughing.
So of course your writing doesn’t seem that good or interesting to you: you can’t find any of it clever because you know all the tricks already.
The problem isn’t that your writing is bad, it’s that enjoying your own writing is like trying to tickle yourself.
I was sent a script recently, and the opening scene was; Jessica, or maybe not Jessica, whatever her name was, rolls around in bed and stretches. She’s 35, and in brackets they had it say 8/10, close brackets. I closed the script, and didn’t read the rest of it. Because you cannot reduce a character, you cannot make them their attractability, you can’t number them and then claim you’ve written a multidimensional female character, or a male character. That is just not acceptable. […] And I think it’s very important to say ‘this is the reason I didn’t respond to, or didn’t read your script’, because that’s absolutely outrageous. You can’t do that.
Andrew Scott, Paris Comics Expo 2016 (x)