#he can sautee onions tho....

[oensible]

watching jan rutta make pasta on a bolts video/natural gas advertisement, he said he put too much pasta to plate it nicely and he started taking the pasta back out of the pan im gonna cry

[ltleflrt]

I would love some more mean advice, I'm taking notes because this is a goldmine

lol honestly, the advice about not starting a fic with Life Story Infodump or Daily Grind Infodump is the most important thing I can think of. Since nearly all of the times I back out of a fic, it’s because of one of those two things.  Just about everything else I can think of is pretty minor and won’t make me quit reading.  But here’s a few things I think might be helpful just for giving a story some extra shine.

1. Minute detail of a process is rarely necessary.  Gloss over how something works unless the details have something to do with plot. For instance, if Dean is making tacos for dinner, just say Dean gets to work preparing tacos. Don’t talk about warming up the shells, or browning the meat, or slicing the veggies.  Unless it’s plot related. If Dean makes checklists and crosses things off to soothe anxiety, then those details are important, but make it clear that he’s self-soothing.  Or if Cas is allergic to onions, bring up that Dean sauteed them and added them to the meat, because Dean LOVES onions, and it didn’t occur to him to check if Cas has allergies before he started cooking, and they can’t be picked out, and oops the date ends with Dean rushing Cas to the ER, etc.  Otherwise, just say Dean had an hour left till Cas showed up for dinner, so he hurried to prepare all the taco fixings, and it took too little time so now he had to figure out how to occupy himself till the doorbell rang.

(btw, I would LOVE more first date ending up in the ER stories, everyone who reads this is free to adopt that idea lol)

2. Please don’t write an entire story in 1-2 sentence paragraphs.  This is rare, but it’s an almost instant nope out for me.  There’s this one story that I reeeeeally want to read, because it’s right up my alley, and other than the short paragraph issue, it’s well written so I keep trying but getting stuck.  I’m gonna have to copy it into a doc and edit the paragraphs and squish some stuff together to make it legible to my brain.  Like there’s a long stretch in the first chapter where every sentence is its own paragraph, and just.... why.  When you’re putting a paragraph break, there’s a mental pause happening in the reader’s mind.  And too many short paragraphs in a row makes it more like a really long poem rather than a typical story you’d read in a book.  A lot of advice says to not attack your readers with a wall of text (WALL OF TEXT CRITS YOU FOR OVER 9000!!!) and to break things up, but the opposite is also true.  Too many super short paragraphs is like Damage Over Time (THROW MORE DOTS, MORE DOTS!) and either one of those will defeat your reader’s interest.  Short paragraphs are a very useful tool, I use them myself for emphasis, but it can’t be your whole story.  Try to limit it to no more than 3 in a row.  If you’re going past that, take a minute to read those sentences and see if they’re related to each other.  Squish them into a single paragraph if they are.  Varying your paragraph length IS an art form.  Like writing music.  Paragraphs build a cadence, and staccato cannot sustain a whole song.  This can be mitigated by creating long compound sentences though, so keep in mind that the length of the sentence, which should vary, can make a paragraph feel longer, even if it is only 1 or 2 sentences.

(haha she gives advice on how to break up paragraphs while critting you with a wall of text!  good job, Carebear.)

3. The art of breaking up dialogue is just as delicate as the art of paragraph construction.  Too much back and forth without breaking it up with an action or an internal thought can make it confusing who is talking.  The rule of 3 comes in handy here too.  After 3 back and forths, put in something non-dialogue.  So it would go Character A says thing, Character B says Thing, Character A says thing, add some action/internal thoughts.  And just a he/she/they said tag isn’t enough.  IT IS BETTER THAN NOTHING, and depending on the cadence of the conversation it’s the right tool.  But adding some physical movement or a stray thought would be better.  That being said, don’t put too much action/thought between sections of dialogue.  If you put too much info in there, it can make your reader forget that there’s even a conversation going on, and they’ll get to the next piece of dialogue and be like wtf is this pertaining to again? and they’ll have to scroll back to the last line of dialogue to remember what was last said.  Remember, thoughts fly at the speed of light, so if you’re pausing the dialogue for some internal character thought, it’s happening in a matter of seconds, but your reader needs minutes to read and parse what’s going on.  Again, rule of 3, try not to do more than 3 paragraphs between dialogues.  And if you’re still not sure, or you feel like you need more so you keep going, read out loud from the last dialogue through the next dialogue and it’ll give you an idea of just how much time is physically passing for your readers, and you’ll start to feel the true size of things.

(WRITE ALL THAT STUFF DOWN THO.  If you need to get it out, then by all means, get it out.  It’s your first draft, and it’s important for YOU, even if a lot of it isn’t important for the reader.  Trim it in the edit. FOR THE LOVE OF THE GODS, TRIM IT IN THE EDIT.)

(And the rule of 3 is a guideline, not a rule.  It’s just a good measuring tool that you can use until you’re comfortable enough to eyeball things on your own.)

Anyway, those are the only things that come to mind while I’m calm and not in a frothing rage over writing errors that are not mine to correct.  I feel like a huge asshole for vague-bitching about other people’s writing, and I profusely apologize for anyone’s hurt feelings if they read this advice and realize this might apply to something they’ve done.  PLEASE KEEP WRITING, DON’T LET MY WHINGING DISCOURAGE YOU, I LOVE YOU.