**** FOR WRITING CONTEST, GO HERE*****
Hi everyone,
We have received some wonderful writing contest entries for our January 31st deadline, but we are eager to read more! So please, keep them coming. We will post the top five entries on our website, and there are lots more cool prizes (All contest details, prizes, deadlines, and rules are HERE!)
But for now, here are a few random and completely arbitrary guidelines we threw together while we were touring… for all the hundreds of times people asked us, “Hey D&D, what are your favorite writing rules?” We picked out eleven out of the ocean of potential no-no’s, just because these are the ones we hate most:
STUFF NOT TO DO WHEN WRITING
1) Blithely shoehorning adverbs, unadvisedly throughout
2) Naming the hero after yourself and the villain “mom”
3) Writing every detail in dialogue, like when two people meet and they say, “Hi,” and then the other one, a redhead, says, “Hi,” and then the first one says, “Howsit going?”
4) Characters who say everything they are thinking (“Hello Jim. I just wanted to tell you that I would rather go to Sizzler than IHOP because when I was a child I fell into a vat of pancake syrup and now I associate all breakfast cakes with the memory of my negligent father.”)
5) One exclamation point for every three pages! (At most!!)
6) Names/Places no one can pronounce (like Korialstrasz, or Bicé)
7) Surrendering diction to the Thesaurus, in the vainglorious endeavor to appear excessively erudite
8 ) No cliché’s (Dance to the beat of your own drummer, please)
9) Words to avoid: fecund, moist, blogosphere, wowza (Why? Because these words creep us out… most likely, everyone else in the world would disagree)
10) Characters who are all bad or all good (Except if one of them is Satan)
11) In the end, discovering that it was all a dream, you were in the Matrix, or turns out the characters were dead all along
Okay, there you have it!
Happy New Year, Happy Writing, and click here to learn how to enter the contest!
D&D