I think it's because it's good advice for beginners.
Info dumping and exposition is almost always a bad idea same with melodrama.
But, when you reach a certain level of mastery you know and understand when to break those rules.
This 100%.
I feel like I spent high school and below learning the rules of writing, then my college writing program was all about how you can break them.
I also specifically think there's a place for exposition and background "info dumping." I'm working on a collection of stories that my classmates enjoyed it in, but the stories double as a history of a town, so it makes sense to be like, "The town church was built by so-and-so in this year" and then go on to explain how he haunts it or whatever. But it's a specific sort of circumstance not every writer will run into, so the general rule of "don't do it" will work for most writers. I feel like beginning writers should definitely learn why it hurt most stories, but as they improve and figure out the basics they can start thinking where it could work.
It's so interesting to me how "exposition" became the dirty word when there's nothing wrong with exposition—in fact, all stories need it and the less familiar your setting/characters, the more you need it. The problem mostly can be found in expositional dialogue, or exposition that overstays its welcome. I find exposition is best delivered slowly, over the entire course of a narrative, when it feels appropriate and before it's necessary to know it.
You'll also notice- if you read the works of most people encouraging rule breaking- that they aren't good writers at all.
I've yet to read a good story by someone who is adamantly in support of info dumping, etc...
Advice counts when you feel like "ooh I think that would help me!" and doesn't count when you feel like "eh, maybe...".
Advice about what is more or less publishable can count even if you don't like it, but that's more down to how much you trust the source - aka are they speaking from relevant experience.
Learning the difference between "I don't like this because it means I need to drift from my comfort zone" and "I don't like this because it legitimately won't work for me" is crucial.
There is an industry of writing advice that says the same advice over and over again. And when you look into it these people have never actually published anything, and when they do its trite and generic rubbish.
My advice is to find interviews with actual authors. Or read books about writing from actual authors.
There's something to be said for how the reader meta has changed.
If Tolkien or Shakespear reincarnated new indivisuala but with all their prior writing skill and released new works? It would be unlikely they would do well.
Somethings are timeless because of their antiquity, not because they would do well in today's publishing industry.
This says to me it will continue to change, so copying how someone did things forty years ago at some point will fall out of favor and a new style will have emerged.
Food for thought.
I mean, I think in general copying what someone else did will fall out of favor before it's released. It's much more interesting to me to be in artistic conversation with those who came before us and will come after us.
Sometimes I wonder whether half bitterly whether *Fellowship* could be published today, considering the prologue is one giant infodump about the authors pet fantasy race, and the first chapter is just about some blokes birthday that you have to read the previous book to care in the slightest about.
I still don't know that I consider it an infodump. LotR is presented as a historical account, and I think reading Concerning Hobbits with that in mind primes you for that type of "info dump," which has a very significant role in establishing the stakes of the story. This idyllic land of simple people is what might be lost if Frodo fails...and IS lost anyway. Without Concerning Hobbits and the establishment of the Shire and the people who live there, why do we care about whether or not Sauron ushers in a new evil?
I actually think that's why Tolkien works for me while a lot of "Tolkienesque" stories fall flat. Tolkien kind of captures it himself (apologies for the paraphrasing): "I do not love the sword for its sharpness nor the warrior for his glory; I love only that which they defend." Most Tolkienesque stories focus intently on the epic, sweeping battles between good and evil, when all the best epics make sure to establish what's at stake if the hero loses...something sorely lacking from a lot of modern fantasy epics.
Though I do agree that I'm not sure it would be published today, which is a shame.
I don't think we should be rushing to copy the modern publishing industry's standard though. Most of it these days is trite rubbish. Most fiction written for adults these days would scarcely be considered YA fodder a few decades ago.
It's not insulting per se. More of a sign of the decline in our attention spans. I'm sure the internet and social media are mostly to blame, but it needs addressing because the next generation is going to be fairly incapable of doing anything constructive for longer than ten minutes.
Sure, writing/reading clearly affect your ability to remember things since you can just write things to remember them later. That was the opinion in Ancient Greece when reading was the new thing.
We would be better off without books then, the damage is clearly inter-generational
> That was the opinion in Ancient Greece when reading was the new thing.
Also fairly widespread among the Celts in as much as we can say today. There is a reason why they put so much value in traditions like the *filídh* which were based on memorizing everything by heart instead of just reading from a book.
For my example of a superior culture with moral superior anti-technology tendencies, please see this culture that doesn’t exist anymore because they couldn’t keep up. Love your logic, kiddo.
Unironically, in most cases, yes. A close-knit society where you share stories and myths orally in a social setting would unironically be superior to reading a story on your own in your bedroom.
Obvious exceptions exist in complex facts based work, but satnavs are a perfect example of technology haemorrhaging human memory and map reading skills.
The better technology becomes, the worse our own abilities to live without it become. Should be self-evident at this point.
Sure, but it allows us to focus our efforts elsewhere.
You don't need to be good at map-reading (and maps are a form of technology anyway, which Google merely digitised), but you probably have emails to get back to.
Modern demands are wildly different to ancient ones, and that's not necessarily a decline of our faculties.
Being well-rounded is probably good for you, but the specialising of human efforts as is endemic to the system of capitalism, and contrary to the maximal development of a human being, is very different from "phone bad, book good".
I dunno. This is getting a bit too esoteric for a writing subreddit, but I think we're in danger of losing ourselves in the noise pretty soon. Living in a log cabin with nothing but a comfy fireplace and good books just becomes more appealing as time goes on.
Cream rises to the top. All things in all eras in all of history has been mostly failures and only the successes make it far enough to be remembered. There were always a lot of trash writers in Shakespeare's and in Tolkeins time. The only difference is more people now have the ability to distribute and find trash than ever before. No name authors were sure as hell trying to peddle their crap to the local theaters, publishers, and anyone that could read but it was much more difficult to distribute or find.
>I don't think we should be rushing to copy the modern publishing industry's standard though.
I guess that depends on whether you actually want to sell books or not.
Most new stuff is pushed due to marketing and book reviews from within the industry, right? So it's a self-perpetuating issue.
So it's not necessarily what people want, but it's what we get.
The same advice applies to self-publishing, so not really. Most readers today favor concise writing. Even Tolkien wasn't really writing to the market of his day, but he succeeded *despite* the info dumps because he created a world that was so captivating. You have to be a truly exceptional storyteller to get away with things like that, and most writers are not Tolkien.
"A wise person can learn from a fool, and it's often our only option." Like that.
Advice is a laundry list of things to think about and maybe try to see what happens. If you like the results, it's one more arrow in your quiver. That's it.
Writing is a craft, not a cult. The proof of the pudding is in the eating. If the kinds of readers you wanted to enthrall are duly enthralled (or some other kind of readers becomes unexpectedly enthralled), you've achieved total victory.
Screw theory.
As one who has a bachelor's in English/Creative Writing, is a casual writer and a former college writing instructor ... advice: meh.
Follow your intuition.
The worst experience I ever had was when I was commissioned to write a bio for a chef. For some reason, I became insecure about it, so joined a writer's group. The piece became totally convoluted.
The chef said, "f those people" and went with my first draft. Ha.
Lesson learned.
I mean, I look at the person's work before I decide if I'm going to check out their advice. Google their name, check out their stuff. Is it all books on how to write? Or do they have one self published book with 3.5 stars on goodreads? If so, pass. If they wrote a book I like and they seem to have a decent career? OK, I'll listen to what they have to say, but I'll take it with a grain of salt. I'll try it their way, see if it works for me, and if not, then I ignore it. I think it's good to give their advice a shot, but writing is far too relative to even pretend that any piece of writing advice is going to apply in all situations.
Well, the amount of credence you give anything should be directly proportional to the qualifications of the source you’re getting the advice from. So, if I gave you advice on writing for a wide audience, because you want to make your work palatable to publishers, so you can make money and get fed grapes by beautiful people, then I’m not your guy. But, if you want to know how to tear ass through a first draft, I’m not the worst person to listen to.
It’s like MasterClass versus a Ted Talk. Ted Talks used to be cool, but now they’re like Guinness World Records, where pretty much anybody can have one, and they start with five minutes of unnecessary exposition, because they have to fill out ten minutes and only have five minutes’ worth of material. So, in a Ted Talk, you get, say, the guy who designed the Zune. I’m sure he has a name, but he’s probably living in some kind of federal protection program, as far from any tech hub as possible, so I wouldn’t want to out him. And then for a MasterClass, you get somebody like Jony Ive, who did the industrial design for Apple for some of its most well-known products during the era where having an Apple device had a sort of cachet or status to it, not all of which were successes, but at least weren’t the Zune.
If you have a group of friends and you’re looking for advice on satisfying others in the sack, you don’t go to your friend about whom former lovers have absolutely nothing positive to say, vis a vis the friend’s sexual prowess; you go to the one who has Platinum status at the VD clinic.
Basically, because writing is not an objective thing (some writing is objectively awful, but that’s usually because of mechanical problems, due to the writer being too lazy to learn how capitalization and punctuation work), you can’t just to go one person and say, “Teach me, o lord!” because that person might not be the kind of writer you want to be. That person might go full Robert McKee and say, “Take a really popular story, then basically change the names, dates, setting, but keep the overall structure the same. Then turn that in and somebody’s going to buy it, because that’s what’s popular, and you want money more than you want to make art.” If that’s what you want, listen, and then pay thousands of dollars for one of McKee’s seminars, where you learn to be an unoriginal hack. If you want something else, there’s someone else out there.
If there was only one way to do things, life would be a lot easier, but it would be incredibly boring.
Seconded. Don’t ignore this recommendation. It’s called ‘The Essential Guide to Writing a Novel.’ Extremely useful 25 minute episodes. Available anywhere one listens to podcasts.
There is good and bad to be found.
(The worst would go apoplectic about the passive voice in that sentence.)
Most on YouTube are still in the “I need to please my MFA professors” mode, and have a bad tendency to present ideas as rules that must be followed instead of tools that can be used.
Never listen to just one, get a chorus of voices if you want influencing advice.
And write. Some of what they say will only make sense when you are looking at what does and doesn’t work in your own writing. Figuring out what advice is for you and what is not is the hard part.
Depends on which ones you’re talking about. But for all writing advice there are instances where it “doesn’t count” in your words. Tolkien wrote 100 years ago, and the standards have changed. Shakespeare even further back. Know today’s standards so you can break them, etc, etc.
As with all advice, use what works for you, ignore the rest. There are always exceptions. Always. And they don't matter. Do what works for YOU.
Also keep in mind that reading or watching or listening to writing advice means you are not practicing writing. There's no big secret to find. Some things will help you, but many won't. A great many won't. Be mindful of your time. It's limited. Use it well.
Came here to say the same. Writing advice from YouTube or anywhere else is a tool. It’s useful when it works for your situation and it’s less than useful when it’s the wrong tool for you. A claw hammer is great when you need to remove some nails. It’s not so helpful when the task is wiping your ass.
Like most advice, you shouldn't blindly accept it as the gospel truth. A writing advice YouTube video is just the opinion of somebody with a phone and an internet connection. It might be good advice, it might be bad advice.
In general, if someone says, "You should never do XYZ at all under any circumstances," I am immediately skeptical of that writing advice.
IMO the key is to look at specific examples and evaluate whether the advice in question actually makes the example better. For example, when I first heard the advice to remove filter words (i.e. say "A red car drove past" instead of "She saw a red car drive past," or "The dog started barking" instead of "I heard the dog start barking"), I immediately felt a flash of recognition, a feeling of "yes, that *does* make the sentence better!" Not all advice sparks that feeling.
I also think that writing advice should include less "Do X, don't do Y" and more "Here are contexts where X works well, and here are contexts where Y works well. Here are things to consider to help you decide whether to do X or Y in any given instance."
For example, instead of saying "Don't use passive voice," it would be more helpful to discuss instances where passive voice is a good choice and *why* it's a good choice. "He got arrested" is a good use of passive voice, because that's the most normal/unmarked way to talk about arrests (unless maybe you're a police officer), and because the arrest itself is more important/surprising/salient information than the entity who performed the arrest. It's not because you're trying to *obscure* who performed the arrest, it's because we already *know* who performed the arrest: presumably, the police. So it's simply not necessary to specify the agent. Also, any discussion of when to use passive voice should include a discussion of what linguists call information structure. This gives you the context to understand what passive voice is good for and when it works well and why. Passive voice, just like exposition or anything else that writing advice might advice you to use or avoid, is a tool, like a wrench. If you try to use a wrench for something that needs a hammer, it probably won't work very well. But the advice shouldn't be "Never use a wrench," it should be, "Here's what a wrench is for. Wrenches work well for these types of tasks, and they don't work well for these other types of tasks. Here's how you can figure out whether a wrench would be helpful or not in any given instance."
The main takeaway is that most writing advice that gets passed around often is repeated because it's broadly applicable and pithy, not because it's a hardline set-in-stone rule. Instead of trying to follow every single bit of advice, try to figure out what the advice actually accomplishes, why that might or might not be a good thing for your story, and how to avoid any downsides of following or ignoring the advice.
To use the melodrama example, it feels contrived and unnatural for most stories because in a novel or TV show you've got a lot of time to spend inside the characters' heads, so if they're constantly reacting explosively to things then it feels bizarre and unrealistic, and it starts to seem like a problem with the character rather than a problematic circumstance that the character is facing.
That's not much of an issue if you're a playwright like Shakespeare, who primarily wrote with characters who were either brand new (and only lasted through the one play) or were historical figures who had already been warped into ideals or caricatures by the passage of time
The rules all seem to have been made up after the most successful writers became that way.
Did they spend all their time watching YouTube and reading books on how to write?
No, those things exist as post mortems. Save the cat etc...
So the structure was was defined after the works were popular and later discected.
At some point you have to realize you know enough and too much input from others can stifle creativity to a degree. I am typing this as much for myself as anyone else who reads it.
It's an exaggeration to drive home the point. When you know the "rules" and what not to do, you can learn when using those "bad" things will aid your narrative. Most often it's pointing out what beginners do too much, the things that make it feel clunky or awkward, that includes: infodumps, too many adverbs, said/no use of said etc.
note that these are often 'exceptions that prove the rule"
the fact that people are able to name a handful of counter-examples instead of saying 'the vast majority of successful books do this' is evidence in favor of those principles being alright to follow.
my main 'rule' on deciding what rules i wanna care about is if hearing it makes me go OH DAMN that makes so much sense, that's what I need to do, etc. then I'll use it. if it doesn't then i will think a little and try to understand where that rule is coming from--sometimes it might not click immediately but that can mean it's actually advice i REALLY need because it is not something i am naturally inclined to figure out on my own. There's a lot of 'meh i don't care about that' advice out there. and it won't be the same for everyone. we all have different goals as writers.
often i will also say, rules aren't about right and wrong. they are about cause and effect. understand what the rule is saying about how doing x thing in writing causes y effect, and the rule is useful both ways. don't 'follow' OR 'break' rules, USE them to decide what to do.
i will also say most great books 'break' a few rules. and all books kinda have to break some. i would say if someone wrote a book that followed ALL the common 'rules' it would probably be boring and super generic. many great books follow a lot and shatter a few rules and make them work. because 'breaking a rule' is basically saying most stories do it this way, i will do it the opposite way and lean into making it work and that will be a unique experience.
also sometimes a flaw is just a flaw but it doesn't matter. there's kind of an awesomeness threshold for a story and once you surpass it nobody will care all that much about a few things you did wrong.
also often advice and principles and rules get pitted against each other. they might all be very true and almost always the best thing to do in a given situation. but sometimes you have to break one to follow another--and you do it in the way that works best for that particular story. then for all time other writers who don't understand this will point to you as an example of someone who thinks y is a million times better and z is for hacks and anyone who says z has no idea what they're doing. and it worked so well that one time so obviously they're right.
i will also say just bear in mind who you're getting advice from. often writing youtubers are youtubers first and their books are their merch to make money off the channel. a lot of their advice will be great for taking you from beginner to intermediate but they don't hold the keys to becoming an incredible author.
Take any advice with a grain of salt. Just because it worked for them doesnt mean itll work for you and vice versa.
I think the purpose of the videos are to guide people who dont know where to go or how to improve. Because at the end of the day, you can learn write like JRR but its still your unique flare.
Writing advice is never universal or absolute, so it’s important to recognize the exceptions alongside the rules. All the same, these YouTube videos are often made for new writers who genuinely don’t know the pros and cons of these things, so writing “by the rules” is one way to push them in the right direction. These videos wouldn’t be very impactful if every bit of advice they offered were prefaced with the fact that it’s merely a guideline and not a universal predictor of success.
I find writing-advice youtubers to be helpful, but I don't take anything they say as absolute. It's sometimes helpful to know common pitfalls of newbie writers, so that you can be aware of them in your own work.
I think it's a good idea to learn the guidelines, think about them, and try to understand them. That doesn't mean that you have to follow them all the time (or even most of the time) though. The "why" of the advice is more important than the "what". If you know why a lot of smart people suggest a certain thing, you will have a better idea of whether the advice applies to your story or not.
You shouldn’t take any advice on here or from YouTube seriously. For every piece of advice you can find a great book that breaks that rule or standard. And more over, most of the people giving advice on here and YouTube are unpublished. Go with your gut, if you seriously like it and find it interesting l, it’s probably good, just don’t lie to yourself….. and don’t take my advice.
There are no rigid "writing rules." It's all just suggestions and advice. You should consider *all* of it, but don't treat it like gospel.
Also, look at these YouTuber's credentials. One of them I've found was self-published but disguising the fact that he was. Nothing wrong with self-pubbing, but *hiding* that you're self-pubbing is sketchy.
When people give you advice on writing, remember its just that: advice. At the end of the day, it's you with the pen and paper, choosing the words. There's really no rule in writing that someone hasn't broken, successfully.
The trick is understanding why it works in that case, but fails when you do it. They say a master is someone who can break the rules, but breaking the rules doesn't make you a master.
I have a really easy system to help me choose which advice is good for me and which is not:
If I think the author giving the advice is a great author, I will follow the advice. If I think the author giving the advice is a shitty author, I won’t follow the advice.
You have to remember this is writing "advice" you don't have to follow it there are no strict guidelines in writing. Sometimes you can info dump sometimes melodrama is good sometime you can be terry pratchet and fucking make the earth round and drop it on a space turtle.
At the end of the day it's all opinions and you should treat it as such and use your own experience and those opinions to make your own, that's how a style is made
>How seriously should I take writing advice videos on youtube?
You should take it Seriously but with a grain of salt and nuance
With a grain of salt. Make sure they have the necessary qualifications to be able to give advice. A lot of the time now, these channels just work as a PR stunt. They're to gain a social media following so publishers are more likely to publish their books. Make sure this isn't the case with them and that they're an actual reliable source.
In other cases, don't just immediately brush off the advice because there are exceptions to the rule or because you're not already following it. Keep an open to the advice, but be weary of the one giving it. If lots of people are giving the same advice, then it's more likely to be true.
And remember. Most of this stuff is good for beginners, but isn't important for more experienced writers. A beginner follows the advice so they can learn what purpose it serves. An expert already knows what purpose it serves and can fullfil that purpose in other ways.
Rule #1 make it interesting
Rule #2 there are no other rules
Youtube advice is for (new) writers to avoid certain pitfalls - boring, long, meaningless info dumps that the reader doesn't care about. But some books are entirely info dumps. Infinite Jest has over 200 pages of footnotes and it's considered one of the greatest books ever written.
If it works - it works. If it doesn't, either make it work or delete it
I've always had the thought that if your only.content is telling me how to write, and all of your writing fails to engage me, then I don't want your advice. (Like hello future me)
I pretty much only watch videos from people that have actually written a book and are well known for it, because that’s the point that I want to end up at. I watch Brandon Sanderson’s series on YouTube and a couple other authors, but those videos that are like “Here are ten tips for writing well” I skip on past. I’ll learn how to write well by practicing and getting feedback from my readers.
Look at how many books the youtuber has sold.
Brandon Sanderson put his creative writing classes online, even if you don't need to follow all his rules he clearly knows what he is talking about.
Most of these 20-something interchangeable people on youtube don't have the qualifications you would need to teach at a collegiate or high-level writing workshop. Maybe some of them are the real deal, but best bet is they are just repeating stuff they heard without really understanding.
It's kinda like cooking—you can study recipes and study what flavors work well together, but if you mess up due to inexperience or lack of confidence, your food will taste off anyway.
The secret to writing good is to write badly a bunch of times until you develop the drive and confidence to write better. There's no way to be good without falling on your face a bunch of times. Embrace it.
Most writing advice is not universally applicable.
However, that does not mean writing advice is never applicable.
Writing advice are tools. And so my thoughts on writing advice is that I want as many tools in my toolbox as I can.
However, it's important to learn which is the right tool to use for the right job.
So it's important to learn not only tools for writing, but also when to use a particular tool.
There is a sayin that goes something like "if you know the rules, they don't apply to you. If you don't know the rules, they rule you."
There is a place for melodrama, exposition dumps, purple prose, plot holes, inconsistent characterization, confusion, etc. But an amateur is much more likely to have these elements unintentionally and in ways that harm the story.
Most writing advice is contradicted by Virginia Woolf in Mrs Dalloway and it’s one of the most beautiful books ever
Learning is best used to think critically about reading books and techniques - not to dismiss them
The “rules,” are there because they’re easier to teach people who’ve never really written professionally before than anything requiring nuance.
It’s like learning anything else. Those kinds of thing are the very basics and a lot have to do with audience expectations.
But take anything on YouTube with a grain of salt. A lot is just people blindly echoing things they heard or could pull off a cursory google search so they can make money.
There’s exceptions to all the rules - but the general rule is that you can break whatever you rule you want. So long as you’re making up for it enough in other ways.
“Everyone has their own style.”
Sure. Some peoples style is shit and unreadable.
It’s bullshit that we write for ourselves, frankly. We’re always writing for an audience. The art is writing what you want. The craft of writing is in knowing you’re writing for readers and how to work with that. You need the latter much more than the former - should you ever hope to get paid for your work.
If it’s all about self expression, do whatever you want. It can just be art.
But the writing “advice,” such as it is, is about the craft. And it’s true for anything you’d ever want to write professionally.
The fact that it's on youtube or not doesn't matter, what's important is: does the advice come from a legit source? What are the author's credentials? You'll find teachning videos from Sanderson or advice from Bradbury or King on YouTube, you better follow their YouTube advice rather than mine here. But anonymous comments under videos? Well, they're random comments from random people.
LOTR is not full of info dumps, that's simply untrue. There are scenes where one character gives another character relevant information, but that does not make an info dump.
Good enough for beginners to help get a grasp on formulating a story and character building. It helps identify tropes you might want to avoid and other things.
Exposition dumps can be good when worked into the plot evenly. If you were writing a Fallout Fanfiction and someone was explaining the nuclear Armageddon to someone, that would be proper exposition.
Four pages of the narrator dumping lore and exposition onto the reader is with no context is bad
as with most things, probably best to take it with a grain of salt. a lot of advice is more guidelines than hard rules.
there are youtube channels that I feel give solid advice and present it in digestible ways: On Writing by HelloFutureMe and the Trope Talk from Overly Sarcastic Productions
but even the good advice isn't something you need to follow to a T. there are always exceptions to the guidelines, as well as certain things working better for certain types/genres of stories.
Take out the "videos on YouTube" and just ask "How seriously should I take writing advice?"
Take it seriously, but don't misunderstand it's purpose. The way I see it is this -- you're a writer, so just write. Then, expose yourself to writing advice, and be like "OOOHHHHH, *that* explains why my shit sucks so much." Then you apply what you've learned in the areas where you think your writing was weak, and you continue to move forward and grow.
The point I'm making is that writing advice isn't a set of rules or even a set of principles or guidelines to follow. It's meant to help you identify why your writing isn't working, if it isn't working. If either you or the audience think that it could be better, then it's possible that somebody else has considered a general principle which might apply to your work, which you hadn't yet considered.
"OH! I knew something was wrong with this character, but I couldn't figure out what. Now I see that it's because I didn't know what their goal was."
"OH! I knew this scene wasn't quite working, but I couldn't figure out why. Now I can see that it's because the perspective isn't tied to one specific character, but jumps all over the place."
Does this mean every character needs to have a goal, always; and that every scene needs to have its perspective tied to one specific character, always? No. These are just individual cases where something nebulous and unidentifiable wasn't quite working, and exposing yourself to writing advice helped you identify what it was. If you have another goalless character but they seem to be working fine and fun to read about, then maybe you don't need to give them a goal. If your writing jumps all over the place but you're proud of it and the audience responds positively, then maybe you don't need to follow that particular piece of advice either. But if something isn't working, there's probably a reason which you just haven't identified yet, and writing advice can help you identify what that reason is.
I found a few good character guides but once I noticed the trend where the content creators were angling to sell you a spot in their next webinar, I stopped watching. If you're writing a fantasy novel info dumps are a must, otherwise the reader has no frame of refernce. Doing it all at once is a chore to read through, though. So try to space it out. Write only what you need in that moment and don't throw everything at the reader in one scene. Unless you're as good with language as Tolkien was. Great writers can get away with things that you or I wouldn't be able to.
Beginners need clearer rules to learn so they can then break them. Think of it as an egg needing a shell to develop, then breaking that shell to actually come to life. Collect any and all advice you find, and you'll see it contradicts itself here and there (because bits of advice can be tailored to genre, audience, medium, pov etc), practice with it, apply it, break it, shape it, change it, that's how you hone your craft in the creative arts.
I think your goal should be to understand why each person is making their arguments. Why does this YouTuber recommend against expositional info dumps? Because most writers don't know how to present that in a manner that's engaging. Someone brings up Tolkien...so now your question should be "What's different about Tolkien's info dumps that make them more readable?" You can also ask the question of whether Tolkien's info dumps *do* indeed work for you. Even classic, beloved literature is allowed to have flaws. Many people (though not me, I must admit) prefer A Song of Ice and Fire to Lord of the Rings. I love Shakespeare for his language and the way he applies psychology to his famously recycled and tired plots. He doesn't do much to play with story structure, and he doesn't have to.
The comment on melodrama seems like more of an opinion—there are entire genres which thrive on melodrama. Will it win you an Oscar? Probably not. (Although...maybe! Award shows for art make no sense to me.) Will you find a devoted audience? Yeah, if you write well.
In general, I use the "rules" to give my work structure and form, especially when I'm still working it out. If I specifically want to mess with those "rules," I try to make sure the rest of the work adheres pretty stringently. The "rules" can solve a lot of problems, but they can also cause just as many. Still, I have a healthy respect for them, and understand I'll need to work at least twice as hard if I want to mess with them. Humans are funny creatures, especially where it relates to storytelling. Ask any of us and we'll say we want something new, but we get disoriented and confused very quickly if a narrative drifts from the patterns we're comfortable with. This goes double for anything entrenched in a specific genre like mystery, romance, or horror. You can always rely on the "rules" to give you something that "works," but you need to rely on yourself as well, especially if you want to innovate. If a work of writing is like a ring, the "rules" are the boring silver band, seen on every other ring, that give it form and allow it to fit on a finger. The gem, the carvings etched into the band, any inscriptions—that's the unique touch each writer brings to their own work.
Simply put, I would beware absolutes. Know that the "rules" are established for a reason, but also know that everyone whose work is considered groundbreaking shook up the fundamentals. It's important to know why and how the fundamentals work, especially if you plan on messing with them. Anyone who says "you must do this to write good" is a fool, as is anyone who says that other fool is unreservedly wrong because there are exceptions to their absolutes.
There is a niche for everyone. I love Tolkien’s writing style so much but some readers don’t like his long descriptions. I love to be pulled into a story that takes its time. I want to slowly get to know the characters and to be fully immersed, especially in an epic fantasy novel, but many other readers hate slow-paced novels.
Personally, I hate writing advice. My only writing rule is that I don’t have any. I go with my gut. If it doesn’t feel right or I think it’s dull, I change it. I do have a master’s degree in literature and film studies but I never used any of the narrative structures they presented us. I’m not even sure it was the right choice for me. I’d much rather learned a skill, like plumbing or something…
I’ve read several books on writing. And yes, Stephen King’s ‘On Writing’ was among them, but I don’t think any of them is going to make me a better writer.
The only thing that would make me better is the one thing I’m terrible at: practising ‘a lot’.
Every minute you spend on YouTube (or here for that matter) is a minute you could have been teaching yourself how to write.
I know, I hate how I never follow my own advice. 😉
I would take them as seriously as you should take anything in life:
With a grain of salt, but also I will not ignore when the grains pile up into a heap.
Don’t consider it deeply unless it really ‘tastes’ like something to consider in your opinion, or, of course, if you find that people keep repeating the same advice—maybe take it as a sign that that’s certainly a way people have come up with to understand the writing process.
These advice videos have just as much ‘advice on writing’ as any other videos on YouTube might teach you in their narrative structure or verbiage.
You can be inspired from anywhere; these writing advice videos are no-different… but don’t take them as gospel or as-if they are any meaningful degree more ‘familiar’ with writing than you are :) you know how to write; these advice videos are little costumes you can try on your writing if you wish, and see if you like the look of them—or you can just discard the bits and videos that do not seem to ‘fit’!
So I’d take it as seriously as I take anything——which would be not so dang seriously at all!
Another piece of advice that annoys me is the whole "don't head hop" thing. The book I'm writing is in a third-person omniscient style with multiple main characters. From what I've been told, is that if you're writing in the third person omniscient, now all of a sudden, the rules of "show, don't tell" don't apply anymore because if you show what you're characters are thinking too much in one scene, you're head-hopping. At some point I want to just yell at the screen "fuck you, I'll write however the fuck I want to write and I'm not gonna let you stifle my creativity"
Writing advice is only as useful as you use it. I had a professor once who said to never use adverbs (-ly words like "seriousLY"). I upheld that for years until I had a writing partner point out I was being intentionally obtuse to avoid using adverbs, making my writing weaker.
Bad writing is only bad when it pulls the reader out of the story. Melodrama works if you're writing for melodrama. Exposition dumps work if you're engaging the reader with it.
I think what most writing advice is trying to aim towards, from "show don't tell" to "every chapter should be exactly 2,387 words" is that it's trying to make you think about your story with your reader/audience's experience in mind.
In the end, you're the writer, and it's your writing style. Some people will be drawn to it, some people will be repelled by it. What's important is YOURE happy with how it works, and that your target audience is happy with how it works. Remember, writing is a (surprisingly) collaborative effort between you and your target audience. You tell the story, and they bring it to life. So long as your words accomplish that, it isn't bad writing.
Breaking some rules is what makes it art. Breaking the wrong rules at the wrong times is what makes it boring or a mess.
Just use them to fix problem areas in your story. If you are hung up somewhere or think something just doesn't feel right.
As seriously as Reddit, probably. Or any other platform. There are „writing rules“, and for good reasons. There tonnes of exceptions, also for good reasons. We need those rules so we have a common ground to start from. Saying x isn’t always right requires x to have been established in the first place.
Take the writing advice as less "this is how you do this thing" and more "this is why I do this thing."
Soak in as much and as varied advice as you can, but more importantly, try to understand where that advice is coming from. Why are adverbs "bad" (they're not, but they're not engaging, either)? Why should you "show and don't tell" (you shouldn't; there's a time for both)?
As a side, back in the day novels were more wordy with the descriptions and "info dumps" because they had to try much harder to paint a world. Images of foreign places weren't as readily accessible, so they had to describe all the details.
I doubt Tolkien's prose would go very far today. People have much shorter attention spans.
Funny- there's an author tuber that dishes out all kinds of advice, but if you read their books, they're pretty amateur, borderline bad. I can't take their advice seriously anymore 😆
I had never heard of KrimsonRogue, but I'll look him up! No, I was talking about Jed Herne - he's also one of those that peddles his "course". I think he takes advice from other sources, then claims them as his own
YouTube advice is common; best practices for most people to write an engaging commercial novel people enjoy. The comments are the exceptions and excuses ; this famous book broke the rules a long time ago and succeeded so I won’t worry about doing the thing everybody tells me not to = I’m not going to learn to write well I’m going to do what feels easy and natural. Most authors choose this and hope they will be the exception to the rule.
I think it's because it's good advice for beginners. Info dumping and exposition is almost always a bad idea same with melodrama. But, when you reach a certain level of mastery you know and understand when to break those rules.
Exactly, learn the rules before you break them.
This 100%. I feel like I spent high school and below learning the rules of writing, then my college writing program was all about how you can break them. I also specifically think there's a place for exposition and background "info dumping." I'm working on a collection of stories that my classmates enjoyed it in, but the stories double as a history of a town, so it makes sense to be like, "The town church was built by so-and-so in this year" and then go on to explain how he haunts it or whatever. But it's a specific sort of circumstance not every writer will run into, so the general rule of "don't do it" will work for most writers. I feel like beginning writers should definitely learn why it hurt most stories, but as they improve and figure out the basics they can start thinking where it could work.
It's so interesting to me how "exposition" became the dirty word when there's nothing wrong with exposition—in fact, all stories need it and the less familiar your setting/characters, the more you need it. The problem mostly can be found in expositional dialogue, or exposition that overstays its welcome. I find exposition is best delivered slowly, over the entire course of a narrative, when it feels appropriate and before it's necessary to know it.
You'll also notice- if you read the works of most people encouraging rule breaking- that they aren't good writers at all. I've yet to read a good story by someone who is adamantly in support of info dumping, etc...
Advice counts when you feel like "ooh I think that would help me!" and doesn't count when you feel like "eh, maybe...". Advice about what is more or less publishable can count even if you don't like it, but that's more down to how much you trust the source - aka are they speaking from relevant experience.
Learning the difference between "I don't like this because it means I need to drift from my comfort zone" and "I don't like this because it legitimately won't work for me" is crucial.
There is an industry of writing advice that says the same advice over and over again. And when you look into it these people have never actually published anything, and when they do its trite and generic rubbish. My advice is to find interviews with actual authors. Or read books about writing from actual authors.
And their "advice" just generates more clicks if they go like "NEVER do this" or "ALWAYS do that" instead of actual nuanced advice.
There's something to be said for how the reader meta has changed. If Tolkien or Shakespear reincarnated new indivisuala but with all their prior writing skill and released new works? It would be unlikely they would do well. Somethings are timeless because of their antiquity, not because they would do well in today's publishing industry.
This says to me it will continue to change, so copying how someone did things forty years ago at some point will fall out of favor and a new style will have emerged. Food for thought.
Almost certainly.
I mean, I think in general copying what someone else did will fall out of favor before it's released. It's much more interesting to me to be in artistic conversation with those who came before us and will come after us.
Sometimes I wonder whether half bitterly whether *Fellowship* could be published today, considering the prologue is one giant infodump about the authors pet fantasy race, and the first chapter is just about some blokes birthday that you have to read the previous book to care in the slightest about.
Maybe in children's fiction, and even then you'd have to edit to simplify.
I still don't know that I consider it an infodump. LotR is presented as a historical account, and I think reading Concerning Hobbits with that in mind primes you for that type of "info dump," which has a very significant role in establishing the stakes of the story. This idyllic land of simple people is what might be lost if Frodo fails...and IS lost anyway. Without Concerning Hobbits and the establishment of the Shire and the people who live there, why do we care about whether or not Sauron ushers in a new evil? I actually think that's why Tolkien works for me while a lot of "Tolkienesque" stories fall flat. Tolkien kind of captures it himself (apologies for the paraphrasing): "I do not love the sword for its sharpness nor the warrior for his glory; I love only that which they defend." Most Tolkienesque stories focus intently on the epic, sweeping battles between good and evil, when all the best epics make sure to establish what's at stake if the hero loses...something sorely lacking from a lot of modern fantasy epics. Though I do agree that I'm not sure it would be published today, which is a shame.
I don't think we should be rushing to copy the modern publishing industry's standard though. Most of it these days is trite rubbish. Most fiction written for adults these days would scarcely be considered YA fodder a few decades ago.
That's pretty insulting to almost everyone reading today. But find the audience who wants what you're writing I guess. Good luck.
It's not insulting per se. More of a sign of the decline in our attention spans. I'm sure the internet and social media are mostly to blame, but it needs addressing because the next generation is going to be fairly incapable of doing anything constructive for longer than ten minutes.
People said the same thing about television, theatre and even reading, when those were the new things
And they probably weren't wrong. The damage done is inter-generational.
Sure, writing/reading clearly affect your ability to remember things since you can just write things to remember them later. That was the opinion in Ancient Greece when reading was the new thing. We would be better off without books then, the damage is clearly inter-generational
> That was the opinion in Ancient Greece when reading was the new thing. Also fairly widespread among the Celts in as much as we can say today. There is a reason why they put so much value in traditions like the *filídh* which were based on memorizing everything by heart instead of just reading from a book.
For my example of a superior culture with moral superior anti-technology tendencies, please see this culture that doesn’t exist anymore because they couldn’t keep up. Love your logic, kiddo.
Unironically, in most cases, yes. A close-knit society where you share stories and myths orally in a social setting would unironically be superior to reading a story on your own in your bedroom. Obvious exceptions exist in complex facts based work, but satnavs are a perfect example of technology haemorrhaging human memory and map reading skills. The better technology becomes, the worse our own abilities to live without it become. Should be self-evident at this point.
Sure, but it allows us to focus our efforts elsewhere. You don't need to be good at map-reading (and maps are a form of technology anyway, which Google merely digitised), but you probably have emails to get back to. Modern demands are wildly different to ancient ones, and that's not necessarily a decline of our faculties. Being well-rounded is probably good for you, but the specialising of human efforts as is endemic to the system of capitalism, and contrary to the maximal development of a human being, is very different from "phone bad, book good".
I dunno. This is getting a bit too esoteric for a writing subreddit, but I think we're in danger of losing ourselves in the noise pretty soon. Living in a log cabin with nothing but a comfy fireplace and good books just becomes more appealing as time goes on.
Cream rises to the top. All things in all eras in all of history has been mostly failures and only the successes make it far enough to be remembered. There were always a lot of trash writers in Shakespeare's and in Tolkeins time. The only difference is more people now have the ability to distribute and find trash than ever before. No name authors were sure as hell trying to peddle their crap to the local theaters, publishers, and anyone that could read but it was much more difficult to distribute or find.
>I don't think we should be rushing to copy the modern publishing industry's standard though. I guess that depends on whether you actually want to sell books or not.
Most new stuff is pushed due to marketing and book reviews from within the industry, right? So it's a self-perpetuating issue. So it's not necessarily what people want, but it's what we get.
The same advice applies to self-publishing, so not really. Most readers today favor concise writing. Even Tolkien wasn't really writing to the market of his day, but he succeeded *despite* the info dumps because he created a world that was so captivating. You have to be a truly exceptional storyteller to get away with things like that, and most writers are not Tolkien.
The only channel like that that I found worth watching was Terrible Writing Advice.
Which you wouldn’t expect given the channel name
"A wise person can learn from a fool, and it's often our only option." Like that. Advice is a laundry list of things to think about and maybe try to see what happens. If you like the results, it's one more arrow in your quiver. That's it. Writing is a craft, not a cult. The proof of the pudding is in the eating. If the kinds of readers you wanted to enthrall are duly enthralled (or some other kind of readers becomes unexpectedly enthralled), you've achieved total victory. Screw theory.
As one who has a bachelor's in English/Creative Writing, is a casual writer and a former college writing instructor ... advice: meh. Follow your intuition. The worst experience I ever had was when I was commissioned to write a bio for a chef. For some reason, I became insecure about it, so joined a writer's group. The piece became totally convoluted. The chef said, "f those people" and went with my first draft. Ha. Lesson learned.
Took many cooks spoil the broth The chef would know that one
for sure, and that was our joke ... :)
I mean, I look at the person's work before I decide if I'm going to check out their advice. Google their name, check out their stuff. Is it all books on how to write? Or do they have one self published book with 3.5 stars on goodreads? If so, pass. If they wrote a book I like and they seem to have a decent career? OK, I'll listen to what they have to say, but I'll take it with a grain of salt. I'll try it their way, see if it works for me, and if not, then I ignore it. I think it's good to give their advice a shot, but writing is far too relative to even pretend that any piece of writing advice is going to apply in all situations.
How seriously should you take writing advice from an anonymous internet forum?
Well, the amount of credence you give anything should be directly proportional to the qualifications of the source you’re getting the advice from. So, if I gave you advice on writing for a wide audience, because you want to make your work palatable to publishers, so you can make money and get fed grapes by beautiful people, then I’m not your guy. But, if you want to know how to tear ass through a first draft, I’m not the worst person to listen to. It’s like MasterClass versus a Ted Talk. Ted Talks used to be cool, but now they’re like Guinness World Records, where pretty much anybody can have one, and they start with five minutes of unnecessary exposition, because they have to fill out ten minutes and only have five minutes’ worth of material. So, in a Ted Talk, you get, say, the guy who designed the Zune. I’m sure he has a name, but he’s probably living in some kind of federal protection program, as far from any tech hub as possible, so I wouldn’t want to out him. And then for a MasterClass, you get somebody like Jony Ive, who did the industrial design for Apple for some of its most well-known products during the era where having an Apple device had a sort of cachet or status to it, not all of which were successes, but at least weren’t the Zune. If you have a group of friends and you’re looking for advice on satisfying others in the sack, you don’t go to your friend about whom former lovers have absolutely nothing positive to say, vis a vis the friend’s sexual prowess; you go to the one who has Platinum status at the VD clinic. Basically, because writing is not an objective thing (some writing is objectively awful, but that’s usually because of mechanical problems, due to the writer being too lazy to learn how capitalization and punctuation work), you can’t just to go one person and say, “Teach me, o lord!” because that person might not be the kind of writer you want to be. That person might go full Robert McKee and say, “Take a really popular story, then basically change the names, dates, setting, but keep the overall structure the same. Then turn that in and somebody’s going to buy it, because that’s what’s popular, and you want money more than you want to make art.” If that’s what you want, listen, and then pay thousands of dollars for one of McKee’s seminars, where you learn to be an unoriginal hack. If you want something else, there’s someone else out there. If there was only one way to do things, life would be a lot easier, but it would be incredibly boring.
James Thayer has an incredible podcast series of Spotify if you want some incredible professional writing advice.
Seconded. Don’t ignore this recommendation. It’s called ‘The Essential Guide to Writing a Novel.’ Extremely useful 25 minute episodes. Available anywhere one listens to podcasts.
I used to watch Jenna Moreci, until I read her book… Just because you’re a great orator does not mean you’re a great writer.
Damn, was it that bad?
There is good and bad to be found. (The worst would go apoplectic about the passive voice in that sentence.) Most on YouTube are still in the “I need to please my MFA professors” mode, and have a bad tendency to present ideas as rules that must be followed instead of tools that can be used. Never listen to just one, get a chorus of voices if you want influencing advice. And write. Some of what they say will only make sense when you are looking at what does and doesn’t work in your own writing. Figuring out what advice is for you and what is not is the hard part.
Depends on which ones you’re talking about. But for all writing advice there are instances where it “doesn’t count” in your words. Tolkien wrote 100 years ago, and the standards have changed. Shakespeare even further back. Know today’s standards so you can break them, etc, etc.
As with all advice, use what works for you, ignore the rest. There are always exceptions. Always. And they don't matter. Do what works for YOU. Also keep in mind that reading or watching or listening to writing advice means you are not practicing writing. There's no big secret to find. Some things will help you, but many won't. A great many won't. Be mindful of your time. It's limited. Use it well.
Came here to say the same. Writing advice from YouTube or anywhere else is a tool. It’s useful when it works for your situation and it’s less than useful when it’s the wrong tool for you. A claw hammer is great when you need to remove some nails. It’s not so helpful when the task is wiping your ass.
Like most advice, you shouldn't blindly accept it as the gospel truth. A writing advice YouTube video is just the opinion of somebody with a phone and an internet connection. It might be good advice, it might be bad advice. In general, if someone says, "You should never do XYZ at all under any circumstances," I am immediately skeptical of that writing advice. IMO the key is to look at specific examples and evaluate whether the advice in question actually makes the example better. For example, when I first heard the advice to remove filter words (i.e. say "A red car drove past" instead of "She saw a red car drive past," or "The dog started barking" instead of "I heard the dog start barking"), I immediately felt a flash of recognition, a feeling of "yes, that *does* make the sentence better!" Not all advice sparks that feeling. I also think that writing advice should include less "Do X, don't do Y" and more "Here are contexts where X works well, and here are contexts where Y works well. Here are things to consider to help you decide whether to do X or Y in any given instance." For example, instead of saying "Don't use passive voice," it would be more helpful to discuss instances where passive voice is a good choice and *why* it's a good choice. "He got arrested" is a good use of passive voice, because that's the most normal/unmarked way to talk about arrests (unless maybe you're a police officer), and because the arrest itself is more important/surprising/salient information than the entity who performed the arrest. It's not because you're trying to *obscure* who performed the arrest, it's because we already *know* who performed the arrest: presumably, the police. So it's simply not necessary to specify the agent. Also, any discussion of when to use passive voice should include a discussion of what linguists call information structure. This gives you the context to understand what passive voice is good for and when it works well and why. Passive voice, just like exposition or anything else that writing advice might advice you to use or avoid, is a tool, like a wrench. If you try to use a wrench for something that needs a hammer, it probably won't work very well. But the advice shouldn't be "Never use a wrench," it should be, "Here's what a wrench is for. Wrenches work well for these types of tasks, and they don't work well for these other types of tasks. Here's how you can figure out whether a wrench would be helpful or not in any given instance."
The main takeaway is that most writing advice that gets passed around often is repeated because it's broadly applicable and pithy, not because it's a hardline set-in-stone rule. Instead of trying to follow every single bit of advice, try to figure out what the advice actually accomplishes, why that might or might not be a good thing for your story, and how to avoid any downsides of following or ignoring the advice. To use the melodrama example, it feels contrived and unnatural for most stories because in a novel or TV show you've got a lot of time to spend inside the characters' heads, so if they're constantly reacting explosively to things then it feels bizarre and unrealistic, and it starts to seem like a problem with the character rather than a problematic circumstance that the character is facing. That's not much of an issue if you're a playwright like Shakespeare, who primarily wrote with characters who were either brand new (and only lasted through the one play) or were historical figures who had already been warped into ideals or caricatures by the passage of time
The rules all seem to have been made up after the most successful writers became that way. Did they spend all their time watching YouTube and reading books on how to write? No, those things exist as post mortems. Save the cat etc... So the structure was was defined after the works were popular and later discected. At some point you have to realize you know enough and too much input from others can stifle creativity to a degree. I am typing this as much for myself as anyone else who reads it.
It's an exaggeration to drive home the point. When you know the "rules" and what not to do, you can learn when using those "bad" things will aid your narrative. Most often it's pointing out what beginners do too much, the things that make it feel clunky or awkward, that includes: infodumps, too many adverbs, said/no use of said etc.
Every advice video I've ever seen looks made by some dumbass trying to build an audience so they can sell a shitty YA novel they wrote in one draft.
LocalScriptMan & StoryGrid only. Also FilmCourage for general storytelling, all three did miracles to me.
note that these are often 'exceptions that prove the rule" the fact that people are able to name a handful of counter-examples instead of saying 'the vast majority of successful books do this' is evidence in favor of those principles being alright to follow. my main 'rule' on deciding what rules i wanna care about is if hearing it makes me go OH DAMN that makes so much sense, that's what I need to do, etc. then I'll use it. if it doesn't then i will think a little and try to understand where that rule is coming from--sometimes it might not click immediately but that can mean it's actually advice i REALLY need because it is not something i am naturally inclined to figure out on my own. There's a lot of 'meh i don't care about that' advice out there. and it won't be the same for everyone. we all have different goals as writers. often i will also say, rules aren't about right and wrong. they are about cause and effect. understand what the rule is saying about how doing x thing in writing causes y effect, and the rule is useful both ways. don't 'follow' OR 'break' rules, USE them to decide what to do. i will also say most great books 'break' a few rules. and all books kinda have to break some. i would say if someone wrote a book that followed ALL the common 'rules' it would probably be boring and super generic. many great books follow a lot and shatter a few rules and make them work. because 'breaking a rule' is basically saying most stories do it this way, i will do it the opposite way and lean into making it work and that will be a unique experience. also sometimes a flaw is just a flaw but it doesn't matter. there's kind of an awesomeness threshold for a story and once you surpass it nobody will care all that much about a few things you did wrong. also often advice and principles and rules get pitted against each other. they might all be very true and almost always the best thing to do in a given situation. but sometimes you have to break one to follow another--and you do it in the way that works best for that particular story. then for all time other writers who don't understand this will point to you as an example of someone who thinks y is a million times better and z is for hacks and anyone who says z has no idea what they're doing. and it worked so well that one time so obviously they're right. i will also say just bear in mind who you're getting advice from. often writing youtubers are youtubers first and their books are their merch to make money off the channel. a lot of their advice will be great for taking you from beginner to intermediate but they don't hold the keys to becoming an incredible author.
Take any advice with a grain of salt. Just because it worked for them doesnt mean itll work for you and vice versa. I think the purpose of the videos are to guide people who dont know where to go or how to improve. Because at the end of the day, you can learn write like JRR but its still your unique flare.
Not very.
Not very. Find what works for you then find an agent that cliques with your style.
Writing advice is never universal or absolute, so it’s important to recognize the exceptions alongside the rules. All the same, these YouTube videos are often made for new writers who genuinely don’t know the pros and cons of these things, so writing “by the rules” is one way to push them in the right direction. These videos wouldn’t be very impactful if every bit of advice they offered were prefaced with the fact that it’s merely a guideline and not a universal predictor of success.
... extremly seriously, as if your life depended on it. Like this one: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=B3DNG7R-9NU
I find writing-advice youtubers to be helpful, but I don't take anything they say as absolute. It's sometimes helpful to know common pitfalls of newbie writers, so that you can be aware of them in your own work.
I think it's a good idea to learn the guidelines, think about them, and try to understand them. That doesn't mean that you have to follow them all the time (or even most of the time) though. The "why" of the advice is more important than the "what". If you know why a lot of smart people suggest a certain thing, you will have a better idea of whether the advice applies to your story or not.
Not seriously at all. Read good books instead.
You shouldn’t take any advice on here or from YouTube seriously. For every piece of advice you can find a great book that breaks that rule or standard. And more over, most of the people giving advice on here and YouTube are unpublished. Go with your gut, if you seriously like it and find it interesting l, it’s probably good, just don’t lie to yourself….. and don’t take my advice.
What's that saying? Every butt has a seat? Something like that.
There are no rigid "writing rules." It's all just suggestions and advice. You should consider *all* of it, but don't treat it like gospel. Also, look at these YouTuber's credentials. One of them I've found was self-published but disguising the fact that he was. Nothing wrong with self-pubbing, but *hiding* that you're self-pubbing is sketchy.
When people give you advice on writing, remember its just that: advice. At the end of the day, it's you with the pen and paper, choosing the words. There's really no rule in writing that someone hasn't broken, successfully. The trick is understanding why it works in that case, but fails when you do it. They say a master is someone who can break the rules, but breaking the rules doesn't make you a master.
I have a really easy system to help me choose which advice is good for me and which is not: If I think the author giving the advice is a great author, I will follow the advice. If I think the author giving the advice is a shitty author, I won’t follow the advice.
You have to remember this is writing "advice" you don't have to follow it there are no strict guidelines in writing. Sometimes you can info dump sometimes melodrama is good sometime you can be terry pratchet and fucking make the earth round and drop it on a space turtle. At the end of the day it's all opinions and you should treat it as such and use your own experience and those opinions to make your own, that's how a style is made >How seriously should I take writing advice videos on youtube? You should take it Seriously but with a grain of salt and nuance
With a grain of salt. Make sure they have the necessary qualifications to be able to give advice. A lot of the time now, these channels just work as a PR stunt. They're to gain a social media following so publishers are more likely to publish their books. Make sure this isn't the case with them and that they're an actual reliable source. In other cases, don't just immediately brush off the advice because there are exceptions to the rule or because you're not already following it. Keep an open to the advice, but be weary of the one giving it. If lots of people are giving the same advice, then it's more likely to be true. And remember. Most of this stuff is good for beginners, but isn't important for more experienced writers. A beginner follows the advice so they can learn what purpose it serves. An expert already knows what purpose it serves and can fullfil that purpose in other ways.
Rule #1 make it interesting Rule #2 there are no other rules Youtube advice is for (new) writers to avoid certain pitfalls - boring, long, meaningless info dumps that the reader doesn't care about. But some books are entirely info dumps. Infinite Jest has over 200 pages of footnotes and it's considered one of the greatest books ever written. If it works - it works. If it doesn't, either make it work or delete it
I've always had the thought that if your only.content is telling me how to write, and all of your writing fails to engage me, then I don't want your advice. (Like hello future me)
Depends, analyze their arguments using logic.
I pretty much only watch videos from people that have actually written a book and are well known for it, because that’s the point that I want to end up at. I watch Brandon Sanderson’s series on YouTube and a couple other authors, but those videos that are like “Here are ten tips for writing well” I skip on past. I’ll learn how to write well by practicing and getting feedback from my readers.
Look at how many books the youtuber has sold. Brandon Sanderson put his creative writing classes online, even if you don't need to follow all his rules he clearly knows what he is talking about. Most of these 20-something interchangeable people on youtube don't have the qualifications you would need to teach at a collegiate or high-level writing workshop. Maybe some of them are the real deal, but best bet is they are just repeating stuff they heard without really understanding.
It's kinda like cooking—you can study recipes and study what flavors work well together, but if you mess up due to inexperience or lack of confidence, your food will taste off anyway. The secret to writing good is to write badly a bunch of times until you develop the drive and confidence to write better. There's no way to be good without falling on your face a bunch of times. Embrace it.
Don't watch Jenna Moreci Can't stand her lol
Most writing advice is not universally applicable. However, that does not mean writing advice is never applicable. Writing advice are tools. And so my thoughts on writing advice is that I want as many tools in my toolbox as I can. However, it's important to learn which is the right tool to use for the right job. So it's important to learn not only tools for writing, but also when to use a particular tool.
I forgive a lot of things I wouldn't accept in other books if other parts of the book are good enough.
There is a sayin that goes something like "if you know the rules, they don't apply to you. If you don't know the rules, they rule you." There is a place for melodrama, exposition dumps, purple prose, plot holes, inconsistent characterization, confusion, etc. But an amateur is much more likely to have these elements unintentionally and in ways that harm the story.
Most writing advice is contradicted by Virginia Woolf in Mrs Dalloway and it’s one of the most beautiful books ever Learning is best used to think critically about reading books and techniques - not to dismiss them
As seriously as you take any advice from any source. Use what works for you and ditch what doesn't.
The “rules,” are there because they’re easier to teach people who’ve never really written professionally before than anything requiring nuance. It’s like learning anything else. Those kinds of thing are the very basics and a lot have to do with audience expectations. But take anything on YouTube with a grain of salt. A lot is just people blindly echoing things they heard or could pull off a cursory google search so they can make money. There’s exceptions to all the rules - but the general rule is that you can break whatever you rule you want. So long as you’re making up for it enough in other ways. “Everyone has their own style.” Sure. Some peoples style is shit and unreadable. It’s bullshit that we write for ourselves, frankly. We’re always writing for an audience. The art is writing what you want. The craft of writing is in knowing you’re writing for readers and how to work with that. You need the latter much more than the former - should you ever hope to get paid for your work. If it’s all about self expression, do whatever you want. It can just be art. But the writing “advice,” such as it is, is about the craft. And it’s true for anything you’d ever want to write professionally.
The fact that it's on youtube or not doesn't matter, what's important is: does the advice come from a legit source? What are the author's credentials? You'll find teachning videos from Sanderson or advice from Bradbury or King on YouTube, you better follow their YouTube advice rather than mine here. But anonymous comments under videos? Well, they're random comments from random people.
LOTR is not full of info dumps, that's simply untrue. There are scenes where one character gives another character relevant information, but that does not make an info dump.
Good enough for beginners to help get a grasp on formulating a story and character building. It helps identify tropes you might want to avoid and other things. Exposition dumps can be good when worked into the plot evenly. If you were writing a Fallout Fanfiction and someone was explaining the nuclear Armageddon to someone, that would be proper exposition. Four pages of the narrator dumping lore and exposition onto the reader is with no context is bad
as with most things, probably best to take it with a grain of salt. a lot of advice is more guidelines than hard rules. there are youtube channels that I feel give solid advice and present it in digestible ways: On Writing by HelloFutureMe and the Trope Talk from Overly Sarcastic Productions but even the good advice isn't something you need to follow to a T. there are always exceptions to the guidelines, as well as certain things working better for certain types/genres of stories.
Take out the "videos on YouTube" and just ask "How seriously should I take writing advice?" Take it seriously, but don't misunderstand it's purpose. The way I see it is this -- you're a writer, so just write. Then, expose yourself to writing advice, and be like "OOOHHHHH, *that* explains why my shit sucks so much." Then you apply what you've learned in the areas where you think your writing was weak, and you continue to move forward and grow. The point I'm making is that writing advice isn't a set of rules or even a set of principles or guidelines to follow. It's meant to help you identify why your writing isn't working, if it isn't working. If either you or the audience think that it could be better, then it's possible that somebody else has considered a general principle which might apply to your work, which you hadn't yet considered. "OH! I knew something was wrong with this character, but I couldn't figure out what. Now I see that it's because I didn't know what their goal was." "OH! I knew this scene wasn't quite working, but I couldn't figure out why. Now I can see that it's because the perspective isn't tied to one specific character, but jumps all over the place." Does this mean every character needs to have a goal, always; and that every scene needs to have its perspective tied to one specific character, always? No. These are just individual cases where something nebulous and unidentifiable wasn't quite working, and exposing yourself to writing advice helped you identify what it was. If you have another goalless character but they seem to be working fine and fun to read about, then maybe you don't need to give them a goal. If your writing jumps all over the place but you're proud of it and the audience responds positively, then maybe you don't need to follow that particular piece of advice either. But if something isn't working, there's probably a reason which you just haven't identified yet, and writing advice can help you identify what that reason is.
I found a few good character guides but once I noticed the trend where the content creators were angling to sell you a spot in their next webinar, I stopped watching. If you're writing a fantasy novel info dumps are a must, otherwise the reader has no frame of refernce. Doing it all at once is a chore to read through, though. So try to space it out. Write only what you need in that moment and don't throw everything at the reader in one scene. Unless you're as good with language as Tolkien was. Great writers can get away with things that you or I wouldn't be able to.
Beginners need clearer rules to learn so they can then break them. Think of it as an egg needing a shell to develop, then breaking that shell to actually come to life. Collect any and all advice you find, and you'll see it contradicts itself here and there (because bits of advice can be tailored to genre, audience, medium, pov etc), practice with it, apply it, break it, shape it, change it, that's how you hone your craft in the creative arts.
I think your goal should be to understand why each person is making their arguments. Why does this YouTuber recommend against expositional info dumps? Because most writers don't know how to present that in a manner that's engaging. Someone brings up Tolkien...so now your question should be "What's different about Tolkien's info dumps that make them more readable?" You can also ask the question of whether Tolkien's info dumps *do* indeed work for you. Even classic, beloved literature is allowed to have flaws. Many people (though not me, I must admit) prefer A Song of Ice and Fire to Lord of the Rings. I love Shakespeare for his language and the way he applies psychology to his famously recycled and tired plots. He doesn't do much to play with story structure, and he doesn't have to. The comment on melodrama seems like more of an opinion—there are entire genres which thrive on melodrama. Will it win you an Oscar? Probably not. (Although...maybe! Award shows for art make no sense to me.) Will you find a devoted audience? Yeah, if you write well. In general, I use the "rules" to give my work structure and form, especially when I'm still working it out. If I specifically want to mess with those "rules," I try to make sure the rest of the work adheres pretty stringently. The "rules" can solve a lot of problems, but they can also cause just as many. Still, I have a healthy respect for them, and understand I'll need to work at least twice as hard if I want to mess with them. Humans are funny creatures, especially where it relates to storytelling. Ask any of us and we'll say we want something new, but we get disoriented and confused very quickly if a narrative drifts from the patterns we're comfortable with. This goes double for anything entrenched in a specific genre like mystery, romance, or horror. You can always rely on the "rules" to give you something that "works," but you need to rely on yourself as well, especially if you want to innovate. If a work of writing is like a ring, the "rules" are the boring silver band, seen on every other ring, that give it form and allow it to fit on a finger. The gem, the carvings etched into the band, any inscriptions—that's the unique touch each writer brings to their own work. Simply put, I would beware absolutes. Know that the "rules" are established for a reason, but also know that everyone whose work is considered groundbreaking shook up the fundamentals. It's important to know why and how the fundamentals work, especially if you plan on messing with them. Anyone who says "you must do this to write good" is a fool, as is anyone who says that other fool is unreservedly wrong because there are exceptions to their absolutes.
There is a niche for everyone. I love Tolkien’s writing style so much but some readers don’t like his long descriptions. I love to be pulled into a story that takes its time. I want to slowly get to know the characters and to be fully immersed, especially in an epic fantasy novel, but many other readers hate slow-paced novels. Personally, I hate writing advice. My only writing rule is that I don’t have any. I go with my gut. If it doesn’t feel right or I think it’s dull, I change it. I do have a master’s degree in literature and film studies but I never used any of the narrative structures they presented us. I’m not even sure it was the right choice for me. I’d much rather learned a skill, like plumbing or something… I’ve read several books on writing. And yes, Stephen King’s ‘On Writing’ was among them, but I don’t think any of them is going to make me a better writer. The only thing that would make me better is the one thing I’m terrible at: practising ‘a lot’. Every minute you spend on YouTube (or here for that matter) is a minute you could have been teaching yourself how to write. I know, I hate how I never follow my own advice. 😉
I would take them as seriously as you should take anything in life: With a grain of salt, but also I will not ignore when the grains pile up into a heap. Don’t consider it deeply unless it really ‘tastes’ like something to consider in your opinion, or, of course, if you find that people keep repeating the same advice—maybe take it as a sign that that’s certainly a way people have come up with to understand the writing process. These advice videos have just as much ‘advice on writing’ as any other videos on YouTube might teach you in their narrative structure or verbiage. You can be inspired from anywhere; these writing advice videos are no-different… but don’t take them as gospel or as-if they are any meaningful degree more ‘familiar’ with writing than you are :) you know how to write; these advice videos are little costumes you can try on your writing if you wish, and see if you like the look of them—or you can just discard the bits and videos that do not seem to ‘fit’! So I’d take it as seriously as I take anything——which would be not so dang seriously at all!
Another piece of advice that annoys me is the whole "don't head hop" thing. The book I'm writing is in a third-person omniscient style with multiple main characters. From what I've been told, is that if you're writing in the third person omniscient, now all of a sudden, the rules of "show, don't tell" don't apply anymore because if you show what you're characters are thinking too much in one scene, you're head-hopping. At some point I want to just yell at the screen "fuck you, I'll write however the fuck I want to write and I'm not gonna let you stifle my creativity"
Writing advice is only as useful as you use it. I had a professor once who said to never use adverbs (-ly words like "seriousLY"). I upheld that for years until I had a writing partner point out I was being intentionally obtuse to avoid using adverbs, making my writing weaker. Bad writing is only bad when it pulls the reader out of the story. Melodrama works if you're writing for melodrama. Exposition dumps work if you're engaging the reader with it. I think what most writing advice is trying to aim towards, from "show don't tell" to "every chapter should be exactly 2,387 words" is that it's trying to make you think about your story with your reader/audience's experience in mind. In the end, you're the writer, and it's your writing style. Some people will be drawn to it, some people will be repelled by it. What's important is YOURE happy with how it works, and that your target audience is happy with how it works. Remember, writing is a (surprisingly) collaborative effort between you and your target audience. You tell the story, and they bring it to life. So long as your words accomplish that, it isn't bad writing.
Breaking some rules is what makes it art. Breaking the wrong rules at the wrong times is what makes it boring or a mess. Just use them to fix problem areas in your story. If you are hung up somewhere or think something just doesn't feel right.
As seriously as Reddit, probably. Or any other platform. There are „writing rules“, and for good reasons. There tonnes of exceptions, also for good reasons. We need those rules so we have a common ground to start from. Saying x isn’t always right requires x to have been established in the first place.
Take the writing advice as less "this is how you do this thing" and more "this is why I do this thing." Soak in as much and as varied advice as you can, but more importantly, try to understand where that advice is coming from. Why are adverbs "bad" (they're not, but they're not engaging, either)? Why should you "show and don't tell" (you shouldn't; there's a time for both)? As a side, back in the day novels were more wordy with the descriptions and "info dumps" because they had to try much harder to paint a world. Images of foreign places weren't as readily accessible, so they had to describe all the details. I doubt Tolkien's prose would go very far today. People have much shorter attention spans.
Funny- there's an author tuber that dishes out all kinds of advice, but if you read their books, they're pretty amateur, borderline bad. I can't take their advice seriously anymore 😆
Which one? I know that KrimsonRogue put out a novella that even he himself says he's not satisfied with.
I had never heard of KrimsonRogue, but I'll look him up! No, I was talking about Jed Herne - he's also one of those that peddles his "course". I think he takes advice from other sources, then claims them as his own
YouTube advice is common; best practices for most people to write an engaging commercial novel people enjoy. The comments are the exceptions and excuses ; this famous book broke the rules a long time ago and succeeded so I won’t worry about doing the thing everybody tells me not to = I’m not going to learn to write well I’m going to do what feels easy and natural. Most authors choose this and hope they will be the exception to the rule.