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RobertBMarks
Jul '22

Just about every single writing technique or rule has exceptions. None are inviolable. Except for one.

It's a rule so important that I tell my students to tattoo it on the insides of their eyelids if they have to, and I express it using coarse language to make sure they will always remember it. A rule so impactful that it can ensure that your writing might not be good on a given day, but it will never be mediocre. In over 30 years of writing and over 20 years of writing professionally, it remains in my mind the first rule, and the only inviolable rule. It is rule #1.

To talk about this rule, I need to tell a story about my favourite author, Harlan Ellison (who, as far as I know, at the time of his death was the most decorated author in the English language)..

Harlan Ellison was teaching at a Clarion writer's workshop one year, and he handed his class an assignment: write a story about where the lost things go.

The class went away and wrote their stories. They all wrote about socks disappearing, gnomes stealing nick-knacks and the like, and then handed their stories in. Ellison read them, and flunked the entire class. Not a single pass among them.

When he took up the assignment the next day, he ran the class over the coals. Who gives a damn about nick-knacks, or socks, he demanded. Nobody cares about the irrelevant, or trivial. What about HOPES? What about DREAMS? What about that one chance you had at true love, and you missed it? THAT is what you need to write about - those things that are important and always worth caring about.

Rule #1: ALWAYS WRITE ABOUT THE IMPORTANT SHIT.

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DiegoPalacios
Jul '22

true, important is the key word......the stakes don't need to be high, but they need to be meaningful for the story, characters and readers

Lensing
Jul '22

That´s good advice.
The question is:
Important to whom?
@DiegoPalacios mentioned "the readers" and that sounds like a trap to me.
Whenever I think about "the readers", my friends, parents, the "target audience"
I end up writing the boring crap which is not important to me at all because I been
thinking what might be interesting for other people instead of writing about something
which is important for me, something I´m obsessed with and can´t stop thinking about,
something which inspires me to create

darthmongoose
Jul '22

Hahaha when I read "write about the important [stuff]" I actually interpreted it differently as, "don't waste time with scenes that don't achieve or set up anything important- ie. anything that will impact later scenes" (Which I personally would say is a good piece of advice), so the clarification that we're talking about some combination of theme and stakes here was a surprise.

From reading the Wikipedia page about the man who gave this advice1 and flunked the class for not following it, it um... sounds like he was... quite a contentious man, and the stuff about his treatment of women in the speculative fiction community is... troubling. :sweat_01: It's hard not to read his assertion critically from an intersectional feminist perspective where the literary canon has always excluded certain types of people by labelling the things they write about as "irrelevant" or "trivial".

It's all very well to tell a person their work is not worthy if it's not about "important [stuff]", but... who decides what's important is a huge, ongoing debate in Literary criticism to this day, and it's something that's been used to gatekeep out women and other marginalised people from literature for centuries.

As an autistic person, a lost sock can feel devastating, and maybe I want to write a story about how it feels to be a person for whom a sock going missing or a cup being smashed can feel genuinely distressing and what it's like to have society all say "it's just a sock, it doesn't matter, your pain isn't valid because it's not important to us". So long as the stakes of your story are big and important to the protagonist and the writer can communicate that and make the audience empathise with it, I don't think you need the external validation of some guy saying "this is about something important and therefore worthy".
In fact, I take great pleasure in my work from exploring characters under-reacting to "important" things like giant monsters, deadly perils or things that we're told are big and important and profound, while treating "trivial" things, like the friendship between teenage girls, or having a crappy boss who makes you uncomfortable, as hugely impactful. The audience actually react more to these things than the big, kingdom-threatening stuff, because they feel real and relatable.

TheLemmaLlama
Jul '22

That reminds me of a youtuber I've been watching recently1 who says "external conflict (the plot) is about what happens; internal conflict (the story) is about why it matters". So I guess "always write the important shit" really means "make the story more character driven" XD

Conversely, even if you're writing (primarily) about something "objectively important" like saving the world or something, it's still a failure to 'write the important shit' if you don't make it feel important to your characters in a particularly evocative way unique to them :'D

darthmongoose
Jul '22

Yes! I mean, there's a common issue on Tapas with Fantasy comics opening their story with a big long narration crawl about the ancient war between kingdoms or gods or dragons for the fate of the universe or something, and then the creator is like "why is nobody reading my comic and reading these fluffy Fantasy stories about relationships instead!?". The big war between the dragons for the fate of the universe is big and important, but it's not relevant to the protagonist and has no emotional stakes to ground it.

On Tapas especially, your work has to establish emotional stakes as early as possible, because that's what readers on this platform generally get invested in. In terms of subs, a comic about the peasant's unrequited crush on the elf princess and wanting to express it by making her the perfect cup of tea will beat the crap out of a similarly well-drawn and written big important comic about ancient gods beyond human understanding fighting over a mythical sword that can unmake reality.

RobertBMarks
Jul '22
darthmongoose

Harlan Ellison was a...colourful figure. He's a man who was told by his writing teacher in school that he would never amount to anything, and then sent that teacher a copy of every single story he had published until the day that man died. He managed to get fired on his first day working for Disney by making jokes in the cafeteria about the type of porno Minnie Mouse would make. He seemed psychologically incapable of turning away from a dispute, no matter how insignificant. He also joined the march to Selma during the Civil Rights movement, and went undercover in a youth gang (and if you want to understand youth violence, I'd go as far as to call his Memos from Purgatory essential reading).

He was about as far from perfect as you can get, but when it comes to the field, he was a titan. The way I like to put it is that Dennis L. McKiernan is the man who inspired me to pick up my pen, but Harlan Ellison was the man who taught me what to do with it.

Society doesn't get a vote in what is important in your story - the humanity common to all of us does. To quote Ellison again, "All stories are about people." If I may clarify the rule (and I speak carefully because I am not autistic, and thus do not have direct experience here), perhaps it is not the lost sock that is so important as all the things it represents - the disruption to the order of one's life, or the loss of control over one's corner of a overwhelming and confusing world. Those seem pretty damned important to me.

Frankly, I fail to see how those are trivial.

RobertBMarks
Jul '22
darthmongoose

Well, that's just putting the cart before the horse.

You want to start small and build. Get the reader invested in the protagonist and their life first, and then, through the protagonist's eyes, introduce the wider conflict. Otherwise, you're just inundating the reader with static.

darthmongoose
Jul '22

Okay, perhaps I misunderstood the intent of the advice.

Is the meaning intended as something like: "don't pussy-foot around and write a banal little story that's just a bunch of low-stakes stuff happening that barely impacts the protagonist/s because you're afraid of the vulnerability that comes from expressing profound feelings in your work"?

ie. Less about the objective importance of the events, but more about the impact they have on characters? So it's not so much "don't write a story about losing a sock" as "don't write a story where the greatest trial the protagonist must endure is a temporary annoyance or a minor inconvenience with little to no deeper or lasting impact or anything to really say about anything."?

RobertBMarks
Jul '22

Exactly.

Or, put another way, "Always write about the important shit." :smiley:

NickRowler
Jul '22
1

I would like to read a story about gnomes stealing things but then again, I like gnomes. It's sort of strange how some would would write something off as not important or bad just because it's not their cup of tea.

This is why I think many adults struggle at writing for children because sometimes things that are important to an adult is not really important to a child. Hopes, dreams, true love are abstract concepts. Adults try to write deep moving things that they hope will morally influence a kid's views then turn around and get frustrated when kids prefer stuff about a talking sponge or a man fighting crime in his underwear.

RobertBMarks
Jul '22

I remember that episode - gnomes were the window dressing, but it wasn't really about gnomes. My recollection is that it was about the need to move beyond a simplistic and/or dogmatic understanding of the world like "big corporations = bad" into something more nuanced.

And, kids are hard (and I say that as a parent). That said, my 3 year old daughter loves Girls und Panzer, and that show contains all the life lessons I want to impart to her, so the depth isn't wasted...

darthmongoose
Jul '22
RobertBMarks

Okay, now it makes sense.

I wrote some really crap comics back when I was in denial about being gay. This one Romance short I sent in to a competition was probably the worst. I wanted to prove I could write Romance (because I was always the "girls with swords girl"), but because I was subconsciously repulsed by the thought of being intimate with a man, and had never felt any actual deeply passionate feelings I didn't bury under a heap of "no, no, I just really like her as a friend!", when it came to writing Romance stories they were very... tame. Just a guy bored on a beach and he finds a message in a bottle and runs into this girl and they have a conversation and they just kind of... hang out, they didn't even kiss. There was no conflict, no realisation, no deeper meaning, just a few pretty inoffensive jokes. It was really a comic about nothing because I'd buried all the things I actually wanted to say.
I think that's the kind of thing the advice is to avoid making. A toothless story that doesn't really dare to say anything or expose the heart of the writer, just a string of "a thing happened, and then another thing happened and we thought something bad might happen, but it didn't / it turned out it was all a dream, and then we went home. The end!"

NickRowler
Jul '22
RobertBMarks

Yeah, that is why I deleted that part and I noticed you completely ignored my statement

"It's sort of strange how some would write something off as not important or bad just because it's not their cup of tea."

As PreK media is it's own can of worms. Unfortunately it has become very commercial with a lot of the shows being giant toy ads. If your 3 year old is watching a show written and targeted at teens and older, I doubt her enjoyment is the "depth" of the story. Most kids that young do not pick up on those kind of things. This is why a lot of the morals and messages of PreK programming are very in your face. But their are also people who think kids that young shouldn't be watching TV at all because it can have negative effects on language and communication skills.

RobertBMarks
Jul '22
darthmongoose

I think we all have stories like that in our past when we're just getting started. To this day, I'm convinced that one of the reasons I got the contract to write Diablo: Demonsbane was that the acquisitions editor DIDN'T read the end of the story I sent in as a writing sample. This was my closing paragraph:

Like Argela, I was wounded deeply, although far deeper than her. And like Argela, although it will take a long time, my wound is healing.

For context: Argela = watched a demon kill her husband in front of her. Narrator = light to moderate PTSD from being a soldier. This is what you get when a 19-20 year-old who has never had a serious romantic relationship in his life tries to just wing it when it comes to writing as though he has life experience.

(It's probably a really good thing that in our early careers we take a lot of storytelling risks that tend to pay off - it balances out the bad or the stupid that creeps in from us being too young and inexperienced to know any better.)

RobertBMarks
Jul '22
NickRowler

I didn't ignore the statement - I had nothing to add to it. You're just right.

(I tend to take an approach of not replying to something if all I've got to say is a variation on "yep!")

NickRowler
Jul '22

Maybe my perspective of an American, I have become a bit tired and sick of stories about characters following their hopes/dreams and true love. I understand a character having goals but I feel like I prefer things that are more slice of life, situational, and focused more on interpersonal interactions.

DiegoPalacios
Jul '22
Lensing

Yeah, pandering is a trap.

But it's important to find the soft point where you make something that is enjoyable for yourself AND for others.......

Enjoyable for yourself to make something genuine and have the strength to work on it and enjoyable for others so they read it in the first place.

29 days later

closed Aug 13, '22

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