Hey Everyone! It's 🌸StrxwberryBliss🍓 here! So, I have been trying to amp up my writing skills so I can engage more of a variety of players but I want to know how exactly do I do that. When you search for example, Visual Novel, you may see a bunch of popular visual novels who have been seen by so much people, and all of them have different ways of writing. This may sound vague here, but I want to know how to write for different themes or different visual novels entirely. 

There is a clear difference between an average piece of writing, to an effective and engaging visual novel that you don't want to take out of your hands when you need to. My intentions at the moment is to create a otome dating sim visual novel or a rpg game that will attract many players to come play my game, but countless times I feel like my dating sims are good at first, until I trash out my idea and the cycle starts all over again.

I hope you have an understanding of what I'm trying to say here and all the information I can get by you the player or you the developer will be truly needed!

Your local itch.io developer who needs help,

🌸StrxwberryBliss🍓

but countless times I feel like my dating sims are good at first, until I trash out my idea and the cycle starts all over again.

It's probably not trash.  It probably just needs refinement.

I'm not much of a writer, so I don't have any advice on how to get better at writing, other than practice.  If you are anything like me, though, you need to not just write, but rewrite.

My first attempt at a scene or conversation usually isn't great.  That's OK, though.  I just do the best I can in the moment, which I may or may not be happy with.  Then I move on to something else.  When I come back to that section later and reread it, I might think it's awful and despair that I wrote something so bad, but I will see ways to improve it, so I rewrite it.  It's probably still not good enough, though, so I come back to it again later.  Then I rewrite it again.  I keep doing that until I have something satisfactory.

I am not talking about proofreading (although that is mandatory) but revising the text for better flow, better word choice, more natural dialogue, more evocative descriptions and so on.  It takes a few tries to get it right.  So basically, don't be discouraged if your work seems poor at a second or third look.  Just keep going over it again and again until it's polished.

Writing visual novels is not fundamentally different than any other type of fiction writing.  Don't ask a bunch of game developers about writing.  Look for communities of writers.  Read books about writing.  Join a local writer's circle.

For me, one of the key advantages of writing for a visual novel compared to a more traditional story is the more intimate connection to the main character's thoughts, as they flow seamlessly along with the narration and dialogue. I suppose that could also be said for writing from a first person perspective in general, of course, but I think it's important to use that to your advantage.

There's a fair balance to strike, too, as you don't want to get bogged down too much in a character's inner thoughts, but at the same time, if you just gloss over them and blaze through a scene it can often feel lacking. Since for me, the main character is a character in themselves and it's important to explore why they do what they do, and how they feel about any given situation, and aren't just a blank slate for the player to slot into.

That's my approach of course, and plenty of visual novels do things differently, with some not even being written in a first person perspective, or even having narration at all. (Being purely dialogue based instead) So there's no one 'right' way to approach it, of course, and it should come down to what you think your project will mesh with the best.

Also something to consider about a visual novel is the 'visual' component--which is one of the largest differences from say, a traditional novel. Because when you have visual aids for the likes of backgrounds, characters, etc. you can often plan your writing around this and avoid redundancy in the narration if what you're describing is already clearly in front of you.

My personal opinion is that you do not abuse of slang.
It makes it difficult for non-native english to read.

It will depend on the type of writing style you want to have. For example, something more descriptive with long paragraphs? Or do you want to rely more heavily on the Visual assets and have fewer/shorter narratives written?

I used to work for a company writing visual novels and they had various guidelines on how to write them that we had to stick to.

For example, be mindful of how many clicks players have to go through before getting to the hook of your story. Because of this, we would write stories in Excel cells rather than a Word document so you can more easily track the number of lines.

 Generally, a good rule of thumb is to have the inciting incident happen within the first hundred clicks. I would aim for much earlier than this, if possible and try to front-load the opening moments with hints to exciting directions to where the story may go, foreshadowing the romance, the danger, etc.

Regarding romance, I found the book "romancing the beat" invaluable help in providing a tried and tested structure to my stories.

Anyway, good luck and happy writing! I'm very happy to give my worthless feedback on anything you come out with!

In general, the best and easiest way is to write about what happened to you and, if necessary, hyperbolize what happened. You can also take a novel or short story and use it as the basis for your own. The main thing is not to plagiarize, but to use some features of the characters or actions. I often check myself through services like https://fixgerald.com/ to see if my writing is okay. Because then you can get your head kicked in.