You dopes actually switched avatars? That's pretty funny @Tenderiser and @BayView. Why dont we start driving on the left side of the road, too? Oh, wait, tenderiser does that already. Never mind.
"Awareness" is the perfect word for this conversation. Even good "rules" require moderation and awareness of what you're doing when you follow or break them. Someone on this forum has a quote in their signature section. I wish I could find them or the original quote, so I could give proper credit, but it says something to the effect of "Story trumps any rule." It's so very, very true, but you have to have a damn good story and preternatural style to successfully write in total ignorance of or blatant defiance of all the "rules". It's better to be able to make mindful choices. Watching for personal crutches is another big part of that awareness. I have to limit the number of times I start a sentence with "Still,..." "Either way,..." or "Although,..." I have a tendency to present both sides of an argument. It's just how I think, and I use those to continue on after or to reconcile seemingly contradictory statements. There's nothing wrong with it here and there, and it usually makes sense in context. Either way though, it becomes a sort of verbal tic in my narration if I don't watch for it. Some friends and I used to play a drinking game that involved a lot of making up new rules as you go. It was like the Calvin Ball of drinking games. A popular rule with infinite variations was "Take a drink if you say ___." Often it would be something like proper nouns, contractions, curse words or questions. Those are difficult to eliminate but easy to catch when someone slips. It's challenging enough to remember to say "Tell me whose turn it is," instead of "Who's turn is it?" but the worst rule anyone ever made was "Take a drink if you use any form of 'to be'." It was proved nearly impossible. Try it sometime. You can reword most things, and it's it serves as a good way to force stronger vocabulary to the surface, but it slowed conversation to a crawl and still ended up getting everyone shitfaced way too fast. It was banned... It ended up being... We banned the rule from subsequent games. I just wasn't fun. The game ceased to be... It ruined the game. Whew.
Your questions sounds like a challenge, except I'm not seeing what the challenge is? I'm glad to hear your editor's advice benefited you. But I think some other posters who replied before my reply here already said it very well - what applies to your writing may not apply to someone else's writing, rendering the same piece of advice useful to one and useless to another. The danger comes when novices to the trade start questioning their own writing because they used certain "forbidden" devices or words without ever questioning its context and whether the use was appropriate. My objection is to blanket bans on things. I also think sometimes people just don't communicate well - like, excessively using the past continuous can have the effect of slowing one's writing down, becoming repetitive, lacking in force, and may be especially inappropriate in certain scenes or moments. But instead of pinpointing why, we just say, "Oh stop using 'was'." (and often erroneously attributing that as passive voice) This reminds me of a question that seriously irks me, though it isn't about stupid writing advice. It's the infamous question: Why should I care? You show somebody your first line or first three lines to your book and they ask, "Why should I care? I don't care about your character." Well blimming heck, it's been anywhere between 1-3 lines! It's not magic - you actually do need time to get anyone to invest emotionally and 3 lines isn't enough to make anyone love your character, which this whole "care" thing implies the reader should. It's the most unhelpful question ever. It took me forever to realise all people really mean is: I'm not interested. Being interested is quite a different ballgame from caring. I just have to be intrigued - I just have to have the vaguest question in my mind to push me to the next sentence. I don't have to care about the character, not yet, not really. "Care" implies a level of emotional investment that a single opening line simply does not allow. And the flippant nature of the question Why should I care? just makes me wanna punch the wall. You've decided to read this story, so be patient and give things time rather than shut the book before you've even tried to listen/read. It's like if I asked you to cook me dinner, and you go into the effort of doing so, then I come and sit at the dinner table and before I've even tasted the food, I say, "Well, why should I eat this?" Makes me wanna jump off a cliff. I have no idea why I sound so angry. My apologies. I guess this thread is supposed to be about stupid advice so there you go
'Honey, so creative, and looks like dog food...' 'Eat your fukking dog food, you schmuck. You asked for dog food, I give you dog food. And what do you know about dog food anyway, asshole?' 'I'm just saying the presentation is unique in the curl, y'know?' 'Eat it or don't eat it. I cooked, you swallow.' 'But what is it exactly, what are you trying to say, chef?' 'If you can't see that you got brain damage.'
That's why I can't go on the "Share your first three sentences" thread. I just end up rudely contradicting people. Some members give great advice in there, but too many want the story or character completely defined in the first three lines. They give advice to this effect, and often the result is that people change otherwise intriguing openers into tightly packed synopses or character analyses. It's an interesting exercise, but that's not how books work.
That's exactly right. The opener to a story, or for that matter the first lines of a chapter are to hook the reader... not coddle them.
That kind of thing makes me angry, too. Because it's so knee-jerk dismissive of the effort and love that the author put into writing. Give it a fair chance, eh? This over-focus (in my opinion) on 'the first three sentences' has skewed people's perceptions of what makes a story work. The first three sentences should certainly create interest in the story—which must be sustained AND developed throughout the story. The first three sentences don't stand alone. They should also display competent, error-free writing, which also needs to be sustained. Caring? ...that's asking too much for the first three sentences. Just relax a bit and keep reading. As long as you remain interested, the story works.
That's sad then I guess the question does count as bad writing advice! Or rather the rule of "Make readers care from the get-go" is stupid. I've often thought the internet might be counter-productive when it comes to developing skills sometimes. Like, if I were a 12 year old and I posted something up here for critique, no one would know I was 12 and they'd probably tear it to shreds, expecting a certain higher standard (since most of us are working adults here). Imagine what effect that'd actually have on a person. Sending a novice in would be similar. I mean, bad advice exists in books too I'm sure, but at least you don't end up in a loop of feedback where multiple, presumably more experienced people than yourself, are repeating the same bad advice. Because on the internet you can come back and discuss things and become convinced of something, whereas you take it from a book and you can apply it but then where you go from there? Well, there's no loop of feedback hemming you in.
All of this is making my eyes hurt. BayView having Tenderizer's picture for a day was more than enough, I don't need her consuming more users. I can't keep up.
I swear, I'm confusing MYSELF. I can't find my own posts. I think it's good for us. It's getting us out of our usual mindsets, keeping us a bit off balance, over in the weird world where creativity comes to play... Or else it's just confusing. Hard to be sure.
Does no one here read signatures anymore? It's me, doing small-time Shakespeare. Ugh. I think this particular picture was taken during 'Once More Unto the Breach', but it's been a few years. EDIT:: in retrospect, explaining it was probably not the way to prevent you from stealing it. Spoiler http://weknowmemes.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/curses-foiled-again.jpg
But what's in the background? It's got the legs of a horse, but then... something on top of it... (Also, in my own twisted way, I'm respecting copyright on the avatars. I'm only stealing the ones that are publicly available on the internet. Now, if you gave me PERMISSION to use your avatar...) ETA: Maybe it's a camel in the background? But surely there were no camels in the Once More Unto the Breach scene...
The founding post tagged an html from KJ Charles, wherein he said he loathed silly rules like: Don’t start with the weather. Don’t use “said”. Don’t use any speech verb except “said”. Don’t use any dialogue tags at all. Don’t use indirect speech. Don’t use prologues. Or epilogues. Or flashbacks. Don’t use dialect. Use proper names, not pronouns. Don’t overuse proper names. Don’t use epithets instead of names (ie “the ninja” or “the short woman” or “my boss” or “the Duke”). Don’t use passive voice (“I was being chased by zombies”). Don’t use present participles (“I was eating a sandwich”). Don’t use “was” at all. Don’t use the verb “to be” in any form. Don’t use auxiliary verbs because they ‘slow things down’. (“I had met him before”, “you could go”.) Don’t use fragments (i.e. every sentence must have a verb). Don’t have simultaneous action. Two things cannot happen at the same time, apparently. No disembodied parts. (“His fingers slid down her leg.”) Don’t use first person narrative. Don’t use second person narrative. Don’t use third person narrative. Don’t write in present tense. Don’t use run-on sentences, or subordinate clauses, or semi colons. Don’t begin sentences with adverbs or conjunctions. Don’t use adverbs. Don’t use adjectives. Just so we know what we started with, and regarding my response: To begin with, no serious editor of publisher believes any of this. Some of these are even laughable, such as the list of POVs which would mean to not write in any POV, and which seems to suggest that 3rd person is one topic for editors, when it is not. Charles, having presents an odd list of things that nobody seriously says you can't do, goes one further by doing the biggest fallacy of logic postulated by the no-rules crowd: To show testimonials of people who have violated the oddly simplistic set of rules. To that I say, it hardly matters if someone violated a "rule" or not, and got away with it, or even excelled at it because: #1, the rule never existed, as simplistically stated (and every single one above is amazingly simplistically stated). #2, Genius writers can physically do just about anything with words and pull it off. #3, Great writers might be great IN SPITE OF the dumb thing they did. #4, What passed muster years ago might not today because you actually have to be better today. #5, Usually when a great writer breaks a "rule" that writer has something else contained within the portion that allows them to violate it, implying that they are well aware of the pitfall. Testimonials about what some well-regarded writer once did are almost always a terrible way to justify what you do because of so many factors rarely considered by those making the argument. For example, consider the two rules above to never start with the weather or to never start with dialogue. Consider why those "rules" exist. In the case of the weather, we are wondering if the story is about weather. In the case of dialogue, we feel detached and don't know enough to sense the scene of relate to the content of the words. Thus the issue is disembodiment and distraction. The rule is to not promote openings that are disembodying and distracting from true content that makes your work distinctive and gets we readers fully engaged in the process. If you know why a rule exists, you are thus liberated to violate it because you can directly confront what the rule is there for, as opposed to some kind of parroting, which is what truly matters. Conversely, just saying that rules don't matter is as lame as it gets. But, the slush pile is high, and the faster it skims....
