Advice to Take or Drop

Q: Which writing advice tropes do you follow, and which do you ignore in your books and short stories?

- from Susan

Trope:  a word or expression used in a figurative sense : figure of speech. b : a common or overused theme or device : cliché the usual horror movie tropes. 

Let’s go with b. Here are a few we hear often:

Write what you know.

Show don’t tell.

Something must happen on page one.

If you introduce a gun in the first act, the gun must be fired in the third.

In a mystery, the reader must get the same clues the amateur sleuth does.

Don’t introduce too many characters in the first chapter.

Don’t switch points of view in the middle of a paragraph/scene/chapter.

Don’t split infinitives.

Avoid slang that will date your story.
Etc.

By this time, if you’re a writer or a reader, you’ve heard all these and more many times. And, yes, where it works, I follow them. But following all these and more makes a work formulaic, just as ignoring all good advice can lead to a mess of a manuscript no editor will buy. If you’re a writer with some experience, you know what will work for your manuscript, don’t you? And you know what bad writing is, so you do your darndest to avoid it.

I tend to follow basic, sensible literary formats, updated for today’s communication-heavy world. I ignore what I think should be ignored to make my manuscript as singular as I want it to be. And that’s my advice, trope or not.