uncannyvalleyforge:

nidoranduran:

amethyst-wind-uk:

nidoranduran:

amethyst-wind-uk:

gwendallas:

jumpingjacktrash:

plunderpuss:

nidoranduran:

Petition to create the term “rad herring” for when you something in a story has no bearing on the actual plot and won’t help piece together any of the big twists, but is just too fucking awesome an idea not to include.

As a professional developmental editor, i hereby vow to include this term in my comments on all relevant manuscripts.

oh shit i have so many of these

So mote it be.

I have to think that attempting to legitimise all-spectacle-no-depth moments in fanfiction is a bad idea.

Imagine some squeaky-voiced thirteen-year-old using it as justification for why their Sherlock Holmes fic now includes tiger mimes.

“No, it’s not out of place, it’s a Rad Herring (link to TVTropes page)”.

Right that would be terrible. 13 year-olds having fun and writing things they enjoy is something I refuse to stand by, and I apologize for this post and the unintentional evil I have now unleashed upon Sherlock Holmes fanfic. It was never my intention to let anyone enjoy themselves, and my firm beliefs that all teenagers should be joyless and Hemmingway-esque have been violated this day.

You are unironically defending tiger mimes in a Sherlock Holmes story.

While not 100% formulaic, there is at least a foundation to the practice of good story writing. One strut of said foundation is to not bloat your story with scenes which do not contribute to the plot. That is objectively bad writing. The ‘rule of cool’ trope does not excuse it.

You are free to write about the silent bengals of Baker Street all you like, but the readers are equally free to tell you that your waste-of-time scene is a waste-of-time scene when it’s a waste-of-time scene.

Nobody’s under any obligation to pretend your writing is not bad.

Looking forward to your climactic meeting of The Great Detective and Asian panto cats.

Let’s ignore ignore that a scene in a story can have a purpose other than moving the plot along in capacities of worldbuilding or driving characterisation, and that minimalistic storytelling can be boring as shit sometimes. No one single tenet of ‘good storytelling’ is universal, but that’s not what I’m engaging you on the grounds of.

I am unironically defending the idea that letting a teenager write something that amuses them in a dumb Sherlock Holmes fanfic is not going to do any harm to anybody, and the fact that your first impulse was not to remark on good writing practices in anywhere it’s meaningful and instead drag a hypothetical teenager speaks for itself, I think.

 Also, even if you apply the same principle to “serious” writing, holy shit

Mate, unless you wanna tell Kathy Acker, Donald Barthelme, Anne Carson, Mikhail Bulgakov, William S. Burroughs, Italo Calvino and other fucking titans of modern literature that their books are worthless because not everything in them comports to some airtight, hackneyed, Bob McKee-ass three-act structure in the name of driving the plot forward, then good luck with that. 

Just don’t expect anyone take you very seriously.