Aight, this part will mainly be focused on rhythm, flow, and personality within the writing. Essentially, how to not make your writing dry and yeet some flavour into it.
First method: Diction.
I used "flavour" instead of "flavor" due to the uniqueness of the spelling since most peeps are familiar with the Americanized English, and not British English. The uniqueness adds spice to the sentence.
Second method: Jokes, puns, etc.
Make sure to keep it subtle and don't overdo it. And most of all, make sure it's not used in the wrong mood. How many of y'all caught the pun in the first method's explanation? (talking about the word "flavour" + the last sentence of that paragraph).
3rd method: Putting yourself into the writing.
This bit is complicated and requires skill. When you write, you're exposing bits of yourself through the style your using.
If the book is dialogue, what you're saying, then your writing style is your slang, diction, and accent. Based on one's slang, diction, and accent, one can infer pieces of information about the writer.
Example: Last sentence written by a formal/professional boi, this sentence written by a memer/someone who frequents the internet.
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----- Example
"Make use of your abilities," It responded as the snake charged at her, and she leapt into the air, a dark whip appearing in her hand, which she used to slash the snake at the side of its neck as it charged at her, and she smirked.
----- Notes
Aight, dry boi right here. Dryness can happen for a variety of reasons. But first, to clarify, "dryness" can also come off as platonic, 2D, boring, etc. Think of your bad history teachers.
Back to those reasons... Most common is people are heavily influenced by other works and put nothing of their own in. So it ends up like someone copied and pasted a bunch of research papers from different authors into a document and turned that in.
The clash of each author's style, on top of the person who is actually publishing the book's style, just creates a jumbled up mess. It's worse if the author who influenced the writer had no style...
So ye, dryness will naturally disappear if YOU write the majority of it. Being influenced by ideas is good and all, but if 90% of your plot just comes from taking ideas from everywhere then typing it out, chances are the writing is dry.
In other words, you need to leave room for your own creativity to blossom in your work, otherwise your characters, which are heavily influenced by a different char of a different author whom you may not even understand completely, will have a clash of what the story's logical flow is supposed to shape them and what the original char is.
...still kind of hard to understand so think of it like this. Let's say you know a Billy irl and you decide to make a character based on them. But the story needs "Billy" to behave different from Billy irl. Character Billy will then behave erratically due to you thinking of irl Billy while you write him, and unintentionally put irl Billy's traits in Char Billy.
The heavily influenced thing is like that, but 10x to 100x worse. Sometimes, the new book looks as if someone took pages of 10 other books and taped them together to form a "new" one.
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So the other reason: There is no personality to put in the style.
I don't mean this as an insult, like "you have no personality," but simply as factual evidence: there is no personality.
This could mean you really don't have a personality (whether it's due to wearing a mask, having filters on, or whatever) OR you simply don't know enough about yourself to put yourself into the writing.
Someone who is proficient in facial expressions and reading body language may explain them in more detail and even with references. Someone who enjoys engineering may have designs or have a character who is an engineer. etc. etc.
The simplest way to know more about yourself is through hobbies. Writing is one of those hobbies, but if you want to use it to explore yourself, you must write with little to no influences and without filters or masks (create an alt if need be).
Another method is to just live. Chances are you're too young to know most of your personality traits. You could ask your friends and family though to get an idea, as you will always be the person who knows least about yourself.
Lastly, read. Read traditional books, ebooks, comics, play scripts, anything. Don't be limited to one, two, or even five genres either. As you get more exposure through reading, you'll have a better knowledge base to write from since you're observing another author's personality through their work.
In the best of works, the characters will diverge from the author's personality or intentions and act on their own.
Here's a recommendation for those who are interested in this method:
The Crucible - a play by Arthur Miller | The Great Gatsby - a book | Fahrenheit 451 - a book | If you're up for it, then some plays by Shakespeare. It'll require a lot of research though | The End of Eternity - a book | Metamorphosis - a book about a dude becoming a dung beetle | Of Mice and Men - a book | Old Yeller - a book | Wolves of Beyond - a series of books | Warriors - the cat book series
The intended audience of these bois are all over the place, as it should be. Make sure to read a few sample chapters, and if you can't understand it, then move on. Poetry is also good for studying rhythm and flow, but I hardly read any so not much recs to give there.
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I didn't put many examples of an author's personality within the work because that takes CHAPTERS just to barely see a hint. You'd also need a decent level of wisdom/understanding/inference sight thing to even understand where and what I'm referring to, to the point you wouldn't even need to read those explanations if you could do that.
If you aren't sure if something is dry, there are some bois in the novel discussion channel of the inkstone server who can help, or you can ping me there.
...Rhythm and flow to be continued next chap since only personality was done here and that turned out to be quite hefty.