![]() 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. 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". 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.Īs 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". ![]() It's all very well to tell a person their work is not worthy if it's not about "important ", but. 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". quite a contentious man, and the stuff about his treatment of women in the speculative fiction community is. 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.įrom reading the Wikipedia page about the man who gave this advice and flunked the class for not following it, it um. Hahaha when I read "write about the important " I actually interpreted it differently as, "don't waste time with scenes that don't achieve or set up anything important- ie. Rule #1: ALWAYS WRITE ABOUT THE IMPORTANT SHIT. 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. Nobody cares about the irrelevant, or trivial. ![]() Who gives a damn about nick-knacks, or socks, he demanded. When he took up the assignment the next day, he ran the class over the coals. Ellison read them, and flunked the entire class. They all wrote about socks disappearing, gnomes stealing nick-knacks and the like, and then handed their stories in. The class went away and wrote their stories. 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. 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). 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. 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. 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. If she hates her brother, though, and is friends with his bullies, she’s conflicted in a way that makes your plot even more interesting.Just about every single writing technique or rule has exceptions. For example, if your character is a teenage girl who really cares about her family, you might expect her to protect her brother from school bullies. What was the lonely old man like as a child? Where did he get that scar on his hand? Even if you don’t include these details in the story, knowing your character deeply will help them ring true.Ĭharacters Make the Plot: Create a character who makes your plot more interesting and complicated. You can also borrow traits from people you know.Ĭrafting a Backstory: Delve into your main character’s past experiences to figure out what makes them tick. Make notes about interesting people you see and think about how you could incorporate them into your story. Spend some time people-watching in a public place, like a mall or busy pedestrian street. Finding Inspiration: Characters are all around you.
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