Written by: Tara De Wet
If there's one thing writers around the world will never escape, no matter their skill level, it's bad writing advice. Teachers, friends, and well-meaning strangers will 90 percent of the time offer nuggets of wisdom they read from a fortune cookie or heard from a friend of a friend of their cousin about how you should 'show and not tell' or 'write what you know'. Not all the advice you get from strangers are bad, but they're usually not elaborated on or are misinterpretted and therefore poorly explained. Here are a few examples to ignore whenever you are subjected to the opinions of others.
Don’t use adverbs
Like anything, adverbs should not be overused to the point that it becomes annoying to the reader. A sentence like “The man walked very slowly” is lame in comparison to “The man ambled”, but the poor underappreciated adverb still has a place in your story and should be used when appropriate. They do a lot to spice up your writing, much like their sister part of speech, the humble adjective. And nobody hates adjectives so why would you hate adverbs?
Quantity does not mean quality
Word counts certainly mean something. They dictate whether your writing is classified as a short story, novella, or novel but writing a 100k word story does not mean that it is of superior quality to a well-written children’s novel
.
The word count of your writing does a lot, but it cannot convince someone to keep reading your story if the quality is subpar. A short story of 1000 words is already leagues better than a poorly written novella. Quality depends on pacing, grammar, world-building, character development, and the overall structure of the story you are telling. Long, drawn-out sentences cannot achieve this.
Only write what you know
Wait, why is this bad writing advice? Is it not ideal to know about the subject you’re covering? Verily, it is so, but a lot of writers miss the point of storytelling by trying to relate exclusively their own knowledge without exploring the veritable mountain of information they could explore online or in books or even through asking others about their experiences. Say you’re writing a story about a species of photosynthesising humans but you know nothing about plant biology. But you really like your plant-human idea. What do you do? Well, the only thing you can do is research! That’s the solution to not knowing something, isn’t it? Why let an opportunity pass you by when you have the means to obtain it.
Comments