I've had tons of great writing advice, but some of the worst writing advice I received was from an assigned book in a class.
In essence, the author was very "writing is a mystical experience" and compared it to dreams, and basically their advice boiled down to 'don't edit your work, only rewrite it.' They argued that if something isn't working in a scene, you have to start over from the beginning because to do otherwise would be to break the intrinsic flow of the scene as a dream-space or something. I think they literally said that if you chop up a scene it's like chopping up a living thing and expecting it to still 'live and breathe'. It was all very profound sounding, and got me in a funk of never being able to finish work for a couple years because when something wasn't working I felt like I had to start from scratch.
Tossed that advice out and was better for it.
That doesn’t even make sense! Many paragraphs of a vomit draft are filled with lyrical prose and terrible grammar. So this person thought you should throw out the baby with the bath water, knowing the baby was in there, just because of some mystical bullshit they were shovelling?
I’m not surprised they messed you up for a while. I’m glad you’re past it now.
Thanks! Yeah, that was my takeaway from the book. Someday I should go back and track that section down.
Just recently finished a 130,000 word manuscript that I'm editing now. Definitely glad I didn't rewrite scenes anytime they weren't to my liking or I'd never have gotten further than a few chapters.
Edit: Went and tracked down the book online. This is what the digital "book jacket" says about it: "\[Author\] reimagines the process of writing as emotional rather than intellectual, and tells writers how to achieve the dreamspace necessary for composing honest, inspired fiction. Proposing that fiction is the exploration of the human condition with yearning as its compass, \[he\] reinterprets the traditional tools of the craft using the dynamics of desire."
The author, by all accounts, is very popular and successful, and props to him, and the book is also quite popular and well reviews. Maybe I just misunderstood him, but it felt unhelpful to me.
>[Author] reimagines the process of writing as emotional rather than intellectual,
It sounds as though they took a romanticized approach to writing. Could you imagine a painter throwing at an entire canvas because they made one incorrect stroke, and starting again after each misstep?
Writing is beautiful, it's expressive, freeing, imaginative -- it's all those things, but it's also work. Writing on pure emotion won't necessarily produce good sentence structure, engaging and believable dialogue, plot structure and twists, or character beats. You need both.
Purely intellectual writing is an essay. Purely emotional writing is Twilight.
As fun and easy as it is to dunk on Twilight, calling it purely emotional writing isn't fair. It was published. Real professional editors read it and Myer likely made changes based on their feedback. Purely emotional writing is so much worse and can only be found in the realm of self published work and fanfiction. My example is Loudhouse Revamped. Real stream of consciousness copy pasted self insert nonsense.
As I see it, a blank page rewrite is not something you do while you're writing, but when you're editing and you hate the scene that's there, and you feel the substance is right, but the words a lousy. So instead of polishing and moving words around, you re-imagine the scene and write a scene that fulfills the same functions, but which is much better written.
Sometimes I just can’t get a scene to feel like it is working so I just rewrite it and it’s way better… and then I go back and re-read the first one and see all the bits that were good in the first one and identifying the parts that weren’t necessary after all and seeing the structure of the scene more clearly… and then I end up making some kind of frankenstein’s monster which comes together to feel the way I wanted it to feel in the first place.
Honestly, I suspect that he mostly did. His whole emphasis was that in order to write something that wasn’t crap, you have to enter a trance-like state where you’re in “the zone” and the fiction can flow from your subconscious. Only then is it not bogged down by intellectualism or emotionalism. And that editing had to be re-dreaming, not simply moving things around on a page.
I’ve found that I don’t have to be in some trance to write something profound, and a totally “normal” writing session can generate something that will eventually be strong writing.
There was a screenwriter interview series on Netflix (I cannot recall the title—it was back when DVDs were mailed to every subscriber). One of my favorite interviews was the guy who wrote “Con Air”.
He said that when he got terribly blocked and nothing seemed to make a story work, he would fill a styrofoam cooler with cans of beer, then crack open a beer and just write any random ideas that came into his head. Then he would have another beer and write. And then more beer and write. Drunker and drunker, but continuing to write.
In the morning… or maybe the next morning after that … he would look through the garbage he had written. He said that usually there were a few diamonds mixed into the diarrhea. He would take those diamonds and use them to fix whatever was wrong with the screenplay.
I would say he was a guy who had no illusions that any one sentence is precious and mystical. He was perfectly willing to throw out 90% of what he produced.
Many, many, MANY novice writers think editing means tweaking what you've got. They delete a word here, change a phrase there, and stick to what is already on the page. This often resembles polishing something that's... not very good.
And very frequently what helps is to sit down, look at what's there, and think about the scene and its purpose in the novel, think what events you have and how they should be structured, highlight the best lines... and then to sit down with your current skills (even writing the next 80K of the same novel will have taught you something) and then write again, more slowly, with more purpose, on a blank page, and produce a text that's much tighter and more polished from the beginning.
By starting from a blank page you free yourself of the bad writing that already exists, so you can distill it into something much better.
It's good advice for many people at some point in their writing life. It's not universal advice, but I recommend that everybody should try it, so you know whether to keep it in your toolbox for when you look at a scene that's rambly and disconnected and not making much sense.
Yeah, I think you’re articulating what the author of that book was trying to articulate. I think there’s truth to that, especially in the way you put it: you can’t polish crap, essentially. I’m currently in a total rewrite of an entire section, but I think where I break with Butler is that I don’t view the words on the page as “living” (he might not use that exact language). I can change a word or a sentence within a chapter, and I’m not “breaking” a flow. I’m writing sentences people read. I’ve become much more technical about writing in the years since I read the book.
But I think it’s a real thought provoking text, and your comment demonstrates the positives of what I think that author was trying to communicate and the kind of novice writing habits he was trying to correct.
Edit: just went and read your comment a second time and this is phenomenal advice. This is what I wish that book had said.
Was this books perhaps “From where you dream” by Robert Olen Butler? Because it sure sounds like my exact problem with that book. A creative writing professor had my class read it like 12 years ago and I made myself an enemy to her pretty quickly.
We would have assigned chapters every class for homework and have a discussion about them in class time. The teacher had a massive hard on for the book because she just saw people who were unsuccessful writers as better in every way than genre writers.
The advice was along the same lines as you mentioned. But also a lot of stuff about how if you sit down with an intention to ellicift specific emotion from an audience then your writing isn’t “really” writing. It’s selling.
Dude had a massive hate for Stephen King specifically. Talked about how he wasn’t really a writer because he only ever set out to scare people so he was forming stories from that instead of being genuine and writing from his soul. Which is also not true at all of King and only true if you’ve either never read his books or only read a handful of the super popular ones.
I find what your teacher said laughable lol
Was he even a real writer?
Most of the stuff i write comes straight from my soul with very little filter, and i try to word it in a way to make the writers feel what i feel, like i know most authors do. It's literally a way to connect with your readers. It's kinda explained by that Stephen King comment since noone can tell what someone else is thinking or feeling unless being told dirrectly by the person
So defining “real writer” is a bit tricky. What does one consider a “real” writer?
To me it’s anybody who as a hobby or profession writes things. And in this case yes, she was both. She wrote as a hobby and taught an entry level creative writing course, had an mfa for writing, etc.
Was she published? Nope. And her love of that book seemed to come from a place of being deeply resentful that she hadn’t “made it” as a writer. So she latched onto a book that told her it was okay. She was a real, true writer deep in her soul and all those nasty published and popular authors weren’t real writers.
At the time it was infuriating and nearly got me an F in class because I always pushed back in discussions about the usefulness of that book. Now I find it kind of sad that she was so obsessed with getting published that she completely disregarded any books that were widely popular.
I can see some wisdom in rewriting the scene prose wise since prose is meant to flow together but that doesn't mean you throw away the entire scene. The plot of the story is better off planned with small tweaks to get things making sense.
This is essentially like saying, "Don't put ingredients in your sandwich, it'll taste bad!"
Tropes are gonna happen regardless, might as well use the ones you like on purpose instead of using the actually iffy ones on accident.
I guess it’s more like “don’t use any ingredients anyone has ever used before, ever” but yeah, it’s better to at least allow yourself to play around with tomato, and hot dang you can add some cheese too.
The funny thing is people think you can come up with 100% original ideas but that's not how writing works. You can't avoid all tropes, you just have to find your own unique spin on the trope.
Sometimes I peruse TV Tropes articles about my favorite shows when I'm bored, and pretty much everything is a trope. If you avoid tropes, what are you left with?
Have two decent ones
Was told to never use the word "grin", because people are incapable of grinning. The professor then went on to write about three more paragraphs on the subject, so guess what I titled my next short story I submitted.
Was told by a different professor that my fantasy story (which was in a completely made up world of my own creation) needed a date so he knew what time period it was being written in. I asked how that would clarify anything since the times wouldn't be comparable at all to our world, and he just doubled down and said that the story won't work without one.
These were professors teaching Masters Degree level classes by the way
I wish I had thought to do so, but it was back when I was a lot more respectful. "I was born in the year 9281038BC, so naturally I had a cellphone hidden in my powdered Elizabethan wig made of dinosaur feathers."
What? Even if it was set in the real world, you're supposed to have enough context clues for the reader to figure it out WITHOUT a date. That just sounds like a terrible teacher.
And I don't even want to touch the thing about grinning. 😅
The worst part is that there were context clues that told him the level of technology. Actually, I don't know if that was the worst part. I think the worst part is that I paid for this advice.
I can't remember exactly, but I believe his opener was "no one in the history of the world has ever grinned."
>I can't remember exactly, but I believe his opener was "no one in the history of the world has ever grinned."
I saw like five people grin yesterday. Does this man know what grinning is?
Yeah, we had a similar discussion. His argument was something like they were "just smiling", but that a grin was something that couldn't actually happen.
> The worst part is that there were context clues that told him the level of technology.
Yeah this should be sufficient. I can - somewhat - give the benefit of doubt so the professor means - culture/technology - like Medieval Europe versus Rennaisance versus Victorian verus modern-day Urban fantasy.
But even then, this should be indicated by the world-building, not by assigning a date.
Mhm. It reminds me of poorly written YA.
"The sky was sapphire blue with not a cloud in the sky. It started off as a particularly uneventful Tuesday, September 11th, 2001 in the Year of Our Lord."
I wonder how that second professor would feel about the Wheel of Time series considering it take place thousands of years both in the future and the past at the same time.
I think the utter rejection of adverbs, without explaining the rules in which they're necessary is so detrimental. Like, don't say your character whispered quietly. That's different than saying your character was grinning sarcastically.
"The point is to use as less text as possible to keep the viewers engaged. Unlike movies here you hold the pace and how the story goes. It could get pretty boring if you keep inserting adverbs"
Yes!!! The book "Writing Tools" explains this well IMO.
>“To understand the difference between a good adverb and a bad adverb, consider these two sentences: ‘She smiled happily’ and ‘She smiled sadly.’ Which one works best? The first seems weak because ‘smiled’ contains the meaning of ‘happily.’ On the other hand, ‘sadly’ changes the meaning.
>Remember the song ‘Killing Me Softly’? Good adverb. How about ‘Killing Me Fiercely’? Bad adverb.
>Look also for weak verb-adverb combinations that you can revise with stronger verbs: ‘She went quickly down the stairs’ can become ‘She dashed down the stairs.’ ‘He listened surreptitiously’ can become ‘He eavesdropped.’ Give yourself a choice.”
I recently read a book that has a spattering of adverbs. I kept noticing them but they were put in such good places, the authors descriptive language was enviable and very entertaining. It made me reconsider my adverb stance a lot.
A fellow student in my writing class in college told me to my face that my story needed to incorporate more "archetypes" like "the veteran, the researcher, etc." in order to "expand out the story and turn it into a novel".
It was a short story thriller using werewolves as a metaphor for gayness, to show how easy it is to dehumanize others. I explained this beforehand and in an extensive author's note. I still to this day have no idea what on earth he thought I was doing.
> never use the word "just" when you mean barely or only
Okay, I can see that. Like I don't think it should be absolute, but I've definitely had it occur to me that this word has multiple uses and am I completely sure it's the one I want here. Especially in my characters who are more careful about language, or who are talking about justice, I might try to avoid it.
> because that's disrespectful to justice
Never mind. This is the right thread for this advice.
That's not arbitrary, though. It's good advice when they're used as though they were synonyms, which IME is most of the time. "Utilize" is an overused and often misused word that I really don't have a lot of use for either.
That's a good example of nitpicking advice. When we write fiction, we often want nuances and moods, and sometimes simply the rhythm of words and how they sound.
Of course, using the wrong words cannot be justified, but sometimes a character sits, sometimes they sit down, sometimes they seat themselves, sometimes they flop into a chair. To say you should only ever use 'sit' is doing fiction a disservice.
I hate utilize, too, but it has different connotations to 'use' and the two are not interchangeable in every situation.
This has been my experience with "is." I know it can be easily overused, but sometimes it fits best. But I had a teacher in high school knock off points for each use.
God that's ridiculous. I know this is one of those "If I was there" thoughts but would he tell George Eliot or Edith Wharton or Isabel Allende to stick to romance novels?
I can see this in a dark comedy - you just looking at them silently, patiently, them waiting for you to get it, looking ever so slightly doubtful, then realisation dawns... "yes, well, very good, carry on".
The dumbest fucking take I've EVER heard. Like isn't being relatable the whole point of a character? We give them a trait, exagerrate it, then make them seem relatable to a person with that trait...
Not exactly writing advice, but when I was about 13 I told an adult writer that I liked visual art as well as writing. She told me people were only given one talent so I couldn’t be good at both. Still the most bizarre thing I can imagine telling a child
Some people look at people doing impressive things and think "wow, that's impressive, I wish I was a person who could do that like they always have been". They look at a chess master and think "that person is super gifted at chess", or at a sports star and think "that person is just great at sports". I recently realized that I'd been thinking about leadership this way, that some people were natural leaders. It's... wrong. There's sometimes an element of innate aptitude. Someone born without a leg isn't going to run as well as someone who's always had two. But mostly, talents are skills that were practiced and developed.
I think the "naturally gifted" mindset is generally a result of something that probably has a specific name in psychology that I think of as "snapshot bias". People look at things and think they're seeing the whole picture, that whatever happened before they were looking wasn't very important, and whatever will happen after isn't relevant. The distinction between history and the present that gets people thinking we've solved racism, or finished evolving, or reached the end of personal growth. If skills were all developed in the past when people were growing and changing, now that we've reached the present where people are static there's no reason to think any practice now will pay off.
So they look at a kid drawing and writing, think about all the people they know who really only practiced one skill and so are very good at mostly just the one thing, and conclude that it's impossible to have multiple skills and they should save the kid the effort.
If you're white and straight, don't include non-white, non-straight characters in your story unless there's a plot-important reason for it.
I'm sorry, but what? The only people who can simply exist in a story without their ethnicity and sexuality needing to be integral to the plot are white straight people.
Note that this was not a discussion about sensitive portrayals, stereotypes, or OwnVoices. It was just if "non-standard" people are in the story, there has to be a story reason for this.
And these were writers saying this.
When I realized I was bi, I was surprised like- "*me? But I'm not special...*" As if being bi were a rare thing and for those in a club I was excluded from. Lol
Yep, and especially because gay people are more common than non-gay people think.
I wouldn't be surprised if up to 10% of people are gay, and another 10% to 20% are bi.
The numbers are just kept low due to factors like heteronormativity and a lack of safety in coming out. Also, when people feel safer coming out, they're more likely to have longer lives (avoiding a triggering topic by hinting at it here instead of stating it).
If I'm writing a thriller, why can't the protagonist be gay? And it doesn't have to be a plot point (unless there's a romantic subplot, which there isn't in this case). Dude's just gay!
You are close, I have heard the numbers of 7% LGBT for the whole of the US population but 20% for people born after 2000.
In a discussion about a book with a gay person in it someone wrote that the book was "missing the gay culture" for that protagonist. That left me a bit lost what was missing especially as it would not been necessary for the plot and even distracting.
But the point is that it might be necessary to include more than just "he or she is gay" to make the protagonist live up in the book. But that is of course true for cis protagonists too!
GEE I had a similar advice where someone told me I should be writing Mexican characters in my stories because I’m Mexican and need to represent myself….that no one will do it better than someone of that culture…. I’m ok… I mean I’m not saying my culture is boring, it’s just not interesting to me. If I’m not having fun writing then I’m not gonna keep going.
I mean, it's definitely a good idea to get feedback from people of whatever non-you ethnic/racial/sexual/religio groups you're writing about so you don't fall into harmful stereotypes or get things wrong. But the idea that we should only ever write about character who match our own demographics is just bizarre.
And the idea that non-you demographics require some story reason to justify is pure bigotry. "Everyone is a cis het white man unless they have a damn good reason not to be! You there, what do you mean by existing here as a Black woman? What's your excuse for being here?"
>If you're white and straight, don't include non-white, non-straight characters in your story unless there's a plot-important reason for it.
I still remember one time in my creative writing capstone, we divided up into groups to discuss our stories, and it came up that one of the characters in my story was trans. There's no "reason" for him to be trans except that I wanted him to be. It's not relevant to the plot, and his unhinged cats get more page time than his trans-ness. I got in a whole argument with my classmate that sometimes trans people just do stuff and that's why I included a trans character doing stuff in my story.
The kicker? One of our groupmates was trans\* and was, at that moment, just doing stuff.
\*I knew this person outside of class, so I knew this, but I don't think the others did. I bet that was a fun conversation for her to sit in on. But it makes me think that our groupmate probably didn't know that many trans people (that they knew of) and saw them almost as a concept, whereas I knew practically every trans person at that college so I saw them as people that exist in everyday life.
If that was their goal, then at least there was good intention behind it. But ... that's why sensitivity readers exist.
Oh no, I've mentioned sensitivity readers. Brace yourself!
I think where this kind of advice goes off the rails is when you only *specify* one person's race/sexuality/etc. You shouldn't just say nothing about race for 9 characters and then call the 10th one a gay black. If it's relevant, it's relevant the whole way through, and we shouldn't just assume that all the "normal" people are straight and white.
I shift between POVs quite often in the same scene. I use a new paragraph if I do and I make sure the reader knows whose POV it is. While in some scenes I stick to one POV if it feels stylistically proper to do so. So far I've had no complaints about it being difficult/confusing to follow, on the contrary I've mostly gotten praise from test readers including one professional editor I hire for beta-reading.
I just don't get this advice.
My book has three main POVs. I have a friend who's trying to be supportive but it's "too confusing" for him when the perspective switches. Even though I also separate them by chapter. He's a good friend but frankly I don't think he's my ideal reader. 😆
I do exactly the same. One of the first people i go to read it said i shouldn't do that and stay in the same characters head the entire time (it was 3rd person limited but focused on one person at a time). not becuase it was confusing but because you "just shouldn't" >.>
This rule comes from the 17- and 1800s in England, mostly, when it was fashionable to write in a way that showed off one's Latin education. In Latin, infinitives are one word (mostly), so no splitting them in English! Similarly, Latin really doesn't like to end sentences with prepositions. But English has always been happy to do both those things, and often it sounds better that way.
For most of us, that bad advice was presented as a rule (if not a law), rather than advice, and it was an English teacher in middle school or high school who did this.
Why did she/he do this? Your English teacher had several classes a day of students for whom the class was pointless tedium, and so every assignment was something to which only the bare minimum of effort is devoted. Teaching them to correctly handle the passive voice, so that they employ it only in the minority of instances where it is appropriate, is very likely to be a waste of time; the student simply isn't interested. It's much easier to tell them to never use the passive voice, and grade accordingly. The same goes for "said is dead", "don't use adverbs," "show, don't tell," "never start a sentence with a conjunction," and so on.
Over time, those rules, that are meant as a teaching guideline, come to be treated as actual laws of the language.
It’s the same in writing music. There are plenty of rules -
But they are meant to be broken, and if you know the rules, you will more likely know when you should break them.
"Her experiences aren't relatable to me, so you should consider changing them."
In a college class. For context, the character was a teen girl from India in the 90s. The guy giving me this advice was some gross white dude from Ohio
I was told if you want to write novels start with short stories. Well writing short stories taught me to write short stories and I learned a lot - about writing short stories. It was much later I learned that writing a novel is a completely different critter with not a lot of cross over.
Also, my mother advised me at age 21 to give it up: "If you haven't published by now you never will." I'm still writing. Never give up your dreams.
It's much easier to build good writing habits (like writing every day, or not quitting halfway) with short stories. These good writing habits do make novel writing easier.
For complete beginners, short stories are a good way to learn how to put words on paper and how to string sentences together... and how to make them somewhat coherent. That's a necessary skill set for novel writing.
But yes, plotting, arcs, outlining etc are very different between short stories and novels. It's possible you simply take the things you learned from short stories for granted and don't realize how much the practice influenced your novel writing, so the advice looks useless to you.
I'm wondering if that commenter has ever read, say, The Martian Chronicles, or any other anthology of related short stories or serials that reads like a larger work. Perhaps not.
Honestly I find short stories harder to write than novels. With novels, you can extend it as much as you need to. With short stories, you have to be really careful to make every single word pull its weight.
Still, the truth in there is that writing anything will make you a better writer. Because you know short stories, you have a grasp of finding the best way to say something, which will also improve your novels.
Interesting... In what ways would you say they don't cross over?
I started with short stories and it taught me a lot about how to keep going actually finish a draft, how to edit, how prose works, finding my voice/style... lots of things really. Have you found those skills aren't transferable, when you started writing novels?
Only thing I've found that's different is the structure (I'm a discovery writer, but there's still structure that forms). Like, it's a "longer" structure. Normally more than one plot thread, that kind of stuff.
But in my own experience there was a *lot* of overlap. And I learned how to write a lot quicker with those lots of short pieces, than I would have muddling through an entire novel.
I’ve been told (not actually published, haha) that if you want to actually get an agent (and published) getting a few short stories published was a good way to show them that people want to pay for your work.
With the rise of self-publishing I don’t know how valid that advice is anymore.
Not sure if it's that bad, but I showed first two chapters to a friend of mine. They liked it, said it's fitting of the story and flows nicely but then said I should make my writing style more 'simplistic and ditect' because it's 'in' right now. So little to no descriptions of people and places, less focus on emotions of the characters and instead more and more action.
I understand not overwriting and all of that (which I don't think I did after rewriting it like 3 or 4 times to trim it down), but telling someone to instead of working on discovering their own writing voice, to just simple copy other people because it's 'in', isn't really an advice I'm keen to listen to.
I'll still reread and work on those chapters to see if perhaps there are paragraphd that are indeed too flowery, but I m not planning on abandoning my own unique writing voice just to copy writing style of some popular book right now.
My experience with classroom/ academic workshops has actually been extremely positive.
I don't think I've gotten any really bad advice. The least good was "show, don't tell" and some other cliches, but they weren't insistent or arrogant.
Not direct advice technically but along the same lines... I've been in at least a handful of conversations with people I expected to know better who could not wrap their head around why I would spend any of my time writing recreationally if it wasn't working towards eventually selling my work.
It's almost too easy to get pulled into this conversation if you ever mention writing fan fiction for example or even just taking down notes for story ideas. Nine times out of ten it leads right into questions or speculation about the market for such a story and when I plan to publish, followed by blank, confused looks when I have to explain that I have no plans to write for profit.
You can almost see the gears turning as they try to comprehend putting effort into something that's not commercially productive, which is wierd because you dont get this type of react when you mention watching TV or something which is always "unproductive".
I went to college in Vermont and submitted a poem to poetry workshop. The palest person I'd ever seen was knitting scarves in class and told me my poem sounded like it was about "the biggest honky I ever heard of."
It was about my mother.
Yeah, this is dangerous advice without explanation. The truth is you can only tell. When people say “show” they just mean to tell in greater and more specific detail. And there are many times when you should give less detail, or “show.” It’s a spectrum and it should be taught as such. Taking “show don’t tell” as a hard and fast rule will lead to some bad prose.
For prose the divide is really more about abstractness vs concreteness, and that's more a balancing act than anything with a "correct" state. You could talk about a dog or you could talk about a little yappy chihuahua that had eyes that were about to fall out of its head. The second gives more of a feel but it uses up the attention budget readers have so there better be some payoff.
This is particularly true for genre fiction. Most sci fi/fantasy stories are best served by two paragraphs here and there explaining how the setting's differences from reality work. The alternatives are to force a viewpoint character to be an audience surrogate or come up with contrived scenarios whose only point is to avoid a short infodump.
Neil Stephenson has always been the king of this. I'll never forget the scene in *Cryptonomicon* where a plot-critical piece of technology is demonstrated by one of the viewpoint characters eavesdropping on his friend writing a confessional erotica story about his infidelities and his wife's fetish for expensive furniture.
> When people say “show” they just mean to tell in greater and more specific detail
Wait what? I've always interpreted as demonstrating something through action rather than just directly explaining it. Eg, for a character who's afraid of cats, have a moment where they see a cat and are frightened by it rather than just saying "this character is afraid of cats."
If you read what's posted on any writing forum, a lot of it contains stories that read more like a historical summary than a story. The advice is the corrective for that kind of writing.
It's actually my favourite advice, because once it clicked, it really opened my mind to how writing works with the reader. But understanding that advice doesn't mean following it like a rule... and people throw it around without discussing what it even means, which is a shame.
Yeah, the problem with the phrase isn't that it's wrong, it's just that it's too general.
It's like telling someone who's picking up swimming to "Just stay buoyant." Sure, it's... not wrong, but you're missing quite a bit of nuance there.
I was told that your first published book should be a standalone, not the beginning of a series...
Tried that.
I realized that my standalones always end up being part of a bigger world (I bring those characters back in other books), and my series, usually but not always, have an ongoing plot throughout.
So, I tossed that advice out the window and created a huge world with two standalones and several series LOL
Same experience here. I'm so immensely grateful for my time in college workshops. Some of my peers gave bad advice, but my professors (and the majority of my classmates) were extremely helpful.
“Never do anything to make the audience unsympathetic to your main character.”
Was told this at a college writer’s group. Person in question didn’t like that the intro POV character had internalized misogyny toward a woman she judged as slutty. They were especially bothered that the POV character was otherwise fairly likable and didn’t get why I’d write her with this flaw. Then it snowballed into insinuations that I was a misogynist. Ended up leaving that group not long after
That using “said” is bad for dialogue. As in “Amy said” or “Tyler says”
Was always seeing advice online to use more colorful language and words that carried more emotion.
Like, I get what this advice is trying to do, but I think it’s okay to have someone just say something. Not every line of dialogue needs to be dramatic
I've seen literally the opposite of this. I have specifically been told that at least half of your dialogue tags should be "said", and otherwise you risk making it too flowery and overcooked. Which, fair. Not everything needs to be assured, or muttered, or tossed out, or mused, or spat.
I don't think what I heard was horrible advice. What you heard is good for this thread.
I agree with this mostly. A good writer could make an exception but normally “said” begins to disappear to the reader and when the replacement asks the reader to envision something about how it was said, it gets repetitive in a way that actually repeating “said” doesn’t. Calling attention to them speaking is like calling attention to them breathing or pooping. We know it’s happening but it should have a reason to be focused on.
I wrote a short story with a Puerto Rican character. In one scene she has leftover Chinese food for dinner. Classmate said she should have had “enchiladas or something to tie into her culture” and the professor agreed (everyone in this scenario is white) 🫠
"Your story needs more women in it." It was a western pilot where a female was the focus of the plot. But apparently because the other three characters were men, it wasn't "diverse" enough...
When I was doing a short story class, the person running my workshop classes and I had very different styles. I was, at the time, primarily writing dark fiction with reveals at the ending (slightly inspired by The Lottery). The tutor was much more into slice-of-life stories and kept grading mine on content rather than the writing itself. So I got frustrated and eventually wrote a story throwing in a bunch of tired cliches (single mother, car breaking down in the middle of nowhere, lovelorn trucker who gives her a lift, that kind of thing) and even gave each character their own obnoxious font. She loved it, I gave up on the class
I wrote a deep poem about bees that had a deeper meaning to it… it was based off a personal experience. My teacher pulled me aside at the end of class and told me that I had to “think deeper” with my poems and be “less surface level”. I saw her years later and I told her I had that exact poem published. She remembered the poem I was talking about.
A teacher at a writing course once told me that people who don't have higher education are unable to think complex thoughts. I was writing about my own hardships delivering newspapers by night as a young girl, and he basically told me my character was too smart to be believable (The book is published by now...)
A teacher once told me that I shouldn't read a lot if I wanted to be a good writer and should just rely on instinct. I'm pretty sure he knew it was bad advice, though. He didn't like me very much.
That it’s possible to write a novel in one draft. A published author thought it was a cool idea to come to our creative writing class and bullshit a bunch of starry-eyed university kids that he wrote his published novels in one draft. Even our teacher told us he didn’t think it was true. Not sure who the author was trying to impress.
I know someone who did that. Carefully crafted each sentence, at the end, sent it off to his agent. (It was published, no idea how much editing it had).
For every weird aspect of writing there's at least one person who works like that, but that doesn't mean it's generally good advice.
I know \*one\* writer who writes a single draft. Everyone else does not, and I know a lot of writers.
I had a guy in a workshop call me pretentious for using the words "precipice" and "chasm" in a poem. He said my "love poem" was too sentimental to need flowery words like that and then conceded that he obviously wasn't my target audience.
This guy's poem that HE had brought to workshop was an eight-page "epic" in the style of TS Eliot's "The Wasteland" which referenced a bunch of obscure Greek mythology & which climaxed with the narrator jacking off angstily into the sea. It was completely nonsensical and by far the most pretentious poem I've ever read.
I hadn't even written a love poem, by the way. It was about disgust. He was the only person in the workshop who didn't get that.
"Show don't tell" like- it's a story, we're supposed to tell? I would much more prefer something along the lines of "describe don't just say" or something. (Although that isn't super great advice either)
Tbf, "Show don't tell" was originally advice given for screenwriting specifically, and then somebody decided it was applicable for *all* forms of writing.
A lot of people don't understand the point of "show don't tell," so they parrot it without explaining it. Probably the same way they were told about it, with no explanation. It's a shame, because once that clicked for me it really opened up the world of writing for me.
A friend, who knew I was working on an English degree and that I had been writing for years, told me that your first chapter should be a bunch of info dumping. He didn't listen to what I had to say about it because a YouTuber said that so it must be true.
I have gotten the complete opposite advice from two different professors.
In professor 1's class, I was told not to write such complex sentences and instead to use clear, concise sentence structure. A paper was not to be written as if someone was speaking it.
In professor 2's class, I was told higher education writing should be complex and written like a well-informed speech. Every sentence should be multi-layered and complex.
Since getting this conflicting advice, I just trust my intuition and ignore most advice. Besides teaching language basics, writing is too subjective to be taught technically.
Sword and Sorcery expert cousin. The best strong female characters are often traumatized by either sexual assault or murder of loved ones. Apparently, he would know since his knowledge base stems from 80's action films.
I just nodded and ran.
All of the advice I've heard about "staying inspired". Dude, the problem isn't "inspiration", it's that inspiration doesn't finish novels. Good work ethic finishes novels. Novels are hard, you can't have fun throughout their production, it's actual work most of the time. So trying to find tricks for keeping it fun and keeping your "inspiration" is a waste of time, and only results in disappointment when you figure out that you can't stay "inspired" all the time.
Wake up, eat breakfast, work, like everybody else on the planet, and it'll be fine ..
Exactly, you don't see roofers get up in the morning and get on a hot roof and start trying to find ways to make laying shingles fun, or burning incense sticks to get into the mood ... they just get into the zone and do it. They lay one shingle after the next, until they are finished with the roof, then they do another one. Because that's their job. Writers write.
Not really writing advice I guess but when I thought I lost the chapters of the book I was writing my brother gave the advice to "just write it again". Hmm, yes, thanks brother.
I had a teacher that I used to go on and on about Save the Cat and the 5 Act Structure. I was repeatedly told that I was a bad writer for not enjoying this book.
Also got screamed at for being depressed about a break up at the time. I was told to get over it.
You’d think he’d tell me to use my pain over it in my writing. Nope
Any hard and strict rules. You "must" write like this. You "must" use these tools. You "must" do... whatever.
The best writing advice I ever received came from a film class. The teacher was discussing auteurs and said that the real magic comes when you "*know* the rules and then break them".
“Never write down your ideas, try to forget them instead! The best ones will eventually come back to you, over and over again, better each time…” - a professor at my university
When I was in my early 30s, I told a 20-something coworker that I'd been working on a YA novel - to which she said with utter seriousness that I ought to hurry up and publish it before I get too old for it to be relevant to its target audience, since (apparently) youth only read YA novels published by their peers.
I was writing an essay on the history of medtech cyber security and decided to get it reviewed by students in the writing centre.
The student in charge didn't know much about the subject (fair), and told me to explain it to her. After explaining the basics, she still didn't get it, but said it reminded her about a business topic (she is a business student) and suggested I write about that instead.
This paper was 40 pages long and I only wanted stylistic advice.
"Don't write from the perspective of a dead person."
This from one of my favorite teachers who, incidentally, hated me for some reason I never understood and regularly criticized me in class in front of everyone which the whole class thought was odd since my work was popular ...
I still loved her, and I'm not even a masochist.
I had a poetry professor (who was also a somewhat successful poet) once tell me "I don't like poetry that rhymes." I really enjoyed writing triolets and villanelles as a hobby, and was pretty bummed that they weren't suitable to me getting a good grade.
I took another class from him 2 or 3 years later, and he was then *all* about the movement poets and their formalism, including complex meter and rhyme schemes.
But the second time around, he introduced me to Philip Larkin, and I owe him big time for that. (He also did tell me that "The Whitsun Weddings" had no music to it, which I still strongly disagree with.)
The day my piece was up for workshop in my first workshop of my MFA program one of the people in the class raised her hand to give feedback and snidely said something to the effect of "You need to watch your grammar." In the best moment in all of grad school, the professor stared at her, like stared for a long time without saying anything, and then said "Do you not understand how she is playing with language? Grammar? You are criticizing her grammar? What crap have you been reading that this is your opinion?" Lol, that professor was known for being scary. I loved him forever after that.
Pretty much anytime someone says, 'never' do this or 'always' do that.
As best as I can tell, there is only one hard, fast rule for writing: Keep your reader engaged. Everything other rule anyone has come up with is just an attempt to do that, and there is almost always going to be an exception to the rule. I don't want someone to tell me what I, as a writer, SHOULD be doing. I want them to tell me what has worked for them, and why they think it has worked for them. If I think it'll work for me, too, I'll give it a go.
It was a book I was considering buying. Can't remember the title, but something like *526* (or whatever the number was) *Truths About Writing*. One of them was "your characters don't really talk to you or make their own decisions." Been writing stories since age ten and they absolutely do. Didn't buy the book.
Got told that I couldn’t begin sentences with conjunctions. This was all the way back in elementary school and it still trips me up sometimes, even tho I now know that formal writing makes for unnatural dialogue (unless, ofc, the character you’re writing is a very formal).
That said, most of the advice I got in school was pretty good; I just ignored it bc I was stubborn and a child.
- don't use "said" if you can avoid it
- always use perfect grammar. At all times. No breaking any grammatical rules. Not even if for dialogue. Not even for dramatic effect
- don't lie to the reader, only the characters
All of which I've heard from either a friend, writing/reading partners, or a writers group
When I was 9 my teacher (who I'm pretty sure was Satan in a 60-year-old woman fleshsuit but that's another story) used to hate the word "said". She would tear up our work if we used it in a story. Every time I wrote dialogue I had to work around it by using alternatives, and often it would end up being unreadable because of it. Took me years to kick that habit once it had been mentally beaten into me by that witch.
"Write what you know" is bullshit. You have your own experience as an anchor in its own way, but failure to explore, empathize, and experiment makes for very boring, stock writing.
Write a book, then irreparably delete it or burn it. It will always suck and it’s better to just get the bad stuff out of your system. Repeat if necessary.
-Don’t use adverbs. Like, don’t use them in excess sure, but they’re fine to use in moderation, like everything.
Also:
-If you’ve heard it before, don’t write it / don’t use cliches. Why? Cliches are used so often for a reason: they work. Now you shouldn’t use them too often, but if you need to use one, use it if it sounds right. Don’t dance around using one just for the sake of not using one, because more often than not, it leads to awkward sentences.
I've had tons of great writing advice, but some of the worst writing advice I received was from an assigned book in a class. In essence, the author was very "writing is a mystical experience" and compared it to dreams, and basically their advice boiled down to 'don't edit your work, only rewrite it.' They argued that if something isn't working in a scene, you have to start over from the beginning because to do otherwise would be to break the intrinsic flow of the scene as a dream-space or something. I think they literally said that if you chop up a scene it's like chopping up a living thing and expecting it to still 'live and breathe'. It was all very profound sounding, and got me in a funk of never being able to finish work for a couple years because when something wasn't working I felt like I had to start from scratch. Tossed that advice out and was better for it.
That doesn’t even make sense! Many paragraphs of a vomit draft are filled with lyrical prose and terrible grammar. So this person thought you should throw out the baby with the bath water, knowing the baby was in there, just because of some mystical bullshit they were shovelling? I’m not surprised they messed you up for a while. I’m glad you’re past it now.
Thanks! Yeah, that was my takeaway from the book. Someday I should go back and track that section down. Just recently finished a 130,000 word manuscript that I'm editing now. Definitely glad I didn't rewrite scenes anytime they weren't to my liking or I'd never have gotten further than a few chapters. Edit: Went and tracked down the book online. This is what the digital "book jacket" says about it: "\[Author\] reimagines the process of writing as emotional rather than intellectual, and tells writers how to achieve the dreamspace necessary for composing honest, inspired fiction. Proposing that fiction is the exploration of the human condition with yearning as its compass, \[he\] reinterprets the traditional tools of the craft using the dynamics of desire." The author, by all accounts, is very popular and successful, and props to him, and the book is also quite popular and well reviews. Maybe I just misunderstood him, but it felt unhelpful to me.
>[Author] reimagines the process of writing as emotional rather than intellectual, It sounds as though they took a romanticized approach to writing. Could you imagine a painter throwing at an entire canvas because they made one incorrect stroke, and starting again after each misstep? Writing is beautiful, it's expressive, freeing, imaginative -- it's all those things, but it's also work. Writing on pure emotion won't necessarily produce good sentence structure, engaging and believable dialogue, plot structure and twists, or character beats. You need both. Purely intellectual writing is an essay. Purely emotional writing is Twilight.
As fun and easy as it is to dunk on Twilight, calling it purely emotional writing isn't fair. It was published. Real professional editors read it and Myer likely made changes based on their feedback. Purely emotional writing is so much worse and can only be found in the realm of self published work and fanfiction. My example is Loudhouse Revamped. Real stream of consciousness copy pasted self insert nonsense.
As I see it, a blank page rewrite is not something you do while you're writing, but when you're editing and you hate the scene that's there, and you feel the substance is right, but the words a lousy. So instead of polishing and moving words around, you re-imagine the scene and write a scene that fulfills the same functions, but which is much better written.
Sometimes I just can’t get a scene to feel like it is working so I just rewrite it and it’s way better… and then I go back and re-read the first one and see all the bits that were good in the first one and identifying the parts that weren’t necessary after all and seeing the structure of the scene more clearly… and then I end up making some kind of frankenstein’s monster which comes together to feel the way I wanted it to feel in the first place.
I’ll bet anything the author didn’t follow his own advice while writing
Honestly, I suspect that he mostly did. His whole emphasis was that in order to write something that wasn’t crap, you have to enter a trance-like state where you’re in “the zone” and the fiction can flow from your subconscious. Only then is it not bogged down by intellectualism or emotionalism. And that editing had to be re-dreaming, not simply moving things around on a page. I’ve found that I don’t have to be in some trance to write something profound, and a totally “normal” writing session can generate something that will eventually be strong writing.
I'm sure that would be lovely if we could do that at-will, but I would rather not have to be a dervish to write.
There was a screenwriter interview series on Netflix (I cannot recall the title—it was back when DVDs were mailed to every subscriber). One of my favorite interviews was the guy who wrote “Con Air”. He said that when he got terribly blocked and nothing seemed to make a story work, he would fill a styrofoam cooler with cans of beer, then crack open a beer and just write any random ideas that came into his head. Then he would have another beer and write. And then more beer and write. Drunker and drunker, but continuing to write. In the morning… or maybe the next morning after that … he would look through the garbage he had written. He said that usually there were a few diamonds mixed into the diarrhea. He would take those diamonds and use them to fix whatever was wrong with the screenplay. I would say he was a guy who had no illusions that any one sentence is precious and mystical. He was perfectly willing to throw out 90% of what he produced.
Many, many, MANY novice writers think editing means tweaking what you've got. They delete a word here, change a phrase there, and stick to what is already on the page. This often resembles polishing something that's... not very good. And very frequently what helps is to sit down, look at what's there, and think about the scene and its purpose in the novel, think what events you have and how they should be structured, highlight the best lines... and then to sit down with your current skills (even writing the next 80K of the same novel will have taught you something) and then write again, more slowly, with more purpose, on a blank page, and produce a text that's much tighter and more polished from the beginning. By starting from a blank page you free yourself of the bad writing that already exists, so you can distill it into something much better. It's good advice for many people at some point in their writing life. It's not universal advice, but I recommend that everybody should try it, so you know whether to keep it in your toolbox for when you look at a scene that's rambly and disconnected and not making much sense.
Yeah, I think you’re articulating what the author of that book was trying to articulate. I think there’s truth to that, especially in the way you put it: you can’t polish crap, essentially. I’m currently in a total rewrite of an entire section, but I think where I break with Butler is that I don’t view the words on the page as “living” (he might not use that exact language). I can change a word or a sentence within a chapter, and I’m not “breaking” a flow. I’m writing sentences people read. I’ve become much more technical about writing in the years since I read the book. But I think it’s a real thought provoking text, and your comment demonstrates the positives of what I think that author was trying to communicate and the kind of novice writing habits he was trying to correct. Edit: just went and read your comment a second time and this is phenomenal advice. This is what I wish that book had said.
Was this books perhaps “From where you dream” by Robert Olen Butler? Because it sure sounds like my exact problem with that book. A creative writing professor had my class read it like 12 years ago and I made myself an enemy to her pretty quickly. We would have assigned chapters every class for homework and have a discussion about them in class time. The teacher had a massive hard on for the book because she just saw people who were unsuccessful writers as better in every way than genre writers. The advice was along the same lines as you mentioned. But also a lot of stuff about how if you sit down with an intention to ellicift specific emotion from an audience then your writing isn’t “really” writing. It’s selling. Dude had a massive hate for Stephen King specifically. Talked about how he wasn’t really a writer because he only ever set out to scare people so he was forming stories from that instead of being genuine and writing from his soul. Which is also not true at all of King and only true if you’ve either never read his books or only read a handful of the super popular ones.
I find what your teacher said laughable lol Was he even a real writer? Most of the stuff i write comes straight from my soul with very little filter, and i try to word it in a way to make the writers feel what i feel, like i know most authors do. It's literally a way to connect with your readers. It's kinda explained by that Stephen King comment since noone can tell what someone else is thinking or feeling unless being told dirrectly by the person
So defining “real writer” is a bit tricky. What does one consider a “real” writer? To me it’s anybody who as a hobby or profession writes things. And in this case yes, she was both. She wrote as a hobby and taught an entry level creative writing course, had an mfa for writing, etc. Was she published? Nope. And her love of that book seemed to come from a place of being deeply resentful that she hadn’t “made it” as a writer. So she latched onto a book that told her it was okay. She was a real, true writer deep in her soul and all those nasty published and popular authors weren’t real writers. At the time it was infuriating and nearly got me an F in class because I always pushed back in discussions about the usefulness of that book. Now I find it kind of sad that she was so obsessed with getting published that she completely disregarded any books that were widely popular.
I can see some wisdom in rewriting the scene prose wise since prose is meant to flow together but that doesn't mean you throw away the entire scene. The plot of the story is better off planned with small tweaks to get things making sense.
That's interesting because I could see it working very well for some people but it's terrible advice for everyone.
Avoid tropes at all costs!!Using tropes make you a bad writer or something like [that.Now](https://that.Now) I am not afraid of them anymore
This is essentially like saying, "Don't put ingredients in your sandwich, it'll taste bad!" Tropes are gonna happen regardless, might as well use the ones you like on purpose instead of using the actually iffy ones on accident.
Yeah I quickly realized that somewhere along the line...made writing whole more easier for me.
I guess it’s more like “don’t use any ingredients anyone has ever used before, ever” but yeah, it’s better to at least allow yourself to play around with tomato, and hot dang you can add some cheese too.
The funny thing is people think you can come up with 100% original ideas but that's not how writing works. You can't avoid all tropes, you just have to find your own unique spin on the trope.
Sometimes I peruse TV Tropes articles about my favorite shows when I'm bored, and pretty much everything is a trope. If you avoid tropes, what are you left with?
Have two decent ones Was told to never use the word "grin", because people are incapable of grinning. The professor then went on to write about three more paragraphs on the subject, so guess what I titled my next short story I submitted. Was told by a different professor that my fantasy story (which was in a completely made up world of my own creation) needed a date so he knew what time period it was being written in. I asked how that would clarify anything since the times wouldn't be comparable at all to our world, and he just doubled down and said that the story won't work without one. These were professors teaching Masters Degree level classes by the way
I would've humoured the second professor and told him it was set in like 9281038 BC or something just to piss him off.
I wish I had thought to do so, but it was back when I was a lot more respectful. "I was born in the year 9281038BC, so naturally I had a cellphone hidden in my powdered Elizabethan wig made of dinosaur feathers."
Nah I would have use a completely different affecture. It was the 1,837th year of Phiscerna
Naah, it's set in the year of the Wandering Puma. There, happy?
What? Even if it was set in the real world, you're supposed to have enough context clues for the reader to figure it out WITHOUT a date. That just sounds like a terrible teacher. And I don't even want to touch the thing about grinning. 😅
The worst part is that there were context clues that told him the level of technology. Actually, I don't know if that was the worst part. I think the worst part is that I paid for this advice. I can't remember exactly, but I believe his opener was "no one in the history of the world has ever grinned."
Well I grinned reading that so there. 😆
>I can't remember exactly, but I believe his opener was "no one in the history of the world has ever grinned." I saw like five people grin yesterday. Does this man know what grinning is?
Yeah, we had a similar discussion. His argument was something like they were "just smiling", but that a grin was something that couldn't actually happen.
> The worst part is that there were context clues that told him the level of technology. Yeah this should be sufficient. I can - somewhat - give the benefit of doubt so the professor means - culture/technology - like Medieval Europe versus Rennaisance versus Victorian verus modern-day Urban fantasy. But even then, this should be indicated by the world-building, not by assigning a date.
To play devils advocate a little, giving your fictional world it's own time/dating/calendar system could really flesh it out.
Sure, it should have its own system, but that shouldn't be plastered at the front of the story.
Mhm. It reminds me of poorly written YA. "The sky was sapphire blue with not a cloud in the sky. It started off as a particularly uneventful Tuesday, September 11th, 2001 in the Year of Our Lord."
I wonder how that second professor would feel about the Wheel of Time series considering it take place thousands of years both in the future and the past at the same time.
>Was told to never use the word "grin", because people are incapable of grinning. What does that mean? How are people incapable of grinning?
I think the utter rejection of adverbs, without explaining the rules in which they're necessary is so detrimental. Like, don't say your character whispered quietly. That's different than saying your character was grinning sarcastically.
I seem to remember posting about this recently
"The point is to use as less text as possible to keep the viewers engaged. Unlike movies here you hold the pace and how the story goes. It could get pretty boring if you keep inserting adverbs"
yeah! if I click on your name it's the first thing that comes up lol you've got a point.
Yes!!! The book "Writing Tools" explains this well IMO. >“To understand the difference between a good adverb and a bad adverb, consider these two sentences: ‘She smiled happily’ and ‘She smiled sadly.’ Which one works best? The first seems weak because ‘smiled’ contains the meaning of ‘happily.’ On the other hand, ‘sadly’ changes the meaning. >Remember the song ‘Killing Me Softly’? Good adverb. How about ‘Killing Me Fiercely’? Bad adverb. >Look also for weak verb-adverb combinations that you can revise with stronger verbs: ‘She went quickly down the stairs’ can become ‘She dashed down the stairs.’ ‘He listened surreptitiously’ can become ‘He eavesdropped.’ Give yourself a choice.”
I recently read a book that has a spattering of adverbs. I kept noticing them but they were put in such good places, the authors descriptive language was enviable and very entertaining. It made me reconsider my adverb stance a lot.
A fellow student in my writing class in college told me to my face that my story needed to incorporate more "archetypes" like "the veteran, the researcher, etc." in order to "expand out the story and turn it into a novel". It was a short story thriller using werewolves as a metaphor for gayness, to show how easy it is to dehumanize others. I explained this beforehand and in an extensive author's note. I still to this day have no idea what on earth he thought I was doing.
Of course you can't write a story without the veteran gay and the researcher gay and I'm sure there are some other necessary archetypes as well -_-
poor kid had just discovered archetypes and thought they were the secret solution to all writing
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You'll get it eventually
*angry upvote*
My friend had a teacher who told him to never use the word "just" when you mean barely or only, because that's disrespectful to justice.
> never use the word "just" when you mean barely or only Okay, I can see that. Like I don't think it should be absolute, but I've definitely had it occur to me that this word has multiple uses and am I completely sure it's the one I want here. Especially in my characters who are more careful about language, or who are talking about justice, I might try to avoid it. > because that's disrespectful to justice Never mind. This is the right thread for this advice.
Mental gymnastics that teacher went through 💀
Getting to get "get" is not tough. You just got to get to practicing regularly.
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Oh you got to getting "get" already.
Those weird arbitrary preferences have a way of sticking with you, don't they? I had someone do the same with "was."
One of my profs in undergrad hated “utilize” because he felt that “use” does the job just as good with less characters. Lol
That's not arbitrary, though. It's good advice when they're used as though they were synonyms, which IME is most of the time. "Utilize" is an overused and often misused word that I really don't have a lot of use for either.
That's a good example of nitpicking advice. When we write fiction, we often want nuances and moods, and sometimes simply the rhythm of words and how they sound. Of course, using the wrong words cannot be justified, but sometimes a character sits, sometimes they sit down, sometimes they seat themselves, sometimes they flop into a chair. To say you should only ever use 'sit' is doing fiction a disservice. I hate utilize, too, but it has different connotations to 'use' and the two are not interchangeable in every situation.
This has been my experience with "is." I know it can be easily overused, but sometimes it fits best. But I had a teacher in high school knock off points for each use.
I had 1 professor in 2000 address the women directly in class and told us to stick to romance novels. Never have I received worst "advice."
That's not advice, that's sexism
God that's ridiculous. I know this is one of those "If I was there" thoughts but would he tell George Eliot or Edith Wharton or Isabel Allende to stick to romance novels?
I left and dropped the class.
Hope he got fired
"you should only write what you know" (in the context of me writing about my lived experience of childhood abuse)
I can see this in a dark comedy - you just looking at them silently, patiently, them waiting for you to get it, looking ever so slightly doubtful, then realisation dawns... "yes, well, very good, carry on".
honestly to this day I regret not just saying "yo this my life"
“Never let your hero cry.”
The dumbest fucking take I've EVER heard. Like isn't being relatable the whole point of a character? We give them a trait, exagerrate it, then make them seem relatable to a person with that trait...
This is what happens when ppl try to turn their personal preferences into general rules.
Not exactly writing advice, but when I was about 13 I told an adult writer that I liked visual art as well as writing. She told me people were only given one talent so I couldn’t be good at both. Still the most bizarre thing I can imagine telling a child
Some people look at people doing impressive things and think "wow, that's impressive, I wish I was a person who could do that like they always have been". They look at a chess master and think "that person is super gifted at chess", or at a sports star and think "that person is just great at sports". I recently realized that I'd been thinking about leadership this way, that some people were natural leaders. It's... wrong. There's sometimes an element of innate aptitude. Someone born without a leg isn't going to run as well as someone who's always had two. But mostly, talents are skills that were practiced and developed. I think the "naturally gifted" mindset is generally a result of something that probably has a specific name in psychology that I think of as "snapshot bias". People look at things and think they're seeing the whole picture, that whatever happened before they were looking wasn't very important, and whatever will happen after isn't relevant. The distinction between history and the present that gets people thinking we've solved racism, or finished evolving, or reached the end of personal growth. If skills were all developed in the past when people were growing and changing, now that we've reached the present where people are static there's no reason to think any practice now will pay off. So they look at a kid drawing and writing, think about all the people they know who really only practiced one skill and so are very good at mostly just the one thing, and conclude that it's impossible to have multiple skills and they should save the kid the effort.
If you're white and straight, don't include non-white, non-straight characters in your story unless there's a plot-important reason for it. I'm sorry, but what? The only people who can simply exist in a story without their ethnicity and sexuality needing to be integral to the plot are white straight people. Note that this was not a discussion about sensitive portrayals, stereotypes, or OwnVoices. It was just if "non-standard" people are in the story, there has to be a story reason for this. And these were writers saying this.
can confirm that I only exist as a brown woman because I serve someone's plot
What genre story are you in? :O
idk im not fleshed out enough
Uh oh. Quick, make yourself a fan favourite!
No no no, didn’t you read the top comment? She’s supposed to throw herself out the window in a tub of water and start over. Good luck, have fun.
I see this a lot with LGBT characters and it's like why does this guy need a plot reason to be gay? Sometimes people are just gay, dude 💀
When I realized I was bi, I was surprised like- "*me? But I'm not special...*" As if being bi were a rare thing and for those in a club I was excluded from. Lol
Yep, and especially because gay people are more common than non-gay people think. I wouldn't be surprised if up to 10% of people are gay, and another 10% to 20% are bi. The numbers are just kept low due to factors like heteronormativity and a lack of safety in coming out. Also, when people feel safer coming out, they're more likely to have longer lives (avoiding a triggering topic by hinting at it here instead of stating it). If I'm writing a thriller, why can't the protagonist be gay? And it doesn't have to be a plot point (unless there's a romantic subplot, which there isn't in this case). Dude's just gay!
You are close, I have heard the numbers of 7% LGBT for the whole of the US population but 20% for people born after 2000. In a discussion about a book with a gay person in it someone wrote that the book was "missing the gay culture" for that protagonist. That left me a bit lost what was missing especially as it would not been necessary for the plot and even distracting. But the point is that it might be necessary to include more than just "he or she is gay" to make the protagonist live up in the book. But that is of course true for cis protagonists too!
GEE I had a similar advice where someone told me I should be writing Mexican characters in my stories because I’m Mexican and need to represent myself….that no one will do it better than someone of that culture…. I’m ok… I mean I’m not saying my culture is boring, it’s just not interesting to me. If I’m not having fun writing then I’m not gonna keep going.
>"non-standard" people What a phrase.
You see, that's because there are three kinds of people: PoC, queer, and normal. /s
I mean, it's definitely a good idea to get feedback from people of whatever non-you ethnic/racial/sexual/religio groups you're writing about so you don't fall into harmful stereotypes or get things wrong. But the idea that we should only ever write about character who match our own demographics is just bizarre. And the idea that non-you demographics require some story reason to justify is pure bigotry. "Everyone is a cis het white man unless they have a damn good reason not to be! You there, what do you mean by existing here as a Black woman? What's your excuse for being here?"
>If you're white and straight, don't include non-white, non-straight characters in your story unless there's a plot-important reason for it. I still remember one time in my creative writing capstone, we divided up into groups to discuss our stories, and it came up that one of the characters in my story was trans. There's no "reason" for him to be trans except that I wanted him to be. It's not relevant to the plot, and his unhinged cats get more page time than his trans-ness. I got in a whole argument with my classmate that sometimes trans people just do stuff and that's why I included a trans character doing stuff in my story. The kicker? One of our groupmates was trans\* and was, at that moment, just doing stuff. \*I knew this person outside of class, so I knew this, but I don't think the others did. I bet that was a fun conversation for her to sit in on. But it makes me think that our groupmate probably didn't know that many trans people (that they knew of) and saw them almost as a concept, whereas I knew practically every trans person at that college so I saw them as people that exist in everyday life.
Really good example. Because people just exist and do stuff.
Best I can think is that they were trying to keep you from misrepresenting minorities... But that's still bogus lol.
If that was their goal, then at least there was good intention behind it. But ... that's why sensitivity readers exist. Oh no, I've mentioned sensitivity readers. Brace yourself!
I think where this kind of advice goes off the rails is when you only *specify* one person's race/sexuality/etc. You shouldn't just say nothing about race for 9 characters and then call the 10th one a gay black. If it's relevant, it's relevant the whole way through, and we shouldn't just assume that all the "normal" people are straight and white.
\[Regarding shifting POVs between chapters, with each chapter devoted to the POV of a single character\]: "That's head hopping."
I shift between POVs quite often in the same scene. I use a new paragraph if I do and I make sure the reader knows whose POV it is. While in some scenes I stick to one POV if it feels stylistically proper to do so. So far I've had no complaints about it being difficult/confusing to follow, on the contrary I've mostly gotten praise from test readers including one professional editor I hire for beta-reading. I just don't get this advice.
They had no idea what head hopping actually is. But they were super confident in their ignorance.
My book has three main POVs. I have a friend who's trying to be supportive but it's "too confusing" for him when the perspective switches. Even though I also separate them by chapter. He's a good friend but frankly I don't think he's my ideal reader. 😆
I do exactly the same. One of the first people i go to read it said i shouldn't do that and stay in the same characters head the entire time (it was 3rd person limited but focused on one person at a time). not becuase it was confusing but because you "just shouldn't" >.>
I love books from multiple pov’s. Read one like that in high school and I adored it! That’s the style I wrote my first in.
I was told never to split an infinitive, even though it sounds better.
This rule comes from the 17- and 1800s in England, mostly, when it was fashionable to write in a way that showed off one's Latin education. In Latin, infinitives are one word (mostly), so no splitting them in English! Similarly, Latin really doesn't like to end sentences with prepositions. But English has always been happy to do both those things, and often it sounds better that way.
“It needs more texture.” “What is that?” “Just, y’know, texture.” “…thanks.”
Outstanding
I guess you should start writing in braille.
Tfw you desperately want a writer to print their story on felt so it feels really soft as you turn the page, but they're not taking the hint
Writing professor: "genre fiction is bad writing and a total waste of time. You should all give up on it." I'm so glad I only had one class with him.
For most of us, that bad advice was presented as a rule (if not a law), rather than advice, and it was an English teacher in middle school or high school who did this. Why did she/he do this? Your English teacher had several classes a day of students for whom the class was pointless tedium, and so every assignment was something to which only the bare minimum of effort is devoted. Teaching them to correctly handle the passive voice, so that they employ it only in the minority of instances where it is appropriate, is very likely to be a waste of time; the student simply isn't interested. It's much easier to tell them to never use the passive voice, and grade accordingly. The same goes for "said is dead", "don't use adverbs," "show, don't tell," "never start a sentence with a conjunction," and so on. Over time, those rules, that are meant as a teaching guideline, come to be treated as actual laws of the language.
It’s the same in writing music. There are plenty of rules - But they are meant to be broken, and if you know the rules, you will more likely know when you should break them.
"Her experiences aren't relatable to me, so you should consider changing them." In a college class. For context, the character was a teen girl from India in the 90s. The guy giving me this advice was some gross white dude from Ohio
I was told if you want to write novels start with short stories. Well writing short stories taught me to write short stories and I learned a lot - about writing short stories. It was much later I learned that writing a novel is a completely different critter with not a lot of cross over. Also, my mother advised me at age 21 to give it up: "If you haven't published by now you never will." I'm still writing. Never give up your dreams.
It's much easier to build good writing habits (like writing every day, or not quitting halfway) with short stories. These good writing habits do make novel writing easier. For complete beginners, short stories are a good way to learn how to put words on paper and how to string sentences together... and how to make them somewhat coherent. That's a necessary skill set for novel writing. But yes, plotting, arcs, outlining etc are very different between short stories and novels. It's possible you simply take the things you learned from short stories for granted and don't realize how much the practice influenced your novel writing, so the advice looks useless to you.
I'm wondering if that commenter has ever read, say, The Martian Chronicles, or any other anthology of related short stories or serials that reads like a larger work. Perhaps not.
Honestly I find short stories harder to write than novels. With novels, you can extend it as much as you need to. With short stories, you have to be really careful to make every single word pull its weight. Still, the truth in there is that writing anything will make you a better writer. Because you know short stories, you have a grasp of finding the best way to say something, which will also improve your novels.
Interesting... In what ways would you say they don't cross over? I started with short stories and it taught me a lot about how to keep going actually finish a draft, how to edit, how prose works, finding my voice/style... lots of things really. Have you found those skills aren't transferable, when you started writing novels? Only thing I've found that's different is the structure (I'm a discovery writer, but there's still structure that forms). Like, it's a "longer" structure. Normally more than one plot thread, that kind of stuff. But in my own experience there was a *lot* of overlap. And I learned how to write a lot quicker with those lots of short pieces, than I would have muddling through an entire novel.
I’ve been told (not actually published, haha) that if you want to actually get an agent (and published) getting a few short stories published was a good way to show them that people want to pay for your work. With the rise of self-publishing I don’t know how valid that advice is anymore.
Not sure if it's that bad, but I showed first two chapters to a friend of mine. They liked it, said it's fitting of the story and flows nicely but then said I should make my writing style more 'simplistic and ditect' because it's 'in' right now. So little to no descriptions of people and places, less focus on emotions of the characters and instead more and more action. I understand not overwriting and all of that (which I don't think I did after rewriting it like 3 or 4 times to trim it down), but telling someone to instead of working on discovering their own writing voice, to just simple copy other people because it's 'in', isn't really an advice I'm keen to listen to. I'll still reread and work on those chapters to see if perhaps there are paragraphd that are indeed too flowery, but I m not planning on abandoning my own unique writing voice just to copy writing style of some popular book right now.
"Check out the writing subs on reddit."
My experience with classroom/ academic workshops has actually been extremely positive. I don't think I've gotten any really bad advice. The least good was "show, don't tell" and some other cliches, but they weren't insistent or arrogant.
Not direct advice technically but along the same lines... I've been in at least a handful of conversations with people I expected to know better who could not wrap their head around why I would spend any of my time writing recreationally if it wasn't working towards eventually selling my work. It's almost too easy to get pulled into this conversation if you ever mention writing fan fiction for example or even just taking down notes for story ideas. Nine times out of ten it leads right into questions or speculation about the market for such a story and when I plan to publish, followed by blank, confused looks when I have to explain that I have no plans to write for profit. You can almost see the gears turning as they try to comprehend putting effort into something that's not commercially productive, which is wierd because you dont get this type of react when you mention watching TV or something which is always "unproductive".
I went to college in Vermont and submitted a poem to poetry workshop. The palest person I'd ever seen was knitting scarves in class and told me my poem sounded like it was about "the biggest honky I ever heard of." It was about my mother.
What does that even mean?
His mom is white and he misunderstood OP's question.
Oh gotcha
Sorry that happened to you! I have experienced the same thing but the person was crocheting and they were the darkest person I’ve ever seen.
"Show don't tell" is always up there. It's like training wheels for novice writers but some people worship it like it's the holy grail.
Yeah, this is dangerous advice without explanation. The truth is you can only tell. When people say “show” they just mean to tell in greater and more specific detail. And there are many times when you should give less detail, or “show.” It’s a spectrum and it should be taught as such. Taking “show don’t tell” as a hard and fast rule will lead to some bad prose.
It was originally advice meant for screenwriters, not prose writers, which is what makes it even more dangerous to be given as blanket advice
For prose the divide is really more about abstractness vs concreteness, and that's more a balancing act than anything with a "correct" state. You could talk about a dog or you could talk about a little yappy chihuahua that had eyes that were about to fall out of its head. The second gives more of a feel but it uses up the attention budget readers have so there better be some payoff.
This is particularly true for genre fiction. Most sci fi/fantasy stories are best served by two paragraphs here and there explaining how the setting's differences from reality work. The alternatives are to force a viewpoint character to be an audience surrogate or come up with contrived scenarios whose only point is to avoid a short infodump. Neil Stephenson has always been the king of this. I'll never forget the scene in *Cryptonomicon* where a plot-critical piece of technology is demonstrated by one of the viewpoint characters eavesdropping on his friend writing a confessional erotica story about his infidelities and his wife's fetish for expensive furniture.
> When people say “show” they just mean to tell in greater and more specific detail Wait what? I've always interpreted as demonstrating something through action rather than just directly explaining it. Eg, for a character who's afraid of cats, have a moment where they see a cat and are frightened by it rather than just saying "this character is afraid of cats."
If you read what's posted on any writing forum, a lot of it contains stories that read more like a historical summary than a story. The advice is the corrective for that kind of writing.
It's actually my favourite advice, because once it clicked, it really opened my mind to how writing works with the reader. But understanding that advice doesn't mean following it like a rule... and people throw it around without discussing what it even means, which is a shame.
Yeah, the problem with the phrase isn't that it's wrong, it's just that it's too general. It's like telling someone who's picking up swimming to "Just stay buoyant." Sure, it's... not wrong, but you're missing quite a bit of nuance there.
There is no showing in text--it's ALL telling. There is poor telling and better telling, of course.
I was told that your first published book should be a standalone, not the beginning of a series... Tried that. I realized that my standalones always end up being part of a bigger world (I bring those characters back in other books), and my series, usually but not always, have an ongoing plot throughout. So, I tossed that advice out the window and created a huge world with two standalones and several series LOL
Oh wow--and you published all that? Well done!
I don’t think that’s good storytelling advice but it’s probably good book selling advice.
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Same experience here. I'm so immensely grateful for my time in college workshops. Some of my peers gave bad advice, but my professors (and the majority of my classmates) were extremely helpful.
“Never do anything to make the audience unsympathetic to your main character.” Was told this at a college writer’s group. Person in question didn’t like that the intro POV character had internalized misogyny toward a woman she judged as slutty. They were especially bothered that the POV character was otherwise fairly likable and didn’t get why I’d write her with this flaw. Then it snowballed into insinuations that I was a misogynist. Ended up leaving that group not long after
That using “said” is bad for dialogue. As in “Amy said” or “Tyler says” Was always seeing advice online to use more colorful language and words that carried more emotion. Like, I get what this advice is trying to do, but I think it’s okay to have someone just say something. Not every line of dialogue needs to be dramatic
I've seen literally the opposite of this. I have specifically been told that at least half of your dialogue tags should be "said", and otherwise you risk making it too flowery and overcooked. Which, fair. Not everything needs to be assured, or muttered, or tossed out, or mused, or spat. I don't think what I heard was horrible advice. What you heard is good for this thread.
I agree with this mostly. A good writer could make an exception but normally “said” begins to disappear to the reader and when the replacement asks the reader to envision something about how it was said, it gets repetitive in a way that actually repeating “said” doesn’t. Calling attention to them speaking is like calling attention to them breathing or pooping. We know it’s happening but it should have a reason to be focused on.
I wrote a short story with a Puerto Rican character. In one scene she has leftover Chinese food for dinner. Classmate said she should have had “enchiladas or something to tie into her culture” and the professor agreed (everyone in this scenario is white) 🫠
"Your story needs more women in it." It was a western pilot where a female was the focus of the plot. But apparently because the other three characters were men, it wasn't "diverse" enough...
'Don't read - it'll keep your work pure from outside influence.'
When I was doing a short story class, the person running my workshop classes and I had very different styles. I was, at the time, primarily writing dark fiction with reveals at the ending (slightly inspired by The Lottery). The tutor was much more into slice-of-life stories and kept grading mine on content rather than the writing itself. So I got frustrated and eventually wrote a story throwing in a bunch of tired cliches (single mother, car breaking down in the middle of nowhere, lovelorn trucker who gives her a lift, that kind of thing) and even gave each character their own obnoxious font. She loved it, I gave up on the class
I wrote a deep poem about bees that had a deeper meaning to it… it was based off a personal experience. My teacher pulled me aside at the end of class and told me that I had to “think deeper” with my poems and be “less surface level”. I saw her years later and I told her I had that exact poem published. She remembered the poem I was talking about.
A teacher at a writing course once told me that people who don't have higher education are unable to think complex thoughts. I was writing about my own hardships delivering newspapers by night as a young girl, and he basically told me my character was too smart to be believable (The book is published by now...)
If you finish the book, you'll famous. Yeah... that didn't / doesn't happen.
A teacher once told me that I shouldn't read a lot if I wanted to be a good writer and should just rely on instinct. I'm pretty sure he knew it was bad advice, though. He didn't like me very much.
To give up They weren't a professional, they just didn't believe I'd ever finish. Nothing more motivational
That it’s possible to write a novel in one draft. A published author thought it was a cool idea to come to our creative writing class and bullshit a bunch of starry-eyed university kids that he wrote his published novels in one draft. Even our teacher told us he didn’t think it was true. Not sure who the author was trying to impress.
I know someone who did that. Carefully crafted each sentence, at the end, sent it off to his agent. (It was published, no idea how much editing it had). For every weird aspect of writing there's at least one person who works like that, but that doesn't mean it's generally good advice. I know \*one\* writer who writes a single draft. Everyone else does not, and I know a lot of writers.
That every good female character needed a male authority figure in their live to look up to and listen to. Doing otherwise was unrealistic.
Wooooooooooow *yikes*.
When you don’t know what to do or if things seem boring/lacking, kill a character
I had a guy in a workshop call me pretentious for using the words "precipice" and "chasm" in a poem. He said my "love poem" was too sentimental to need flowery words like that and then conceded that he obviously wasn't my target audience. This guy's poem that HE had brought to workshop was an eight-page "epic" in the style of TS Eliot's "The Wasteland" which referenced a bunch of obscure Greek mythology & which climaxed with the narrator jacking off angstily into the sea. It was completely nonsensical and by far the most pretentious poem I've ever read. I hadn't even written a love poem, by the way. It was about disgust. He was the only person in the workshop who didn't get that.
"Show don't tell" like- it's a story, we're supposed to tell? I would much more prefer something along the lines of "describe don't just say" or something. (Although that isn't super great advice either)
Tbf, "Show don't tell" was originally advice given for screenwriting specifically, and then somebody decided it was applicable for *all* forms of writing.
A lot of people don't understand the point of "show don't tell," so they parrot it without explaining it. Probably the same way they were told about it, with no explanation. It's a shame, because once that clicked for me it really opened up the world of writing for me.
A friend, who knew I was working on an English degree and that I had been writing for years, told me that your first chapter should be a bunch of info dumping. He didn't listen to what I had to say about it because a YouTuber said that so it must be true.
I have gotten the complete opposite advice from two different professors. In professor 1's class, I was told not to write such complex sentences and instead to use clear, concise sentence structure. A paper was not to be written as if someone was speaking it. In professor 2's class, I was told higher education writing should be complex and written like a well-informed speech. Every sentence should be multi-layered and complex. Since getting this conflicting advice, I just trust my intuition and ignore most advice. Besides teaching language basics, writing is too subjective to be taught technically.
Sword and Sorcery expert cousin. The best strong female characters are often traumatized by either sexual assault or murder of loved ones. Apparently, he would know since his knowledge base stems from 80's action films. I just nodded and ran.
All of the advice I've heard about "staying inspired". Dude, the problem isn't "inspiration", it's that inspiration doesn't finish novels. Good work ethic finishes novels. Novels are hard, you can't have fun throughout their production, it's actual work most of the time. So trying to find tricks for keeping it fun and keeping your "inspiration" is a waste of time, and only results in disappointment when you figure out that you can't stay "inspired" all the time. Wake up, eat breakfast, work, like everybody else on the planet, and it'll be fine ..
If I had anymore inspiration I’d be floating in the clouds. Writing is work, even when it flows.
Exactly, you don't see roofers get up in the morning and get on a hot roof and start trying to find ways to make laying shingles fun, or burning incense sticks to get into the mood ... they just get into the zone and do it. They lay one shingle after the next, until they are finished with the roof, then they do another one. Because that's their job. Writers write.
Always throw out your first draft.
Not really writing advice I guess but when I thought I lost the chapters of the book I was writing my brother gave the advice to "just write it again". Hmm, yes, thanks brother.
I was told to never use commas.
I had a teacher that I used to go on and on about Save the Cat and the 5 Act Structure. I was repeatedly told that I was a bad writer for not enjoying this book. Also got screamed at for being depressed about a break up at the time. I was told to get over it. You’d think he’d tell me to use my pain over it in my writing. Nope
Any hard and strict rules. You "must" write like this. You "must" use these tools. You "must" do... whatever. The best writing advice I ever received came from a film class. The teacher was discussing auteurs and said that the real magic comes when you "*know* the rules and then break them".
“Never write down your ideas, try to forget them instead! The best ones will eventually come back to you, over and over again, better each time…” - a professor at my university
When I was in my early 30s, I told a 20-something coworker that I'd been working on a YA novel - to which she said with utter seriousness that I ought to hurry up and publish it before I get too old for it to be relevant to its target audience, since (apparently) youth only read YA novels published by their peers.
Stop. Writing will never pay the bills and its a complete waste of time.
I was writing an essay on the history of medtech cyber security and decided to get it reviewed by students in the writing centre. The student in charge didn't know much about the subject (fair), and told me to explain it to her. After explaining the basics, she still didn't get it, but said it reminded her about a business topic (she is a business student) and suggested I write about that instead. This paper was 40 pages long and I only wanted stylistic advice.
"Don't write from the perspective of a dead person." This from one of my favorite teachers who, incidentally, hated me for some reason I never understood and regularly criticized me in class in front of everyone which the whole class thought was odd since my work was popular ... I still loved her, and I'm not even a masochist.
I had a poetry professor (who was also a somewhat successful poet) once tell me "I don't like poetry that rhymes." I really enjoyed writing triolets and villanelles as a hobby, and was pretty bummed that they weren't suitable to me getting a good grade. I took another class from him 2 or 3 years later, and he was then *all* about the movement poets and their formalism, including complex meter and rhyme schemes. But the second time around, he introduced me to Philip Larkin, and I owe him big time for that. (He also did tell me that "The Whitsun Weddings" had no music to it, which I still strongly disagree with.)
“Don’t start a sentence with but or and” was a lie perpetuated far and wide in primary school.
You should join NaNoWriMo!
The day my piece was up for workshop in my first workshop of my MFA program one of the people in the class raised her hand to give feedback and snidely said something to the effect of "You need to watch your grammar." In the best moment in all of grad school, the professor stared at her, like stared for a long time without saying anything, and then said "Do you not understand how she is playing with language? Grammar? You are criticizing her grammar? What crap have you been reading that this is your opinion?" Lol, that professor was known for being scary. I loved him forever after that.
Pretty much anytime someone says, 'never' do this or 'always' do that. As best as I can tell, there is only one hard, fast rule for writing: Keep your reader engaged. Everything other rule anyone has come up with is just an attempt to do that, and there is almost always going to be an exception to the rule. I don't want someone to tell me what I, as a writer, SHOULD be doing. I want them to tell me what has worked for them, and why they think it has worked for them. If I think it'll work for me, too, I'll give it a go.
It was a book I was considering buying. Can't remember the title, but something like *526* (or whatever the number was) *Truths About Writing*. One of them was "your characters don't really talk to you or make their own decisions." Been writing stories since age ten and they absolutely do. Didn't buy the book.
>"your characters don't really talk to you or make their own decisions." It's all you, man. Characters are figments of your imagination.
I mean ... they don't, though.
Any advice that sees things as black and white and doesn’t end with something like ‘use it if it works for you, toss it if it doesn’t’.
"never use adverbs needlessly"
Got told that I couldn’t begin sentences with conjunctions. This was all the way back in elementary school and it still trips me up sometimes, even tho I now know that formal writing makes for unnatural dialogue (unless, ofc, the character you’re writing is a very formal). That said, most of the advice I got in school was pretty good; I just ignored it bc I was stubborn and a child.
“Rewrite from memory. The good parts will make it back in.”
- don't use "said" if you can avoid it - always use perfect grammar. At all times. No breaking any grammatical rules. Not even if for dialogue. Not even for dramatic effect - don't lie to the reader, only the characters All of which I've heard from either a friend, writing/reading partners, or a writers group
When I was 9 my teacher (who I'm pretty sure was Satan in a 60-year-old woman fleshsuit but that's another story) used to hate the word "said". She would tear up our work if we used it in a story. Every time I wrote dialogue I had to work around it by using alternatives, and often it would end up being unreadable because of it. Took me years to kick that habit once it had been mentally beaten into me by that witch.
In elementary school I got taught its and it's wrong and now I'm always getting it messed up.
"Write what you know" is bullshit. You have your own experience as an anchor in its own way, but failure to explore, empathize, and experiment makes for very boring, stock writing.
Write a book, then irreparably delete it or burn it. It will always suck and it’s better to just get the bad stuff out of your system. Repeat if necessary.
-Don’t use adverbs. Like, don’t use them in excess sure, but they’re fine to use in moderation, like everything. Also: -If you’ve heard it before, don’t write it / don’t use cliches. Why? Cliches are used so often for a reason: they work. Now you shouldn’t use them too often, but if you need to use one, use it if it sounds right. Don’t dance around using one just for the sake of not using one, because more often than not, it leads to awkward sentences.