Limit your adverbs; unless you're writing a multi-million dollar series about wizarding school. Don't use passive voice, unless you're using it stylistically. Cliches are bad, but Tropes Are Not Bad. Lots of grammar nuance can be subverted for the sake of storytelling. For almost every writing concept there's examples of how the opposite can be done successfully.

Don't get me wrong, I've learned from these sorts of things. It's just that not a single one of them has helped me write any better, because it's all contradictive blogosphere clickbait with only occasional diamonds in the rough.

Maybe I'm just different, though. I learn more about writing reading a single page of novel than I do after chapters of writing how-to books.

 

I brought it up as a point of discussion. Not saying it's useless, but genuinely curious of what they do to help if the advice is factually incorrect.

 

For pretty much every piece of advice ever given you could probably come up with a few situations when it isn't a great piece of advice given in a particular set of circumstances.

Adverbs, passive voice, cliches— yeah, whatever, they have their own place in certain circumstances. But the majority of the time, riddling your writing with adverbs, cliches and the passive voice will get that shit laughed out.

Not to mention that there's an awful lot of advice for writers that isn't as simple as stylistic tips. One of the biggest issues I see with writers, particularly on DLP and within FF generally, is that they have no idea of how to properly structure or pace a plot, or effectively build tension, or maintain their reader's suspension of disbelief.

Yeah, I've no doubt that if you just write and write and write you'll eventually learn to do these things by trial and error. Some people have a natural talent for these things. But the same could be said of trigonometry or anatomy. But we don't just dismiss the practice of teaching either of these things.

 

1,000,000+ words of fanfiction and three published novels later, and I think I'm only just figuring it out. Heh.

Here's some advice from Chuck Palahniuk:

I make it a point now to go through an unpack. Trick to writing is finish what you start, but unpack the bare bones of the first draft into the second, then edit mercilessly for useless words.

 

Great, Joe! I try to unpack in my writing, and sometimes cheat, but yeah, I should really do more, more, more unpacking - though there are cases when "thought" verbs are the best way to go about stuff - at least without having your story degenerate into a "show" piece.

One thing I really love is this

It really shows the difference between amateur writing and taking your writing to the next level.

And to leave this thread with something useful of my own, I recommend this book - Word Painting. A really good guide to doing better descriptions that are not stale, repetitive, cliche, etc.

 

Great post Joe. However, this made me think.

How would this apply to first person narrative? When you are the head.

 

I... reckon I might be able to help here. Least, in my opinion.

Make your characters real. Do this triply so for your main character. Give them faults. Give them fears. Give them things they love and obsessions. Make them real things, and then metaphorically watch them. Sometimes, if you're in your character's way, the best thing to do is run it like you're making a documentary of that character's life. A literary one instead of a visual one, but still, the same point.

If your character is real, true, and whole, then you can have access to all of their thoughts, without you suddenly forcing them to become YOUR thoughts. You get two characters connected who are real things, and they'll interact like that.

Maybe I'm getting overly whimsical or silly about the concept, but I stand by it in practice, even if its only something that works for me. It isn't so much staying out of their thoughts as in not knowing them. It's not having your fingers inside their heads, changing them.

 

So, bumping with this.

I recently (re)bought a book on characterization by Nancy Kress, and I thought this might be helpful.

I wanted to post this as an attachment, but it's just a few kb's over the limit.

So, just copy and paste the relevant parts of this post into a .Doc.

Hope this helps!

Note: there should be extra spaces under each "question", but the formatting got bugged. So, basically just write whatever you want/is relevant after using "Enter".

 

Did you just copy/paste an entire chapter of a book over? If you did, well, that's breaking the rule about warez right there.

 

Not an entire chapter: just the template and a bit at the end that sums it up.

 

Still, not exactly on the right side of copyright.

 

If I remove the end "summary", it'd just be the template.

Would that be acceptable per rules?

 

You're missing the point. Copying and pasting part of a book is in the grey area of copyright law where a limited amount (in context) is legal but too much is not. This, in my opinion, goes so far over the line that Frank Abagnale is applauding you for your gall.

It doesn't quite fall under the purview of plagiarism, but it's not far away either.

 

Didn't think of that -- I just wanted to post something that would help people, and thought it'd be okay because I'm not posting whole chapters or whole books; just a snippet.

I'll remove the summary bit, but keep the template; if one of the mods think that it's "over the line", I'll delete it or they'll delete it.

 

I've never found character templates helpful. They're a nice time waster, but it's more useful to describe characters in paragraph form, what stands out about them, useful traits they might have, and other relevant data as it pertains to the story, instead of bullet points of their favorite ice cream and TV shows.

 

Fair enough -- gone totally, or should I attach a .txt file?

 

I think the point is just to get you thinking about the character. If you can answer the questions, you basically have a good grasp of how they would act in different situations - which is what you need for a story.