The one thing you should never do as a writer...
...and that's listen when people tell you not to do stuff
Hey, Runners!
Last week I started doing TikToks again—there’s a season for everything, turns out—and in scrolling around WriterTok, I discovered a lot of videos talking about Things Writers Should Never Do. Start with a dream sequence; end a chapter with characters going to bed; use third person present tense.
Blah blah blah.
I don’t like negative goals in fiction, and I don’t like them in life. (For clarity, a negative goal is the goal to avoid something, rather than actively pursue something; it’s not a goal where someone wants to do bad things.) I feel like you get so much more when you actively pursue the things you want to do, rather than avoid the things you don’t want to do.
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Everything can be done well
I have always disliked the fractured tease, which is what happens when a writer borrows an exciting moment from later in the story and puts it right up front, then rewinds and starts the story that leads up to that moment. It always feels like a cheap trick from an insecure writer to me, someone who doesn’t believe that their story and characters will hold my attention on their own, so they borrow from the climax to keep me wondering how we’ll get there.
Not my favorite trope. But it can be done, and done well, as Vince Gilligan et al. proved quite capably in Breaking Bad, where I think every episode started with a fractured tease. The thing is, the borrowed moment from the future was usually not a super-exciting, tension-packed moment; it was typically a quiet moment that spoke deeply to the character’s internal experience, or the theme of the episode.
It was brilliantly done, and I’m so grateful, because now I don’t have to hate fractured teases so much.
Today’s Comments Assignment:
Do you have a least favorite trope? How can you imagine it being done well?
It’s about creativity
I’m not saying there aren’t things that authors do a lot that maybe aren’t the best of practices; I’ve spent years examining stories to find those things. But the more interesting question isn’t whether or not any writer should ever do those things, but how an author who wants to do that thing might do it well.
That’s where the fun is.
There's very few that I won't read provided that I trust the author first; that said, I absolutely cannot understand the Hanahaki disease trope.
Aside - I very carefully curate which authors I follow on TikTok. Excepting yourself, Lani, there's only 3 I think: CeeMTaylor, Elizabeth Wheatley (if you haven't seen her do Book Goblin I highly recommend searching for it), and Gentleman Leu because they all avoid exactly the type of nonsense you mention above and take a more positive, informative, and relatable approach.