The Never-Ending List of Writing Advice

And Brother I Hurt People
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I thought that this might be a fun idea what with so many writers congregated in this small area of the forums. The idea is rather simple: write a piece of advice that you wish to give others when writing and then number it. Like so:
 
Person one: 1) Thesauruses are your friend, but also your worst enemy. Rely on them, but don’t go hunting for the rarest word. You’re writing Pinkie Pie smut, not Henry VIII.
 
Person two: 2) Screw “inspiration”. Write even when you don’t feel like, when you’re barren, write all the time. Force “inspiration”, make it your bitch.
 
…and so on.
 
If you’re going to reply to someone’s advice (a comment, a rebuttal, etc.), please try to give a piece of advice along with your comment so we can keep some sort of reasonable count.
 
I’ll start.
 
  1. When you have writer’s block, think of the weirdest possible sentence you possibly can (“You’re thinking about my mother in a skirt and I’m the weird one?” is a good place to start). It doesn’t even have to make logical sense. Then try to draw a story around it. Characters, intentions, personalities, situations, backdrops, it will all start falling into place. And even if you decided that you’re not satisfied with your final product, hey, you got thinking, and that’s half of the battle.
Poni-namous

  1. Eliminate unnecessary words! All too often I’ll see fanfics where it’s obvious that, 1) the writer was obvlivious to, or, 2) the writer didn’t care enough to proofread, review and edit their work so that it would be readable. I consider that a real shame because some of the better fanfic stories I’ve read were rendered absolutely unreadable by bad grammar, poor composition skills and by the use of just too many words!
     
    Example of too many words: Mary fell to her knees and cried very loudly.  
    Correct: Crumbling to her knees, Mary wept.
     
  2. Any writer who doesn’t have an understanding of the basics of English composition should definitly learn. It makes stories so much better when it’s clear what the writer’s trying to say and you don’t have to stop every five minutes to figure out what they’re trying to tell you.
     
    Thanks for starting this topic, OP. Sorry not more responded to it.
Poni-namous

@And Brother I Hurt People
 
Meow.. Roar! Chirp, beep, honk, tweet, blub, gurgle, glug, glorp! Ping! Boing! Dink! Drip drip drip drip, Sploosh!
 
Okay, so, how do words that phonetically imitate a sound help you to start a story? Or do you even know what onomatopoeia even means? (C’mon! Fess up! You were just trying to impress us, weren’t you? Nudge/wink.)
BL00DW1TCH

@Poni-namous  
oh, i know what they are, my mom raves about them all the time for some reason, and they really do help! if you don’t know what a story should be about yet but you really want to write, just type one in and it can carve the path for you to pave a whole plot line and mountains of interesting characters! like, just type in a quick “Drop drop” and the setting is already narrowed down–a rainy day inside the house next to a window, fixing a leaky fountain, dropping vinegar into baking soda for a school project! i realize from reading what I typed in that other post that i TOTALLY sounded like an ignorant pre-pubescent girl who wears Hello Kitty accessories, and that was not the kind of thing I was going for :“^) I use them all the time in my fanfictions because they help express what is happening in the story just a little bit better~!
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