𓅇 Chase J 𓅊 - lv 33 🍜🐲

1. Use the passive voice.

What? What are you talking about, “don’t use the passive voice”? Are you feeling okay? Who told you that? Come on, let’s you and me go to their house and beat them with golf clubs. It’s just grammar. English is full of grammar: you should go ahead and use all of it whenever you want, on account of English is the language you’re writing in.

2. Use adverbs.

Now hang on. What are you even saying to me? Don’t use adverbs? My guy, that is an entire part of speech. That’s, like—that’s gotta be at least 20% of the dictionary. I don’t know who told you not to use adverbs, but you should definitely throw them into the Columbia river.

3. There’s no such thing as “filler”.

Buddy, “filler” is what we called the episodes of Dragon Ball Z where Goku wasn’t blasting Frieza because the anime was in production before Akira Toriyama had written the part where Goku blasts Frieza. Outside of this extremely specific context, “filler” does not exist. Just because a scene wouldn’t make it into the Wikipedia synopsis of your story’s plot doesn’t mean it isn’t important to your story. This is why “plot” and “story” are different words!

some of my favorite scenes to write are ones where nothing particularly dramatic is happening

one of the things that make me love a character is the parts of themselves they share when their defenses are down, and that tends to happen most of all when they're just going about their day or dealing with the most insignificant of obstacles

my favorite dynamic in the book I'm currently writing came about entirely in the margins of the story, when two characters who hadn't really interacted all that much got a bunch of time to be around each other. it was like a switch had flipped: they instantly started bickering like they'd been next-door neighbors the whole time. I didn't even plan any of it, the words just poured out of me as their personalities bounced off of each other. I now make sure to have them run into each other in moments of downtime so I can sit back and watch

(this is also why I love it when writers just do little prompts on here about off-camera, between-chapters scenes with a couple of cast members)

every well-paced story, no matter the medium, always benefits from little breaks in the action (physical, emotional or otherwise) to let the audience and the characters breathe

You can (and should!) break the norms/expectations,

BUT!

Only if the following two will be true:

1. it is what the story needs to function in the way you want it to
2. you can pull it off well

There are stories that are "only filler". There are stories that have no conflict, or no characters (There Will Come Soft Rains is an excellent example). There are stories in the form of a shopping list, of a flow chart. There are so many kinds of stories out there, told in so many interesting ways, and each of these "rule breakings" does a specific effect that makes the experience of reading the story different.

But how do you pull it off well? Practice, mostly. Getting feedback from people to see if the intended effect is happening. Reading widely, especially other experimental work, and seeing how other people accomplished similar things. Short fiction is full of weird experimental stuff, since it costs the publishers a lot less to put it out there, you can do more weirdness with a webpage, and some gimmicks would get annoying if it lasted an entire book.

Here are some examples of experimental things you can check out:

• "Sing in Me, Holy One, and Through Me" by Rob MacWolf [p1] [p2] - this is a podcast so there's some "effects" that only work in an audio format but it is very cool
• "We Will Teach You How to Read | We Will Teach You How to Read" by Caroline M. Yoachim [link] - most of this story is in images and I don't think there's alt text but I don't even know how you would alt text this. You will need to see it to understand
• "STET" by Sarah Gailey [link] - this is a story that can really only exist in a digital form. It requires you to have some knowledge of the editing process - namely, that "STET" means "fuck you, leave it in as it is." So when you read it, think about what the (diegetic) story's author was thinking then and what she's thinking now, responding to her editor's feedback
• "All Tomorrows" by C. M. Koseman [link] - this one is a whole book. It has no characters, per se, just a lot of connected vignettes. There is a ton of world building, and only the thinnest of plot. This is something that would be difficult to do in most books, but this is the norm for speculative biology books. The "rules" of one genre will not necessarily be the same as the "rules" of another, so that is something important to keep in mind. If you write contemporary romance, "advice" from an epic fantasy author may not necessarily benefit you.