I have been thinking about this for a while, ultimately I don’t have much of a gauge for this myself. Either something will appeal to me or it won’t, for several reasons or sometimes just none. And I think that the ideas of what are good or bad to do in writing, storytelling, scripts, etc are ultimately subjective and change based on time period, culture and society. It’s not a science. But I am curious enough to want to know what other people feel.
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Enjoyment is purely subjective, but I see good writing as anything that is able to stick with its internal logic. The world you create should have its own rules and characters should act to situations in a way that’s appropriate for their personalities/lived experiences/etc. Really, the general rule of thumb is to not force things to work because the plot demands it, but to have your characters lead the narrative with actions they would normally take. Essentially, consistency in every aspect of writing is key to creating a good narrative no matter what the content is.
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Personally, I want something which has a narrative overtone of not overly relying on tropes which have been done to death (especially in the series already, i.e. I’m personally very tired of "defeat a dragon, save the world, recapture a country, etc.) and then has natural writing between characters and actively incorporates the rest of the cast into that narrative. (Bonus points if the narrative adapts and corrects around whether characters are recruited/weren’t recruited, are alive/are dead, etc., a la Path of Radiance. It’s tedious and laborious work, but it shows a great deal of planning and effort when the story will account for characters the entire way through the story and hedge against them having been lost to battle by having alternate script lines if a line they would say would come across.)
Some light humor, for characters it makes sense to speak that way, is fine, but I typically am not a fan of writing which is strictly comedic the whole way through. My biggest thing is something which Bluechan just hit on - it should feel like a living world coming through the writing. People should act like normal people would in everyday life. That sense of things being “grounded” is something that I appreciate quite a bit.
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HYPE MOMENTS WHAOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
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Grounded writing is a big one for me similar to what LordGlenn mentioned. It’s okay to be silly and light-hearted at times, but it can really suck me out of the story if the timing is inappropriate.
Characters behaving consistently with their backgrounds. They should react in a believable ways to the story unfolding around them. This doesn’t mean they can’t grow out of their past, they absolutely should, and the best characters are constantly growing through the story. But you should be able to trace back their actions to an extent.
Probably most importantly for me, believable motivations have to apply to the “bad guys” as well, if the story is to even have “bad guys” at all. If you have someone who is evil for the sake of being evil, it leaves so much unexplored space. There are so many interesting reasons why people end up doing things you may define as evil. After learning their motivations, are they actually evil after all? Can you sympathize with their cause? Given the option, would you side with them? Making the reader feel unexpected empathy is a strong emotion.
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It may seem basic, but mistakes in spelling, punctuation, and grammar are off-putting to me. I’ll tolerate the occasional typo, but too many mistakes encourages me to stop reading.
I should also mention that “correct grammar” depends on the dialect, so characters that consistently use a certain style of what some might call “improper grammar” are totally fine by me.
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its obv all a bunch of little things that add up to something solid but when characters talk overtly like real people s72 style im like ouuuuu
To me “Good Writing” is writing devoid of typographical errors which effectively accomplishes the intentions of the writer.
That said, I’m sure the bigger question here is moreso “what are the key components to my enjoyment of writing”
I’m very picky in my preferences. I like writing which feels grounded and simple. I feel that people can often infer far more than authors give credit.
I dislike when an author pushes some sort of emotional conflict in a way that feels forced or like they’re trying to give their characters substance via immaturity and inability to engage as a stable individual. Examples of this include Avatar the last airbender and Anakin in Star Wars. I know a lot of people laud this way of portraying characters (often talking about how great it is to have flawed characters), but these sorts of character expressions (and the conflict which goes along with them) often feel to me like they either come before there has been enough build up, or that the author is pushing some form of societal statement through the characters having said conflict.
Harry Potter is a great example of a series in which every character is very flawed (except Harry but that’s a tangent) but it isn’t overtly shoved in your face. Instead it allows the reader to step back and think “wow, such ‘n such is a total jerk. I can’t believe they’re so manipulative/immature/etc.”
So for video games, my favorite writing has to be Final Fantasy Tactics Advance. The text is very simple and it communicates a lot of themes, subthemes and inferred world building into a very small amount of simple text.
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Good writing is aware of its themes and is able to explore said themes in a variety of different ways through the characters. The author asks a question, and the characters tackle that question from all different angles, influenced by their background, personality, relationships, etc.
This one sounds obvious, but there needs to be conflict. The overarching conflict needs to tie into the themes, and it should force the characters to confront their ideals, test their faith, figure out how far they’re willing to go, etc. Smaller points of tension between the cast also make things more interesting (Roxelana allying with the exiles in despite her grievances in Drums of War).
The delivery of all of this information is important as well. Figuring out how to give the player information in a way that feels natural and well-paced is a huge challenge, and it’s way easier just to give them a long world map text scroll before the game starts, but it’s more engaging if that information is spread out, conveyed naturally through dialogue and maybe even a few visuals.
This is more of a personal thing, but I think smaller stakes are more effective at getting the player invested and often land harder in general than generic ‘save the world’ stakes (Kyra’s little brother in Hag in White).
Also some of it is just feel. Sometimes I’ll be playing a hack and a character says or does something that gives me chills, and that’s good. It feels cool. Hype moments and aura. Important stuff.
Huge ramble, but writing is a complicated, fascinating craft that requires a ton of effort to do well. I’m constantly impressed by the output of this community, FE hacks are such a wonderfully expressive medium and it’s truly a gift to be able to experience all of this creativity.
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The shortcut to good writing is making every character an absolute nutcase. Not just in a lol so random way, but they’re actually probably better off being held in a cell and instead you have to see them cause problems in the greater world. You can skip every other tenet of good writing if you just make your main cast insane enough.
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I agree with basically every sentiment expressed here.
One thing I’d like to add is that conveying as much as possible in one scene is a skill that’s difficult to master, but makes a huge difference once you’ve mastered it. The more you can accomplish – worldbuilding, exposition, character information, character development, plot progression, etc. – in one scene, usually the better, as long as you aren’t padding it out too much.
I think anyone can identify when a scene is “epic” – emotional impact, powerful plot developments, and other such events tend to stand out. But I also believe that it’s easy to identify when a scene is bad – simply put, if you are getting bored or are otherwise disconnected, the scene is most likely poorly written. I believe boredom when experiencing a story typically occurs when there isn’t much being achieved in the current scene. Banter that feels pointless, dialogue that feels like it’s rehashing characters’ existing traits and beliefs, exposition that isn’t interesting due to the way it’s delivered or other circumstances, etc. Character voice also contributes to this; when everyone speaks nearly the same way, it’s harder for them to be memorable, and dialogue feels much more streamlined across the entire cast, blending together.
The scenes in between the epicness and the boredom – the ones that retain your interest, without being pivotal moments – are the most difficult thing to write. But if you write them well, it makes a significant difference, because those scenes comprise the majority of any given story. You typically don’t get to place a massively important plot event or emotional moment in every chapter. You don’t get to have plot twists all the time. You need to get to these moments, and the in-between scenes are the vehicle for that.
The more you can achieve per scene, the more there is to pay attention to without padding out the scene excessively, the better. And repetition, rehashing the same idea over and over without recontextualization or other aspects that make it feel meaningfully different, is to stay away from. And of course, the more distinctive you can make your character voices – without making characters seem like caricatures – the better.
All of that is, in my opinion, very difficult. But it’s so important.
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Yeeeeeah, especially in a game like fe where the majority of information is conveyed through dialogue, you really have to learn to multitask. Writing dialogue that exposits, characterizes, and drives the plot forward is what ya want. As you said, extremely difficult to achieve this all of the time, but it’s always the goal.
Also YES distinct character voice is so important. Breathes life into a story.
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One thing I want to add that I didn’t really see touched on here is gameplay-story integration. Video games are their own medium, and written dialogue is only one of many, many ways we can convey information. Writing is obviously still super important, but there are ways that stats or gameplay can be writing, if that makes sense. Knoll has 0 Luck in Sacred Stones because he accidentally helped his best friend get possessed by the demon king, even though he had good intentions. Libra has a Killer Axe in Awakening because he’s torn between his roles as a priest and a warrior. 3-13 in Radiant Dawn offers an important choice (I’m not telling you what though, spoilers) that has both story and gameplay implications. (Ok, this example is more story than gameplay, but it’s a cool moment and I wanted to talk about it. And this specific moment is a very good example of good writing, so it still counts.) The Two Paths in Thracia 776 gives the player a story choice on which path to take in a gameplay setting. Thracia also has you play as rebels fighting against a much better equipped army, and you get most of your weapons and funds from the enemy, either by Stealing or Capturing. Which is objectively awesome. My point is, even though it can be difficult, if you can combine good writing with good gameplay, they both become that much better. And it can really elevate the experience, in my opinion.
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This is one of my favorite things about Fire Emblem.
gonna spam a massive word wall now
Good writing is a weird topic, because it assumes that writing is, on its own, a single “thing” that can be done well in a single way, and that two works can be compares on a binary scale of how “good” they are at writing.
As a short-hand term it’s useful - good writing means you liked enough elements of the game’s writing to consider it good, and that’s the important part. Breaking down “what makes writing good,” however, kind of makes it break down a bit.
I like to refer to the way people talk about the Star Wars prequel trilogy when talking about this topic. Those movies are, infamously, not well written. They have a lot of weird pacing issues as the films go on long tangents that exist mostly to fit a cool action setpiece, they have some atrociously wooden dialogue, the characters show very little chemistry with one another. It’s very easy to say that the films are badly written.
However, as people who grew up with those films got older and began participating in online discussion, you saw a lot of people with good memories of those movies, and a few of them aimed to justify that the movies were actually much better than their reputation implies. During this time, I noticed that the thing people talked about the most when praising the writing was not trying to find lines of dialogue that were actually really good, or character dynamics that were really engaging, but rather they spoke about the broad strokes of the plot.
And the thing is, they’re not technically wrong. If you just break down the events of the story, it’s interesting! An idealistic young knight, thrust into a position of great power and responsibility, slowly eroded by the influence of a corrupt mentor figure, mirroring that mentor’s simultaneous dismantling of democracy. Of course, this leaves out a lot of details in terms of how this story is told, but there are people who really value this marco-level look at writing in a story.
A lot of people view a story with pitch perfect character writing and very little plot as “poorly written.” A lot of people will cite a lot of anime and anime-adjacent media as well-written even if the only translation available is quite poor.
I tend to split my writing feedback along a few different lines - primarily “the plot” and “the script,” but sometimes I’ll get more specific and talk about “character writing” or “worldbuilding” if they’re relevant.
Ultimately, I think what makes a piece well written isn’t “what I like to see in stories,” because that’s just my preferences. Lord of the Rings is one of the most foundational texts in the English language and I think it’s kind of a boring read at times, but I’m not going to call it “badly written” as a result of that.
All that to say, something being well written is just a story that achieves its goals. Whether that means a grand political story with tons of politics and lore and worldbuilding, spanning years and years but told with relatively loosely drawn characters, or a hyper focused character study about two extremely layered and distinct characters developing over the course of a lazy afternoon chat, the quality of the writing in a piece is a matter of primarily how well it accomplishes its set of goals in terms of tone, content, messaging, etc, and then secondarily how well it does these things without sacrificing quality in other areas.
On a personal level, I really like stories with a lot of character drama and thematic callbacks, things that manage to make a story feel really tightly wound and meaningful while grounding it in people who I can invest in, learn about, and hopefully relate to, and so I try to create those kinds of stories myself.
also
??? knock it off man, jesus
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I’m pretty sure this isn’t the same Jason we’re refering to.
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i know, checked the profile.
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When I think of good writing, I generally think of writing that tends to flow. Writing that is able to encapsulate the ideas that they’re trying to convey in each step of the process. I think Olivia’s post accurately explains what I think about for good writing because, to me, there are two concurrent sides of a story. The script, and the plot, and often times we see that there is bad writing, but a really good underlying plot, or characters, or a lackluster plot buoyed by excellent writing.
Radiant Dawn, to me, is a really good example of a really good underlying plot, but hampered by bad writing, and misuse. There is a lot of interesting stuff that Radiant Dawn touches on, and very strong characters, but the way in which they’re used is often at detriment to how much fertile ground Radiant Dawn’s narrative has.
So for me, I think truly good writing is able to bond the two concepts to an enjoyable level. It doesn’t even have to be truly perfect or even novel, but it does need to be able to keep both of these on an reasonably similar footing. More specifically to FE, I think good writing involves a lot of character interactions, even from people who aren’t major to the story. Being able to make one’s world feel like a real place is a mark of really good writing to me, and character interactions are a big part of that for me.
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even if it was, taking potshots at the dude at every possible turn is so childish. He’s not even in this thread! Who cares!
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