“Due to an administrative error”, or any major plot point which is caused almost entirely by bureaucratic fuckups
“Contrary to popular belief” appended to something that’s either really obvious or completely subjective
A character makes an assertion, then cut to the narrator contradicting it (‘“Everything’s fine!” Everything was not fine.’)
First-person narrators who call a specific character by a series of increasingly convoluted nicknames
Unusual narrative euphemisms. I still hold that describing around a curse word is almost always funnier than just using the word.
Establishing character moments which subvert your expectations right from the get-go. The best example is in the Brooklyn Nine Nine pilot, where Jake’s fooling around at the crime scene before revealing that he’s already solved the case.
Montages. Just montages of any kind, for any reason, anytime. I actually think they work better in text form because you can do so many creative things with them.
Side characters with a level of fourth-wall awareness / quasi-supernatural ability which is never quite certain, like the janitor in Scrubs.
Double meanings in narration that take a while to make themselves clear.
writing style: author from the 1800s with a severe love of commas whose sentences last half a page
I came out here, to this point, to this place, hoping against all hope and despite signs and portends suggesting otherwise that I might, somehow, find myself having a pleasant experience, and yet here I stand, alone against the world, feeling assaulted, attacked on all fronts, knowing not my enemy’s name nor his face nor whether our battle is done.
break up your paragraphs. big paragraphs are scary, your readers will get scared
fuuuuck epithets. “the other man got up” “the taller woman sat down” “the blonde walked away” nahhh. call them by their names or rework the sentence. you can do so much better than this (exception: if the reader doesn’t know the character(s) you’re referring to yet, it’s a-okay to refer to them by an identifying trait)
blunette is not a thing
new speaker, new paragraph. please.
“said” is such a great word. use it. make sweet love to it. but don’t kill it
use “said” more than you use synonyms for it. that way the use of synonyms gets more exciting. getting a sudden description of how a character is saying something (screaming, mumbling, sighing) is more interesting that way.
if your summary says “I suck at summaries” or “story better than summary” you’re turning off the reader, my dude. your summary is supposed to be your hook. you gotta own it, just like you’re gonna own the story they’re about to read
follow long sentences w short ones and short ones w long ones. same goes for paragraphs
your writing is always better than you think it is. you just think it’s bad because the story’s always gonna be predicable to the one who’s writing it
i love u guys keep on trucking
Okay this is writing advice I can get behind, because I hate writing advice that says to never use “said”. Because everyone does, all great authors use it regularly, because having a weird verb every time someone speaks is just distracting. And then when you actually need to use “bellowed” or “huffed” it’s incredibly weak
