The Worst Writing Advice

what is the worst writing advice someone told you with a straight face I'm most interested in things you learned from academic peers classes or people who believed their advice to be completely infallible credit to Reddit user Sunday Splash for starting this thread on the writing subreddit and let's go read some answers don't read it'll keep your work pure from outside influence a friend who knew I Wasing working on an English degree and that I'd 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 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 to never use the word get or any of its variation patience because there is always a better word you can use instead that was back in high school and I still have trouble using get in stories now you'll get it eventually when you don't know what to do or if things seem boring or lacking kill a character when I kill a character things are getting exciting and I know exactly where I'm going with it I was told to never use commas that you should never write an enemies to friends or lovers situation because it was unethical never let your hero cry that's the dumbest take I've ever heard like isn't being relatable the whole point of a character we give them a trait exaggerate it then make them seem relatable to a person with that trait her experiences aren't relatable to me so you should consider changing them said in a college class for context the character was a teen girl from India in the 9s the guy giving me this advice was some gross white dude from Ohio that using said is bad for dialogue as in Amy said or Tyler says I 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 when I was nine my teacher who I'm pretty sure was Satan in a 60-year-old woman flesh suit 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 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 said by a professor at my University I have two decent ones I 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 and I was told by a different Professor that my fantasy story which was in a completely madeup 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 show don't tell like it's a story were 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 to be fair show don't tell was originally advice given for screenwriting specifically and then somebody decided it was applicable for all forms of writing it needs more texture what is that just you know texture thanks I guess you should start writing in Braille avoid tropes at all costs using tropes makes you a bad writer or something like that now I'm not afraid of them anymore this is essentially like saying don't put ingredients in your sandwich it'll taste bad tropes are going to happen regardless might as well use the ones you like on purpose instead of using the actually iffy ones on accident write what you know is bull crap 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 when I was in my early 30s I told a 20-some co-worker that I'd been working on a young adult 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 that every good female character needed a male authority figure in their lives to look up to and listen to doing otherwise was unrealistic 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 it was a book I was considering buying can't remember the title but something like 526 truths about writing one of them was your characters don't really talk to you or make their own decisions I've been writing stories since age 10 and they absolutely do didn't buy the book 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 be taught technically 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 delivery 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 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 crossover 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 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 intrical to the plot are white straight people I wrote a short story with a Puerto Rican character in one scene she has left over Chinese food for dinner my classmate said she should have had enchiladas or something to tie into her culture and the professor agreed everyone in this scenario is white never do anything to make the audience unsympathetic to your main character I was told this at a college Raiders group the person in question didn't like that the intro point of view character had internalized misogyny toward a woman she judged as they were especially bothered that the point of view 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 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 that doesn't even make sense many paragraphs of a vomit draft are filled with lyrical pros 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 bull crap they were shoveling don't make all the characters die screw that check out the writing Subs on Reddit wink wink thank you to my patreon members my little ruse Seltzer Fountain man KUSI 55 Fallen vexen Sam am puff I am a noodle and John Wong thank you so much for your extra support I will be trying to think of some more patreon exclusive videos to give you as thanks soon so keep your eyes peeled for that and thank you to my YouTube channel members my mini ruse ad Taylor Thompson and Schmidt again thank you for your extra support I'm really grateful to have you here and I hope you enjoyed the video and the same goes to all the other people who watched I hope you enjoyed it thank you for being here let me know what bad writing advice have you heard or what writing advice in general do you think is not actually that helpful let's discuss it in the comments and I will see you in the next video

Channel: tonka joey

Views: 187,897

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Id: hEnY64z8TWU

Length: 11min 11sec (671 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 22 2023