“Huh, this Alpha-17 guy seems pretty interesting! I’ll include him in this list of prompts. Oh, hey, ‘Alpha-17’ and 'Lunch’ came up with this randomized dice roll! I think I could write a one-shot based on that.”
Thought I’d post my old writing advice guides onto this blog since I deleted my old one. I hope it’s helpful!
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Listen. I respect the hell out of teachers. The vast majority of them work crazy hard and most of the time, including the times they give you well-meaning ‘writing rules,’ only want to instill good and helpful habits into you.
That doesn’t change the fact that many of these rules are stupid.
Here are my top five ‘writing rule’ pet peeves, and five rules that should be followed.
✗ Don’t write ‘said.’
Okay, I know this is common knowledge by now, but it’s so important. The concept that you can never write ‘ so-and-so said’ is hurting novice writers’ narratives. Said is invisible. Said is powerful. Said is transformable. If every quote ends in a strong synonym, it is distracting. Sometimes, in an established repartee, quotes don’t need to be tagged at all. Or an adverb following ‘said’ might be better for the narrative than any single verb.
Eg. // “I hate the rain,” grumbled David.
“I love it,” Claire announced.
“You love everything,” he muttered.
“Including you!” she giggled.
versus.
“I hate the rain,” grumbled David.
“I love it,” said Claire.
“You love everything,” he said impatiently.
“Including you!”
✓ Don’t write ‘something.’
Cold hard truth, baby. ‘Something’ is a draft word. It’s what you write when you want to think of a replacement. I cringe when I see it in a sentence that would have been improved tenfold by a specific noun or descriptive phrase in its place. There are times when ‘something’ works or is the only option, but experiment by replacing that word with more description before deciding it’s necessary to keep.
Eg. //He pulled something shiny from his pocket. She craned her neck to see what it was. A metal flask.versus.A flash of light caught the metal he pulled from his pocket. She craned her neck to see what it was. A drinking flask.
[ID: The image is a variation of the “I do not control the speed at which lobsters die” meme which is from the show “Drake and Josh”. In the image there is a man looking exasperated. He is labeled as “fanfic writers” and is saying “I do not control the speed at which my fics are written”. END ID]
adhd is so embarrassing ur basically like “I have to have fun right the fuck now or I’m throwing myself off the roof” 90% of the time and you also have very little control over this
