Tuesday, April 24, 2012

Worst Writing Advice

by KAK  

Top 5 Worst Bits of Writing Advice:
  1. Write What You Know -- Gods help us, the aliens really have taken over the White House, Nostradamus is a zombie, and England is being overrun by Dukes.We don't talk about Maine. NOBODY MENTION MAINE.
  2. Writing is like painting, one must copy the masters to become a master -- Pretty sure that's called plagiarism. Teachers know to copy and paste chunks of their student's papers into the search engines to check for such "practice." (We won't mention the oopsies that snuck by the publishers since the advent of the internet and web search engine.)
  3. No Adverbs, Adjectives, or Complex Sentence Structure -- Apparently, the majority of Americans didn't pass 3rd grade English. See Spot read.
  4. Dumb it Down / Don't Make the Reader Think Too Hard -- Right. We wouldn't want it to be known that reading could make you smarter. We get all the vocabulary we need from video games. That ability to connect the dots? Psht. That only applies to actual dots. On a tablet screen.
  5. Break All The Rules -- When I grow up, I want to be internationally known as a douche. I'll show the business-side of publishing my mad genius by refusing to follow submission guidelines, meet deadlines, or accept editorial input. I'll amass hordes of fans by ignoring consumer-expectations of the genre and blurring the lines by calling my work of fiction non-fiction.
The best bit of writing advice I've received? If you read Jeffe or James's posts this week, then it isn't going to be a surprise.

WRITE.

 (and stay off the internet until you've reached your daily word-count goal)

8 comments:

  1. Great post. Every time I see the whole adverb attack thing, I remember my first crit partner, who would religiously point out every frickin' adverb I used like they were the pox. Okay, sometimes she was right. No one should ever use peremptorily in fiction - no matter how well they think it fits.

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    1. "Peremptorily" has to appear in your book. It has to. It'll be the great descriptor of how we voice our rallying cry for the Adverbs in Moderation Movement!

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  2. I'm sensing a theme this week. LOL. Great post KAK!

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  3. Love this, KAK - and I totally want the t-shirt, too.

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  4. Write what you know - one of my pet peeves. Someone - anyone. Tell me please. How in the name of all the Gods are you supposed to write something you DON'T know?? Honestly. There's a reason most humans master the phrase "It looked like..."

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