I'm becoming more and more amused by "Tips for Writers When Writing" articles. Especially when one of the tips is "Do not write about people on the verge of death, mad people, or children
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Their suggestion has eliminated everything from “Hamlet” through “James and the Giant Peach”. Fuck that noise.
Your more helpful suggestion applies to a lot more than just suffering protagonists. More is not always “more”.
It reminds me of an editorial by Steven Marsh for Pyramid magazine, in which he described a Ravenloft GM's inept attempt to create a horror atmosphere by describing the piles of bones that decorated every scene… Every scene. Courtyard? Bones. Ballroom? More bones. Need more atmosphere? Pile on the bones. It wasn't just that he was a one-trick pony, it was that he had no concept of diminishing returns; if 100 bones were creepy, 1000 were ten times as creepy.
So the players started calculating what the population of this town must have been to leave so many bones lying around, which led to hypothesizing an adjacent Elemental Plane of Bones, and finally ended with attempts to research a Bones to Fireballs spell
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I've decided I will take seriously only writing advice from writers that I find consistently and fantastically awesome. I have a book of essays on fantasy by UK LeGuin and the introduction to Slow Learner by Thomas Pynchon where he complains about all the awful mistakes he made in his early work. And one of those stories he critiques so harshly really is quite good. If every writer were to follow every list of "Don'ts," they would all be confined to writing nothing but diaries with the names changed
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Your more helpful suggestion applies to a lot more than just suffering protagonists. More is not always “more”.
It reminds me of an editorial by Steven Marsh for Pyramid magazine, in which he described a Ravenloft GM's inept attempt to create a horror atmosphere by describing the piles of bones that decorated every scene… Every scene. Courtyard? Bones. Ballroom? More bones. Need more atmosphere? Pile on the bones. It wasn't just that he was a one-trick pony, it was that he had no concept of diminishing returns; if 100 bones were creepy, 1000 were ten times as creepy.
So the players started calculating what the population of this town must have been to leave so many bones lying around, which led to hypothesizing an adjacent Elemental Plane of Bones, and finally ended with attempts to research a Bones to Fireballs spell ( ... )
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