Guest Post: Amanda Fischer

Greetings friends of this blogosphere! Today the winner of the Christmas contest, Amanda, has prepared a lovely guest post. Thanks again, Amanda!

Amanda Fischer
Guest Post: Things You Should Never Do In Your Writing

Howdy, Seana’s blog readers! I’m Amanda (*bows*). You might’ve seen me around here before. Even if you haven’t...I do show up quite frequently to get my fill of insanity.

I’m a rather insane person, as everyone tells me. I love writing and photography, along with a lot of other stuff. Like talking.

Anyway. Enough about me. Today, I’m going to talk about things you should never do in your writing. DISCLAIMER: Go ahead and break these rules if you want to. But don’t say I didn’t warn you.

1. Load your writing down with all the juicy adjectives and adverbs and descriptive stuff you can come up with. You don’t want to do this, no matter what your third grade teacher told you. It slows down the story and annoys your readers like crazy.

2. Use the same word over and over. This one can be hard to catch, so my advice is to read your writing out loud when checking for this. Actually, read your writing out loud whenever you’re editing. It helps. Because if you don’t...you might get this: “Emily just loved her dog. In fact, she loved him so much she just couldn’t stop talking about him to all her friends. This was bad because that made them want to just kill her.”

3. Add all your character’s backstory at once. Ever had to listen to someone tell a long, rambling history of their existence? If so, you know how annoying it can be. If not...well, it’s annoying. Believe me.

4. Start writing without a plot idea in mind. Now, this is one of those things people argue about all the time, so I’m not going to say *never* do it. BUT. It’s not the best idea. This is coming from experience. Also, I once read in a book about writing that since story is about fixing problems, how can you start fixing that problem without know what it is?

5. Have characters that are in your story for no reason whatsoever, other than “I felt like it.” DON’T DO IT. People have said “Stories are life without the boring parts.” This includes the irrelevant stuff. Meaning, unless those little guys have a real reason for existence...kick ‘em out. This goes for everything that’s not in your story for a reason.


There are plenty of other things that shouldn’t show up in your writing, but these are just a few to get you started. Besides, who likes rules that much anyway? ;)

****This ends guest post****

*Bows again* Bye, everyone! See ya around.