Bad Writing Advice

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Silver Chariot

Silver Chariot

I don't care.
kiwifarms.net
Joined
Mar 24, 2017
Post bad writing advice for aspiring Kiwi writers. Inspired by the "bad art advice" thread.

I'll start. A character's identity must be based in gender/sexuality first and all other traits are secondary.
 
  1. You should portray the type of people you dislike in real life unsympathetically, obviously.
  2. You should market something as subversive or against the flow when in reality it has one deviation and follows the same basic path as whatever genre you're writing.
  3. You should definitely give a classic story or genre a fresh coat of paint and not really change anything else.
  4. You should make your dialogue as quippy as possible.
  5. You should write at your level of literacy at all times, regardless of a character's education or culture.
  6. Always keep an ace in the hole for your plot. Never evenly lay out information so that readers can reasonably assume how a situation might play out.
  7. Also, never have a long term plan. You never know if your publisher or network wants to make this into an indefinite series!
 
Every story needs a happy ending or you're going to depress your audience too much. No one likes feeling sad and unfulfilled because their OTP didn't get together at the end.
 
Never play a story straight that's lame, what you should do is make every character break the 4th wall to be ironic and try to make jokes about how lame and boring the story tropes are, that's when you play the story straight.
 
Avoid directly addressing your topic when writing a persuasive piece, and let the conclusion come to readers from the evidence you present. Assertive statements about potentially controversial subjects will alienate people, and it will make them feel smarter and more confident in their beliefs when you let them figure out a conclusion for themselves.
 
Don't focus on characters. Write your story like you're playing with action figures. Put in whatever cool stuff you want. You can include a connecting thread between the cool stuff but you don't really need to. While you will be writing a lot of fight scenes, you don't need to bother doing any research on tactics, strategy, martial arts, period combat, weapons, armor, or any of that. Fights should be won on vague concepts like "strength" and "power" and "will". It's great to have your characters go on long monologues about the importance of these concepts but you should never, ever define them, establish what their limits are, or state what's entailed in developing them.

Remember that your main character shouldn't work too hard for anything. He or she should just have the universe and other characters bend to suit them. It's ok if your character is directionless and is pulled through the story without motivation. Having your characters drive the story means you may not encounter every action set-piece you want which isn't acceptable. Not to mention emotional stakes will just bog down the fight scenes.
 
Make it so every time your character dies, he gets regenerated, which means there is absolutely nothing at stake during the endless fight scenes that make up most of your movie. i'm looking at you, Matrix II.
 
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Make sure your villains have guaranteed victories, and your heroes have no chance against them. Then make a deus ex machina if the story is profitable in some way so that you can make more sequels and retellings of the same "villains always win" plot.
 
Adjust the tense of your writing, as describing everything in the present when it happened was just boring.
Your main character absolutely needed to experience a lifechanging tragedy that completely prevented them from ever returned to their peaceful life.
When you write, you will throw away all you know about run-on sentences because rules against writing the way you will want to would be very limiting and you had put as much information as you could into one line for easier visual digestion.
Rough drafts were for suckers that threw away everything they tried and never got work done.
When writing fictional names and languages, mix real-life dialect that you think nobody will understood; like Spanish, French, and Sanskrit.
 
Pander. Make pandering to a demographic, real or imaginary, your absolute priority. This recipe for failure works every time and even transcends any cultural barriers. Pandering to the feminist and soy demographic will make your work a laughing stock. Pandering to shippers will turn your work into cancer. And pandering to sad and lonely weebs is why around 90% of all shounen anime is a steaming pile of compost.
DDBCAE CBAADCBE said:
You want bad writing advice? Just go watch Fate: Zero and take notes. It's practically a How To guide on how not to write a compelling story.
Click to expand...
Bringing up the Nasuverse as an example of bad anything is almost cheating.
 
When in doubt use copious amounts of sexual tension but always cock block your protagonist even if your story has nothing to do with it.
if writing a romance novel always write the male as an abusive prick with a tragic back story often vague and have the female protagonist save said abusive prick.
always in erotica write penis as cock and vagina as pussy and make sure no lube in anal. nothing says sexy like 4th grade language and bloody assholes.
When writing an apocalypse story don't focus on why the world ended just talk about the cool specs in your bunker.
 
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