It's about time for another blog post. In an attempt to get back to my roots as a verbose git who posts mountains of tl;dr, I present you with this Cracked-style list of the top six things I hate seeing in amateur writing.
What follows may include hyperbole for effect. Rest assured that none of this put-on melodramatic rage was caused by any of your actions, gentledigitians. It's just the rest of the internet.6. Began to verb
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The barrel began to roll down the hill.
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The men drew their swords and began to fight.
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I fell into a lake and started to get wet.
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The barrel toppled over the hill.
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The men drew their swords and flew at each other.
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I fell into a lake and got wet.
5. Direct thought enclosed by single quotes
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"Whatever you want to watch is cool," I said. 'Please don't want to see Twilight…'
4. Incorrect dialogue punctuation
Nothing gets me down like seeing an otherwise mechanically competent writer mangle his/her dialogue with unholy constructions like
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"I am talking." Said the guy.
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I killed. A man.
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"I am talking," said the guy. "Words are coming out of my mouth."
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"I am talking," said the guy, "and therefore words are coming out of my mouth."
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"I am talking!" said the guy.
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"Am I talking?" asked the guy.
3. Needless first person
Most stories these days are written in third person limited or third person omniscient. Seeing as third person limited can (and often is) used to follow a single character, there's little need for first person in fiction – unless your story is written in a way that takes advantage of the format.First person is a very personal and intimate style – every first person story is pretty much the protagonist telling the reader about the things they've done. To make the perspective work, first person stories have to be coloured by the narrator's biases and worldview, full of thoughts, asides and musings from the narrator and just generally personal and intimate. If you can replace every instance of "I" and "me" with a character's name and still have a coherent story, you're doing something wrong.2. Needless present tense
Present tense is a powerful and unusual narrative style. There's a sense of immediacy and unpredictability in "we wait" that you just don't get with "we waited". Because many people tell anecdotes in the present tense ("So I'm walking down the street and I verb a noun…") you also get this informal, comfortable feeling that's not there with past tense. Present tense creates a specific atmosphere that's only appropriate under specific circumstances.So you can imagine the wastefulness of a story written in present tense "just because", where the tense serves as nothing but a distraction and a worrying indicator of how few books the author has read in his/her life. Past tense is good and conventional and appropriate in most cases. It's a natural choice for narrative and should be the first option you consider.1. Musical Names
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Firestormx sat on 64D's server, taking swigs from his hipflask. The site administrator was drunk.
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F1ak3r managed to finished writing his newest blog entry before tiredness overtook the Computer Science student.
I'm a hobbyist grammar-nazi myself, although english is not my native language.
One thing about punctuation:^
People who do those things make me want to strangle them. Whenever someone asks me to read their story, if I see just ONE of these errors, its usually a sign that the work is going to be sub par. Good writers are usually good at writing.
This was a fun read.
But how do you indicate thoughts which are phrased as questions without weird puncuation-mixing?, thought Cesque.P.S. Ever read anything by Cormac McCarthy? (No Country for Old Men, The Road, etc.). I wonder what you'd think about his way of (not) distinguishing dialogue from the narration…@Acid: Indeedy.
@Cesque:If you're doing third person limited, you really shouldn't have to throw in the "…thought x character". And if you're doing omniscient, you should probably learn how to do it in the first place.
Incorporating thoughts into first person narrative is easy. In third person it should be done in a way that makes it obvious it's the character's thought, or else it's like throwing "he said" into a monologue. Italics are one way, using it in narrative is another.You know, I'm kind of a whore for grammar and all, but the same goes for the opposite. If someone is too grammatical in storywriting, and doesn't break the rules, I can't take it seriously. Leave that to the essays, because it makes everything sound like an endless drawl when the author has the voice of a computer.These suggestions are actually pretty good, I might just use this blog at some point…