How not to be a writer #15: Always use passive voice

Do you want to illustrate a life of a character as boring? Illustrate his life in passive tense. Don't heighten action with verbs first and nouns last.

Use nouns first then action. Then you're on the right track to having a monotonous story.

How not to be a writer #14: Don't play with words

I've been reading J.K. Rowling's new books from Pottermore. Reading some of them gave me insight into her thoughts about the wizarding world she built. It's beautiful.

And some of that magic came from her playing with words, whether its to combine two foreign words into one (how she came up with Azkaban) is ingenious. It's really inspired me to start playing with words.

So, if you don't want to be a writer, stop playing with them. Don't stretch outside of your limited knowledge of what words can do for your stories.

How not to be a writer # 13: Literally only what you know

So, your day job is a software engineer? Great! Let's write a story about a man who goes to work and create the most amazing app for the smartphones. And the story would contain lines and lines of code from various stages of work in progress versions.

Nobody is going to read that,except in a computer science classroom.

Writing what you know means drawing from the life experience in your life. How do you eat? How do you express emotions? How do you live life? We put these experiences into stories ranging from the historical fiction to the high fantasy. None of which we could never experience but in our imagination.


So, don't write in a literal sense.

How not to be a writer #12: Order Mix Writing Grammar Your

Want you if as remain someone write doesn't who don't the heed grammar of.

Or rather,

If you want to remain as someone who doesn't write, don't heed the rules of grammar.

So, of course language adheres to a standard, and we all instinctively follow the basics of language in order to communicate our thoughts to one another. The finer points of language, however, needs to be adhered to by professional communicators. Whether that's a lawyers, marketers, technical communicators.

Imagine if we threw all the rules of grammar out. We would have a sentence like the first line above in this post.

Ignore grammar at your own peril. It can mean the difference eating grandpa and letting grandpa know dinner's ready: "Let's eat grandpa."

How not to be a writer #11: Tell, not show your story

This lady will tell you that a story told, not shown is off-putting. How do you describe the sky without saying a variation of blue color, or pink, or purple, or even pink and green? Tell that it's a sunflower without saying it's yellow.

Or the soft twinkling sounds of wind chimes when it's moving among the wind. Suppose a stranger finds himself walking on a path with all these things. These descriptions help shape a mood that help or contrast the story's true mood. Suppose the stranger is about to confront something terrible. Do you want to heighten the drama of the event?

Let's tell a part of a story.

We see  a stranger walking briskly on a path to his destination. It is a calm day, a day like any other day. He knows he has to face his enemy from his childhood. He paid no attention to the nature around him, and if he did, he might have taken comfort in them. All he thought was about the enemy who bullied and abused him as a child, as a teenager, and as a man.

He walked briskly, one hand in his pocket. in his pocket is a knife, prepped for the killing of his enemy or tormented him for so long. His eyes seeing only red with anger.

--- Now, suppose, we show the story ---

Our eyes drew to the stranger walking down a light brown path, surrounded by flowers of different colors--yellow, blue, pink. The midday sun dried up the dew around him. As he traveled on, he did not give attention to the windchimes of a small house almost hidden behind a cluster of bushes.  A butterfly scutted from one flower to another.

The man put his hand into his pocket, feeling the long blade in its scabbard.  He took a deep breath through his nose and out his mouth in a slow, measured way. He stared ahead, walking as fast as he could without raising suspicion by the house he is passing by. The stranger's face is taut with tension, his eyebrows furrowed together in deep rage, teeth grinding together as he recalled the torment his enemy caused him all his life.

"You will never amount to anything, stupid child," his uncle said, and gave a swift kick to his ribs as the child curled up on the ground, trying to protect himself.

"You are a fool! Destroying my farm with the fire!" he said, delivering a blow to the teenager's face.

"Do you really think you deserve any pay after what you did? You are never going to earn a living!" his uncle roared at the younger man. "A fool, like I always said you were!"


---

So, which one sounds more interesting? You tell me. Or, rather, show me. To not be a storyteller, to not be a writer, tell us and your story will be dry.

How not to be a writer #10: Never challenge yourself

Hobble along the path of life, never stopping a moment to see the beautiful sunsets stories provide to you. Never take in a beautiful sigh of fresh air the mountains bring, such great depth of souls' deep stories. If you are never honest to yourself, don't read stories that challenge your mind.

Thus, you never challenge yourself when you write. Dig in deep inside yourself and pull out what's meaningful to you. What is deep, what is dark, and what is shining straight out of your heart. What is it saying? What does your soul cry out for?

Never stop, and you will never know what your soul really cries for.