Do not use these in writing

[Anonymous No.22033754]

Otherwise, you are a bad writer.
>ellipses
>switching tense
>second person voice
>declarative sentences on the first line
>Overused cliches, e.g., "Once upon a time," "Lo," "Hearken," "Long ago"
>adverbs
>passive voice
>semi-colons
>long lists
>any poetry forced into meter or rhyme without meaning, such as doggerel
>any Shakespeare lines as a title
>multiple clauses
>plotless story
>slice of life
>political agitprop or ideology disguised as a story
>philosophical themes
>stories only made as metaphors for something
>contrived speech, especially slang or constructed languages that aren't real
>too many swear words
>longwinded and/or overwrought narratives
>ten dollar words
>too much exposition
>too much description
>too many different dialogue tags since characters should be distinct and be easy to discern
>long speeches with indented dialogue from the same character
>frame narratives
>flashbacks
>prologues
>named chapters
>epilogues
>too many visuals
>bad pastiche
>overdone settings
>"worldbuilding" rather than writing
>infodumps in or outside of dialogue
>multiple points of view
>omniscient narrator that head hops

[Anonymous No.22033755]

Or these:
>overused filler words that don't add much, e.g., "really" and "very"
>genre specific tropes that aren't rethought in any way
>long sentences
>sentence fragments
>epigrams
>chapter summaries
>en dashes
>parentheses
>dramatis personae outside of plays and dramatic poems
>free verse without an understanding of stress and rhythm
>"et cetera," "and so on and so forth"
>any Latin whatsoever, especially legal or philosophical terms
>any gratuitous fan service like unnecessary violence and sex
>em dashes
>hyphenated words that aren't real, e.g., "the-not-so-dark-yet-brownish-tea"
>neologisms
>any psychoanalytic terms
>blending of genres for no reason
>nouns as adjectives
>words that are longer but waste time: "however," "although," "albeit," "howsoever," "contrariwise"
>nonsense poems
>stream of consciousness
>paratext
>intertext
>writing intended to belong to made up literary movements that weren't ever real: "maximalism," "high modernism," "oulipo"
>too many commas
>syndeton
>too many similes
>too many metaphors
>rhyming in prose
>too many idioms
>stories based on puns
>humour without necessary build up nor timing
>wacky humour
>onomatopoeia
>characters say the title of the book anywhere in the book
>titular character is a Mary Sue
>unedited writing appearing in a publication
>using beta readers or family to edit for you
>rushed endings
>boring beginnings
>uneventful middles
>lack of denouement
>"muh prose" rather than learning how to tell a story
>focusing too much on sound and syntax, rather than learning how to tell a story
>the main character is the story's antagonist or monster
>anti-heroes
>anti-villains
>hypertext
>namedropping any philosophers, great writers, or great artists
>ostranenie
>polyphony
>more than one language appearing in the work for no reason
>an index
>footnotes in narrative fiction or poetry which didn't appear due to an editor or translator
>preface
>endface
>maps
>word salad
>lack of punctuation
>exclamation marks
>question marks when someone is confused rather than asking a question
>thoughts in italics
>more than one font or font size
>colons

[Anonymous No.22033762]

Don't write. Simple as.

[Anonymous No.22033798]

>>22033762
You can still write if you also don't use any of the following.
>epigraphs
>cribbed lines
>asides
>monologues
>soliloquy
>reimagining Defoe, Ovid, or Melville but for some sort of feminist, queer, or postcolonial reading
>serialisation
>long chapters
>tiny chapters
>creative nonfiction
>any writing influenced by visual media or TTRPGs
>extended or shared universes
>sub-genres that are fads
>refrains or motifs for no reason, "he spat," "they rode on," "and but so," "so it goes"
>thinking postmodernism can make you write about comics in a novel
>song lyrics anywhere
>ballads
>deus ex machina
>any erotica or romance for older women
>trochees outside of the last lines of dactylic hexameter

[Anonymous No.22033802]

>>22033798
No. Simple as.

[Anonymous No.22033813]

>>22033754
>>22033755
>>22033798
i dare someone to write a novella that purposely violates every single one of these rules

[Anonymous No.22033832]

>>22033754
Are you a writer OP? Provide us an excerpt of your work, the 2000 characters suffice.

[Anonymous No.22033848]

>>22033754
>>22033755
>>22033798
>>22033813
i dare you to give up the ritalin and go to sleep

[Anonymous No.22033851]

>>22033848
>Ritalin
Why would I need Ritalin to have opinions about bad writing? Most of these are just objectively bad and all too common.

[Anonymous No.22033872]

>>22033851
My personal favorite books and every book ever considered to be a contender for the greatest of Western literature all profusely break these rules. Repeatedly. You are an ass.

[Anonymous No.22033875]

I say that you're full of shit

[Anonymous No.22033879]

>>22033872
>profusely
You are bad at communicating for using that adverb.
>every book ever considered to be a contender for the greatest of Western literature
There is no such thing. Canons are marketing tools to shill you free domain books and a critic's secondary literature. All valued books will shift in how many people read or like them.

[Anonymous No.22033882]

I was starting to doubt my novel's boring beginning uneventful middle and rushed ending but you have convinced me that I'm on the right track.

[Anonymous No.22033895]

>>22033762
That's what I was going to post.

[Anonymous No.22033908]

Most of this is arbitrary book tuber tier bullshit. Your feminine conformity to these "rules" is why your work will always be mediocre and uninspired mush.

[Anonymous No.22033911]

>>22033908
pyw

[Anonymous No.22033992]

>>22033879
It doesn't change the fact that famous literature, universally revered by public and critics alike break one or more of your rules. And some of them are asinine - don't write long chapters. Why? Is there some inherent characteristic in writing long chapters that makes them bad?

[Anonymous No.22034014]

>>22033754
what about child orgies in a sewer, necrophiliac wet dreams, the words faggot and nigger, and starting your book describing assholes in shape and color?

[Anonymous No.22034045]

>>22033879
>You are bad at communicating for using that adverb
No I'm not.
>canons are marketing tools to shill you free domain books and a critic's secondary literature
Okay how about: "books that everybody loves"? Is that too elementary or reductive for your pedantic faggot worldview?

[Anonymous No.22034053]

>>22033754
Ok, keeping that all in mind I will now write a story.
Reddit.

[Anonymous No.22034067]

>long sentences
>em dashes
>philosophical themes
He saw the face of a fish, a carp, with an infinitely painfully opened mouth, the face of a dying fish, with fading eyes —he saw the face of a new-born child, red and full of wrinkles, distorted from crying—he saw the face of a murderer, he saw him plunging a knife into the body of another person—he saw, in the same second, this criminal in bondage, kneeling and his head being chopped off by the executioner with one blow of his sword—he saw the bodies of men and women, naked in positions and cramps of frenzied love—he saw corpses stretched out, motionless, cold, void— he saw the heads of animals, of boars, of crocodiles, of elephants, of bulls, of birds—he saw gods, saw Krishna, saw Agni—he saw all of these figures and faces in a thousand relationships with one another, each one helping the other, loving it, hating it, destroying it, giving re-birth to it, each one was a will
to die, a passionately painful confession of transitoriness, and yet none of them died, each one only transformed, was always re-born, received evermore a new face, without any time having passed between the one and the other face—and all of these figures and faces rested, flowed, generated themselves, floated along and merged with each other, and they were all constantly covered by something thin, without individuality of its own, but yet existing, like a thin glass or ice, like a transparent skin, a shell or mold or mask of water, and this mask was smiling, and this mask was Siddhartha's smiling face, which he, Govinda, in this very same moment touched with his lips.

[Anonymous No.22034146]

>>22033754
DO NOT USE THESE IN WRITING OTHERWISE YOU'RE A BAD WRITER:
>WORDS
>LETTERS
>GRAMMAR

[Anonymous No.22034339]

>>22033992
>Is there some inherent characteristic in writing long chapters that makes them bad?
Brevity is better than being longwinded.
>Waste no words.
t. Ezra Pound

[Anonymous No.22034377]

>>22033754
This was obvious b8, but what made me certain was
>ten dollar words
Kek OP is making fun of that loser in >>22028384

[Anonymous No.22034400]

>>22034377
It's much deeper than that.

[Anonymous No.22034404]

Please stop writing and never write again if you agree with any of the following:

>you believe 'the author is dead'
>you think fantasy, science fiction, detective fiction, young adult fiction or horror are literature
>you barely know your classics
>you tend to believe that if you like a given work, it is justified on an artistic level
>you think everyone's opinion should be accepted and respected
>you speak a single language
>you read contemporary versions of Shakespeare or Milton
>you read for the plot
>you read for entertainment
>you rarely read nonfiction
>you don't have a solid grounding in philosophy
>you do not at least have some understanding of the Three Tragedians and Homer
>you have little to no understanding of literature outside of your cultural horizon
>you have little to no understanding of literature within your own cultural horizon (muh african authors)
>you mostly read contemporary literature
>you make your literary analysis proceed from ideology
>you think intricate prose is 'pretentious' and that the author 'should just get to the point'
>your rarely read poetry
>you think Rhythm and Rhyme are just useless rules and laws restricting creativity
>you have a hard time explaining why you like a given work
>you have a hard time forming structured and relevant literary criticism
>you tend to refuse to judge works for yourself, rather relying on the opinions of literary authorities
>you rarely read for more than one or two hours straight

[Anonymous No.22035206]

>>22033848
I have better things to do, use chatgpt

[Anonymous No.22035255]

Half of those are sincerely cringe.

[Anonymous No.22035297]

OP, please list whatever your idea of good writing consists of.

[Anonymous No.22035302]

>>22035297
And also go outside.

[Anonymous No.22035374]

>>22035297
>OP, please list whatever your idea of good writing consists of.
The Cellar by Richard Laymon
All show, no tell. Punchy and active. Mood-inducing.

[Anonymous No.22035507]

>>22035374
God the brevity is torture.
Otherwise, pretty good though. Thanks for the rec, even if your standards are silly.

[Anonymous No.22035932]

>>22033875
>t. thinks they can write like Pynchon before they master basic sentence construction and narrative.

[Anonymous No.22035949]

>OP is autistic
>tries to use it to have fun at the expense of others
nice

[Anonymous No.22036128]

>>22034404
>you think fantasy, science fiction, detective fiction, young adult fiction or horror are literature
>you barely know your classics
so if fantasy isn't literature, how would you categorize the Odyssey?

[Anonymous No.22036318]

>>22036128
it's a poetic historical account

[Anonymous No.22036358]

>>22033851
Exactly what a rittler would say

[Anonymous No.22036378]

>>22036128
fantasy is just the modern digestible facsimile of epic literature, calling the odyssey fantasy is like treating your reflection like another person

[Anonymous No.22036401]

>>22033754
I'm pretty good about most of these except for
>>ellipses
I love using these to show a character's speech slowly dying down rather than having to write out ""blah blah blah" X muttered under their breath" every time
Am I GMI or is it over?

[Anonymous No.22036570]

>>22036318
>>22036378
seethe, dilate, cope, etc

[Anonymous No.22036573]

>>22036570
very impressive

[Anonymous No.22036633]

>>22036401
ellipses are fine. The problem is a lot of people use them incorrectly. Ellipses are meant to show a sentence is incomplete and they're fine if a character is trailing off. However people think ellipses can be used for dramatic weight in complete sentences, or they think it adds a sad undertone to a sentence, like: It wasn't supposed to be this way... Zoomers think it's an opposite exclamation point. It's really annoying.

[Anonymous No.22036645]

>>22033813
L'academie already exists senpai

[Anonymous No.22037000]

For retards ITT who just don't get it.

[Anonymous No.22037657]

>>22036128
The Odyssey is an epic poem. Thank you for using Cliffnotes Answers.

[Anonymous No.22038009]

>>22036633
>ellipses are fine.
There's no reason to use them, in dialogue or in description.

[Anonymous No.22038080]

>>22033754
>>semi-colons
I had a college prof that gave you a zero if you didn't have at least 5 semi colons in your text. You should specify this only is true for fiction.

[Anonymous No.22038247]

Don’t use such an expression as “dim lands of peace.” It dulls the image. It mixes an abstraction with the concrete. It comes from the writer’s not realizing that the natural object is always the adequate symbol.

Don’t retell in mediocre verse what has already been done in good prose. Don’t think any intelligent person is going to be deceived when you try to shirk all the difficulties of the unspeakably difficult art of good prose by chopping your composition into line lengths.

Don’t imagine that the art of poetry is any simpler than the art of music, or that you can please the expert before you have spent at least as much effort on the art of verse as the average piano teacher spends on the art of music.

Don’t allow “influence” to mean merely that you mop up the particular decorative vocabulary of some one or two poets whom you happen to admire. A Turkish war correspondent was recently caught red-handed babbling in his dispatches of “dove-gray” hills, or else it was “pearl-pale,” I can not remember..

Don’t imagine that a thing will “go” in verse just because it’s too dull to go in prose.

Don’t be “viewy”—leave that to the writers of pretty little philosophic essays. Don’t be descriptive; remember that the painter can describe a landscape much better than you can, and that he has to know a deal more about it.

Don’t chop your stuff into separate iambs. Don’t make each line stop dead at the end, and then begin every next line with a heave. Let the beginning of the next line catch the rise of the rhythm wave, unless you want a definite longish pause.

Don’t mess up the perception of one sense by trying to define it in terms of another. This is usually only the result of being too lazy to find the exact word. To this clause there are possibly exceptions.

[Anonymous No.22038307]

>>22033754
>>22033755
>>22033798
assuming this isn't (you) farming, (you) are personally responsible for lowering the mean IQ of the entire human race by several points

[Anonymous No.22038423]

>>22034404
jesus christ at least TRY to have sex

[Anonymous No.22038438]

>>22038423
Don't tell me what to do, faggot.

[Anonymous No.22038446]

>>22034404
Based and accuratepilled

[Anonymous No.22038462]

>>22033755
>long sentences
>>22033798
>long chapters
what do you consider long sentences and chapters? What's the maximum amount of words and pages a sentence and a chapter should have?

[Sage No.22038501]

(You) and Stephen King represent the ruin of art and its mysteries.

[Anonymous No.22038772]

>>22033754
>>semi-colons
>>any poetry forced into meter or rhyme without meaning, such as doggerel
>>philosophical themes
>>long speeches with indented dialogue from the same character
>>flashbacks
>>words that are longer but waste time: "however," "although," "albeit," "howsoever," "contrariwise"
>>parentheses
>>stream of consciousness
>>namedropping any philosophers, great writers, or great artists

Killing myself

[Anonymous No.22039326]

>>22038772
It can't be that bad. Post an excerpt :)

[Anonymous No.22040614]

Still you guys don’t get it. There is never reason to use a dash. Ever.

[Anonymous No.22040633]

>>22033754
>>ellipses
I've found it necessary in very rare cases
>>passive voice
Never understood the fixation on this. It can be useful sometimes.
>>semi-colons
Nothing wrong with this
>>multiple clauses
What?
>>named chapters
This is kino if the names are actually clever
>>multiple points of view
Can be kino, but a little overdone these days

[Anonymous No.22040840]

>>22037000
I hate active prose for the most part. I overwhelmingly use a more passive approach whenever I'm talking about the emotions, philosophy, scenery etc and then I switch to active when I have a few pages of dialogue.

Usually my chapters are laid out in this manner:

1. Introduction to relevant themes explored in the chapter, either through an "objective" inquiry, a character's intrigue or a description of the physical scene and how it relates to said theme. I am objective here as I present the information.

2. Have character interact with other characters - question said theme based on a set location which challenges, reaffirms or introduces a new theme. Usually this resorts to pages of long, intricate dialogue which usually opens more and more as they talk - this is where I use active voice to describe things.

3. Often I will splice relevant "mini" digressions in order to stabilize the scene, re-contextualize theme and character, introduce another or change a location. I pull the camera back to speak, and the language changes.

4. Zoom back to character. Repeat 2 + 3 interchangeably until point is made. Then

5. Transition to next character POV in following chapter.

Basically, passive voice can take up a lot of the text, if you give the reader the chance to be able to zoom in and out of the character as the story progresses.

I often struggled with my stuff because I know I use passive voice a lot more than most do these days, and this is my solution.

[Anonymous No.22040888]

>>22034404
>>you think intricate prose is 'pretentious' and that the author 'should just get to the point'
that's the entire point of your complaints albeit

[Anonymous No.22040895]

>>22040840
The passive voice only is used in my works
>The tree was came uponst by Daniel. The tree was cut. The thought of what to was not thought, until after the thunk had been made. Green was the grass, which had been blown by the wind.

[Anonymous No.22040897]

>>22040840
Your writing is shit and no one wants to read it.

[Anonymous No.22040903]

>>22040897
Your writing is shit and no one wants to read it.

[Anonymous No.22040909]

>>22040903
I just got a contract. Go and seethe about it.

[Anonymous No.22040938]

>>22035374
>prologue
Why did you give an example of a bad writer? Give an example of a good writer.

[Anonymous No.22040969]

>>22035374
>christsake
This is king, isn't it. I've only ever read 1.5 of his books lol

[Anonymous No.22041017]

>>22040969
The Cellar by Richard Laymon.

[Anonymous No.22041019]

>>22040938
Masters of fiction can write a prologue if they’re good enough. That should be obvious.

[Anonymous No.22041032]

Sex

[Anonymous No.22041072]

>>22038307
"The mean IQ of the human race" by definition is always 100, retard

[Anonymous No.22041410]

>>22040888
I'm not OP.

[Anonymous No.22042144]

>>22033754
Or these:
>Using words
>Writing
>Political themes
>Non political themes
>China
>Bad description
>Lazy dialogue
>Greentexts