As someone who writes and has also worked as an editor I can give you both perspectives.
From an editor's perspective:
- You're probably droning on too much to the point of having at least three sentences more than you need. Part of being a writer is tossing something it took 3 hours to write in the garbage. That doesn't mean you should always be terse, it means you're probably over-explaining, repeating yourself, and generally flying past the mark when you already nailed it with a particular line. For learning flow and how to do more with less I recommend reading poetry over prose.
- Your dialogue probably sucks. This is one of the harder things to master since, as much as you may want to say everything, writing a character isn't about letting them spout off clearly. They have to say things they don't mean, they have to misinterpret intentions (their own and those of others), they have to hear what they want to hear - as creations they have to be frustrating little cunts who never quite do what you want them to if they're ever going to feel genuine. For starters cut out as much repetition as you can; amateur dialogue tends to fall into the trap of halfway repeating what was just said and replying directly to it until the whole mess hardens into an expositional graham cracker segment that literally anyone could have said. If you find your dialogue becoming a torrent of explanations it's time to revise it.
- Your plot's probably a bunch of hackneyed events that you're blatantly ripping off from something you enjoyed loosely strung together by all that droning prose and dry dialogue. If you're making snide comments about how it's just like (thing) and/or trying to ~subvert the cliches~ by doing a parody then you're also doing in the hackiest possible way. This doesn't mean that you can't use old standbys, it means that you've not yet worked out a story that you want or need to tell; you're just trying to copy something else without understanding why that other thing worked and yours doesn't. John Hawkes made one of my favorite quotes on writing:
I began to write fiction on the assumption that the true enemies of the novel were plot, character, setting and theme, and having once abandoned these familiar ways of thinking about fiction, totality of vision or structure was really all that remained.
Too many would-be writers get so caught up in these (and so become children rearranging their playthings) that they never fully realize a vision for -what- they want to write. Everything else should flow from that totality of vision; when you're serving that vision instead of trying to recreate things you enjoyed reading the elements you include, whether they're familiar or not, won't come off quite so hacky.
From a writer's perspective:
- Everyone will tell you to read but don't just read what you're familiar with. Read plays, read poems, read screenplays, read short stories, read essays - as a writer you have words, and as limiting as those are there are also countless ways to use them that you're not familiar with yet. The limitations of different mediums for writing will give you new ideas. If you're only familiar with novels you're probably too reliant on prose; reading screenplays or plays where there is no prose can show you how to express things without having to sit there telling your reader what's happening.
- Wean yourself off of cheap tricks to manipulate your reader into feeling the way you want them to. Whether they eat it up or not isn't the issue here; you don't -need- to coax them. The audience is held captive in a prison of your own design. Flex your muscles and subject them to an experience with no mercy or consideration. What they feel is theirs; what you're putting in front of them is yours. They're only allowed to see, to hear, to smell, to taste, to touch what you allow them to; they're completely reliant on you in every sense. You're tricking them by virtue of limiting them to your words. If you're so incompetent in that role that you have to rely on some contrived emotional manipulation you're giving up all your power as an author and resorting to begging them to react a certain way.
- If you're writing about people you're writing about troubles. If you're writing how you wish people would act you're masturbating. Getting wanky isn't necessarily a bad thing but most people's wank fantasies are insipid. Whether you're writing waifus or ideologies you need to see people in action if you're hoping to write about their troubles. If you're writing porn then you're crossing the streams; the best porn has both troubles and eroticised visions of the way people are dealing with them. The essence of erotica is catharsis and understanding how sex is catharsis for social roles and pressures, how they're visions of success and failure, is key to writing smut that's more than just mechanical descriptions of things bumping into other things.
- Write stuff you're not going to actually use. The worst way to write is to reveal over time everything important that happened or will happen. Having these things down on paper will allow you to understand the totality of what you're writing and will inform the way you write in material that you will use. This isn't limited to things from a character's backstory or events in a setting's past that aren't going to actually show up in the story; important events in the ongoing story can be offscreened and the material you include can have other characters reacting to it. Why you'd do this goes back to how the reader is stuck with what you give them. Giving them an incomplete vision is part of setting the scene you're inflicting on them, a way of fine-tuning the details.
- Part of refining your use of words is in learning how people express pain, insecurity, confidence, emptiness, yearning - the ways they project these onto others, the way they try to universalize their own experiences, the way they try to enforce their views onto others, the way they try to judge others by the standards of their own feelings of misery, of superiority or inferiority, of their inexperienced ideals - and mastering them. This means learning the language of attachments, of irony, of genuine interest, of disgust, of self-hatred, of self-actualization, of self-aggrandizement and self-destructiveness. This is a language all its own that lurks in any spoken or written language and a competent writer can express these only if they understand what's actually being said.
