sleepyowlet:

heywriters:

albatris:

hey. hey. I have a confession

I fuckin LOVE dialogue as a first line. I adore it. whenever I flip open a book and the first line is dialogue I’m like hell YES this is my SHIT

there’s lists of, uh, TOP TEN WAYS YOU SHOULD NEVER START YOUR NOVEL EVER and “opening with dialogue” is always on them

the gist being that it’s bad bc the reader doesn’t care about this character yet so why are they gonna care about this dialogue, right, they don’t have any context for it, you should start with something that gets the reader invested and emotionally pulled in, so on, so forth

(and I’m not here to argue or call bullshit on these lists or anything…… 99% of the time, the reasons listed of why you should Maybe Not Do The Thing are perfectly valid concerns and dangers that should be taken into consideration)

(this post is more a ramble about personal preference with a nice moral at the end)

(and definitely not a TOP TEN REASONS “TOP TEN WAYS YOU SHOULD NEVER START YOUR NOVEL EVER” LISTS ARE LIES AND SLANDER post god could you imagine)

but yeah, for me, dialogue opening lines pull me right the fuck in emotionally. for real. nine times out of ten they’ll yank me in and have me engaged instantaneously. always have, probably always will

(like come on. have y’all never just started eavesdropping right in the middle of some total strangers’ conversation on the bus. especially if it’s somethin weird. it’s so good)

but ANYWAY, the moral is uhhhh

whatever Mortal Writing Sin you wanna commit, there’s probably at least one weirdo out there possibly named logan who digs it

do whatever the fuck you want, honestly

you can write an opening scene that does everything every advice page tells you to do with an opening scene and it can still be shit

you can write an opening scene doing everything every advice page tells you NEVER to do with your opening scene and it can still be fabulous and engaging

if you can pull it off, literally who cares

“if you can pull it off, literally who cares“ is the only real writing rule

Those “rules” are made up 

and if you read a few things, you’ll notice that all successful authors break at least some of them. It’s that exact thing that makes them memorable.

Pratchett never kills characters he doesn’t need any more, as a lot of writing advice I’ve found tells you to. He doesn’t kill characters for drama or shock value at all. He doesn’t ever fridge a character for the development of another.

Tolkien added conflict after climax, which is a big structural no-no, and also why the liberation of the Shire was cut from the movies. And he doesn’t flesh out his characters much. The Lord of the Rings is still in the top ten of most read books on the planet.

J. K. Rowling doesn’t write very deep characters. Most of them are pretty one-dimensional, they have one hat and that’s p much it. With very few exceptions.

Sir Walter Scot of Ivanhoe fame inserts treatises about history and culture into his books that only tangentially have to do with the plot. They are cut in a lot of publications, but I think to give the reader this kind of context adds to their understanding of the characters and the settings.

I could go on.

But…these are some of the most influential writers in the English-speaking world – and all of them commit cardinal sins of writing. You know who doesn’t? Those writers wrangled into absolute conformity by their editors and publishers. They are told to never break these rules, to never deviate from the formula. And they don’t.

That’s why you immediately forget them. They are bland, and everything that made their writing unique in form or structure is gone because it’s too much of a risk and might not sell. Because books aren’t considered art by those who run publishing businesses, they’re marketable products. They are designed to be disposable, they are designed to only be read once and never again – because if you re-read an old book, you don’t buy a new one.

And that’s the main reason why I stopped reading books when I discovered fanfic. Fanfic writers don’t care about certain writing conventions. They experiment, they keep things fresh, they let their stories be the exact length they need to be, be that 100 words or 100k. They experiment. They write in present tense (keeping the past tense for flashbacks makes so much sense!), they write in first or second person. And I’m telling you: what makes you go “ewww” at the mere idea of a reader insert is only what you’ve been trained to think since you started to read. It’s just a habit to not do that. Habits and thought patterns can be broken. You don’t need to abide by made up rules put in place by people who just want to sell you something.

TLDR: Capitalism kills art, and fanfic is anarchy in the best sense of the word.

6i:

it takes years to develop your craft. do not romanticize the idea of an ‘overnight success’. be a student. grow organically. get really good. hate your work. start over. find new ways to express the same ideas. the student becomes the master. your time will come.