The Anti-Guide

How do you try to improve your writing?

I try to avoid old, stupid things.	17.5%	[ 2292 ]
I add new things.	14.9%	[ 1951 ]
A combination of both (if one more than the other, pick it).	67.6%	[ 8852 ]
Total Votes:			[ 13095 ]

[Minion Ripley]

If you're writing fiction based in the real world, you can always have the villains be the parents of your main teenage character. So what if they've cared for him, loved him, and paid for everything that he could ever want for practically nothing in return? Your main guy still has a perfectly good reason to hate his parents more than ever and make it widely known and shown, and that reason is "cuz tey r sooooo anoying!" After all, if they won't let him stay up past 3 AM head-banging to his favorite punk-metal band at full blast, they're being unfair!

Only villains and unimportant characters are allowed to be or look 20+ years of age. All of the good guys must look like they just stepped out of middle school.

Minor injuries do not exist for more than three minutes. Scratches and bruises only exist to make your character look a little beat up, and once the character is worried about enough, they can disappear in a flash.

No injury occurs in an embarrassing place unless it is to provide fan-service, and, even then, it is not that serious.

Common, annoying diseases - such as the common cold - do not exist. Furthermore, diseases that can turn disgusting do not exist either. Any illnesses your characters contract are deadly and should be angsted about massively.

[Gemini the Spy]

Any female who begins in the story hating men must fall deeply in love with the hero by the end.

No matter how much your heroes may fight at the begininning of the story, they must have a breakthrough somewhere, learn the power of teamwork, save the world from that villian that just decided to be evil for no real reason except that he felt like it, appologize in a 10,000,000,000 page scene about how sorry they are about ever fighting in the first place, and all live happily ever after. Wasn't that a perfect story? It's also good it several of them fall in love with eachother no matter how little chemistry they have.

[Luis Loriox II]

Narrate like crazy. Discribe eveyr little thing, but don't get to the actual fight scenes until you've writtin at least 50 pages on that flower over there.

All main characters must be age 17, while all villians must be "unknown".

[Veive]

Luis Loriox II

Narrate like crazy. Discribe eveyr little thing, but don't get to the actual fight scenes until you've writtin at least 50 pages on that flower over there.

Fight scenes are all everyone wants to read. Ever.

Assassins should always be good at any form of combat. Screw sneakiness and swift kills; assassins can easily defeat armies of people because they DEFINITELY have the training to do so.

[Luis Loriox II]

Veive

Luis Loriox II

Narrate like crazy. Discribe eveyr little thing, but don't get to the actual fight scenes until you've writtin at least 50 pages on that flower over there.

Fight scenes are all everyone wants to read. Ever.

Assassins should always be good at any form of combat. Screw sneakiness and swift kills; assassins can easily defeat armies of people because they DEFINITELY have the training to do so.

They also have endless amounts of ninja stars, and dont get tired after 24 even hours of consecutive fighting.

[Minion Ripley]

All scars must come from some horrible part of the character's life. So, when your character is asked, "How did you get that scar?", he does not say, "I fell on a stick." Instead, he should say, "Well, you see, I was caught in this absolutely horrible fire that burned down my home, killed my family, and wiped out half the town when I was but a child of five. And, while I was running for my life, I got stabbed by a metal rod out of nowhere!" and go on about that for about five minutes without pause.

Similarly, no injuries shall be gained through sheer stupidity. For example, you can't have a character rip open his elbow by falling off of his bike. Such a wound should be caused by some sort of dreadful monster attacking him out of the blue. After all, no one wants to hear that your character broke both of their arms by practically flying off of chairs because he was a complete idiot; they want to hear about wounds that he didn't bring upon himself!

(Heheh, I've done all of those "bad" examples... mostly from being a complete idiot. xd )

[Veive]

MinionRipley

All scars must come from some horrible part of the character's life. So, when your character is asked, "How did you get that scar?", he does not say, "I fell on a stick." Instead, he should say, "Well, you see, I was caught in this absolutely horrible fire that burned down my home, killed my family, and wiped out half the town when I was but a child of five. And, while I was running for my life, I got stabbed by a metal rod out of nowhere!" and go on about that for about five minutes without pause.

^^ I have a character who accidentally gave herself the scar that runs down her face. She was playing with a knife and trying to figure out how to use it when she tripped. She's not even bitter about it.

[Minion Ripley]

Veive

MinionRipley

All scars must come from some horrible part of the character's life. So, when your character is asked, "How did you get that scar?", he does not say, "I fell on a stick." Instead, he should say, "Well, you see, I was caught in this absolutely horrible fire that burned down my home, killed my family, and wiped out half the town when I was but a child of five. And, while I was running for my life, I got stabbed by a metal rod out of nowhere!" and go on about that for about five minutes without pause.

^^ I have a character who accidentally gave herself the scar that runs down her face. She was playing with a knife and trying to figure out how to use it when she tripped. She's not even bitter about it.

Heh. Sweet. smile

[The One and Only 357]

My characters never come out unscathed. In fact, sometimes they come out dead... Not to sound morbid or anything.

[Silmarwen_Meneldur]

Your characters should always have a scar. Scars are cool. Hey, why bother with internal crap? That's sissy stuff. If they don't loo klike they've lived throuhg something life threatenin, who is going to believe they actually HAVE?

[x_haphazard_x]

((I don't think I've ever written a fight scene, and even in the fantasy I'm writing, I don't think I ever will...))

All good characters must stick together like glue because they like each other so much. It's all love and flowers for them until they confront the villian. Your main villain must be an evil sadistic jerk, hellbent on taking over the world, or kingdom, or whatever, and all of their minions are horrible, annoying little peons. These peons should go on and on about their powers whenever they meet the good guys, and the good guys don't have enough sense to strike them down there, but they end up beating them later anyways. Any time when the good guys don't absolutely make sure that the bad guy's dead, they must somehow be alive and come back to haunt them.

[Adrehel]

Write the entire book in 133T.
Write the entire book in capts...with excessive ellipses. it will just make your writing stand out.
Remember, everything is cross breedable. After all making a half duck, half bee is perfectly possible.
Asian people are so much cooler than white people.
All names must be extremely long, that way they will stand out.
Your charecters should have rainbow hair, just because they are differant. They can fly, just because they can.
Being too kind is an actual weakness.

[Tavreynya]

If Character X is a great hero or historical figure, your main character should be a direct descendant of X, be named after X, and look exactly like X no matter how many generations are between them. However, your hero(ine) doesn't know (s)he's related to X because (s)he's been raised as a peasant farmer.

[Axis of Fabulousness]

- Remember... The more tragic a girl's past, the more attractive and desirable she is! So make sure there's a lot of death and destruction in your heroine's past!!

- Make sure your heroine either bitches alot about her past or sits quietly and stews all the time. ^^ Lots of angst!

- Your hero/heroine must be purely good! No bad or evil thoughts for them, no siree! Although their past is oh-so tragic they'd NEVER have mean thoughts. 3nodding

- Always make sure your hero/heroine is an awesome samurai/ninja. And give them random Japanese names of which you don't know the meaning! Because Japanese people are ssssssssssooooooooooo much cooler than us.

- It must be physically impossible for the hero/heroine to lose! C'mon... Good guys don't lose! ^^ And no matter HOW injured they may become in a battle, they must always able to pull off some awesome move at the end to vanquish their foe.


Hee hee.... I'll try and think of some more. This is fun.

[Tavreynya]

Your characters are all night owls. They can stay up until hella freaky hours of the night, even go several days without sleeping, without experiencing any ill effects. They can also wake up as early as you want them to with no problems except maybe some grumbling, even if they've only gotten an hour of sleep that week. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise.

No one dies, unless they're evil. Failing that, no one stays dead.