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There are a lot of writing guides out there offering tips to those trying to step up their game with their own fictional offerings. There’s a lot of advice in those guides, presented with varying degrees of authority and mandate, and sometimes hoping you’ll be willing to pay for the privilege rather than just browsing the free ones (semi-pro tip: they most often say the same things).
Now, writing guides are not useless, especially if you’ve never read any. In fact, I encourage people interested in writing to read a lot of them, despite the redundancies you’ll come across. The most fascinating thing about them is not what the professional, published, successful writers delivering them your way have to say that’s the same, but what they have to say that’s different. Sometimes they’ll blatantly contradict one another on the habits and techniques that will lead you down the golden path. Sometimes, they’ll even contradict themselves. If you experience enough lists of guidelines, you may get the feeling that the ultimate statement regarding writing is, “Don’t do this, it’s bad and never works out well… unless it does.”
Putting it another way, it’s like the old argument about Jesus which usually ended in some cocky teenager getting smacked.
“Cut your damn hair!”
“Jesus had long hair!”
“That’s different. He was Jesus!”
So for writing, we have:
“Shorten your damn sentence!”
“Faulkner wrote run on sentences!”
“That’s different. He was Faulkner!”
This usually ends in some cocky creative writing student getting a fail. But to be fair, I do agree it’s at least important to know the rules before you think about breaking them. You might still end up with crap, but at least you’re experimenting rather than just being ignorant. So check out all those different authors and their different rules, and see which ones make sense for your work.
And honestly, sometimes, you get little gems of insight you might not have thought about, and that a dozen other guides didn’t mention either (maybe that particular author thought they were too obvious? who knows). For example, relating to this week’s comic is a gem I picked up along the way, which sadly I can’t remember the proper attribution for anymore, and it regards the senses. To badly paraphrase the original tip, the claim was that one of the hallmarks of a beginning writer is that they rely too heavily on how things look or sound, and never give consideration to other elements of the characters’ environment, especially in terms of how things smell.
Maybe this is because humans don’t prioritize smell all that much, or that we don’t especially expect it in our entertainment media. I mean, I don’t, I’m actually rather glad that Smell-O-Vision was a failed experiment in immersive cinema that Hollywood has yet to try again. But we do notice smells, and, good or bad, they do have a big influence on our memories and reactions. They can even show, more than anything else, the difference between a native and a newcomer to a certain place. To me, a barnyard or ranch is still an almost eye-wateringly overpowering experience, while for my wife that same scent is a comforting memory of growing up. Conversely, someone who grew up on a mountain farm would probably feel like choking on the streets of Downtown L.A., while I looked oddly at them and wondered what the problem was.
So, imagine the sort of stench a zombie ranch would have hanging over it… and yet, that stench would be all but invisible to people who have worked there all their lives. Certainly it would be invisible to a TV Crew whose only contact is remote drones being operated from miles away. But oh, poor Rosa. She may be no stranger to zombies, but it’s like the difference between driving by a cow pasture and being next to a slaughterhouse on a hot day. Her chutzpah has been undone in dramatic fashion by the simple expedient of no longer being upwind. And if characters have their own lives, as many writers will claim, then somewhere, somewhen, she’s cursing me for having read that guide.