Identify Your Weaknesses as a Writer to Get Better

It’s hard to improve without knowing what you are doing wrong

Larry Niven is a great writer. His worldbuilding is some of the best in Science Fiction. He can’t write conflict though, and his characters tend to be a little flat. He’s also not great at tension.

Jerry Pournelle is a great writer. His Military Science Fiction is some of the best in the world. He does conflict incredibly well, drawing on a long military career. His characters are kind of flat, he’s bad at tension, and he doesn’t world build terribly well.

Steven Barnes is a different case. Not because he’s not one of the best Science Fiction writers out there, but because I haven’t read his solo stuff, so I don’t know his strengths. I suspect he makes really good characters and excels at tension. I suspect this because when Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle collaborated on novels the character depth and lack of tension issues seemed to be there. When they added Steven Barnes to the mix the characters really came to life and the tension ratcheted up to 10. Read Dreampark if you get the chance, it’s a great novel from the early eighties.

Here’s the point, at least two of these writers have clear deficiencies. They work with them, creating the kind of stories that don’t suffer too much from the areas where they are weak, but at the same time they miss out on several areas they could write about because of those weaknesses.

Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle started working together and crafting stories that had the world-building and wonder of Larry Niven with the hard as nails military action Pournelle brings to the table. They were pretty damned good. That was part of each of them recognizing a weak area. Finally, they worked with Barnes and came up with something stronger than any of them would have been able to produce on their own.

So, weaknesses dealt with right? All you need to do is come up with some collaborators that you work perfectly with and…

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