Five Ways to Fuck Up Your Story

Five Ways to Fuck Up Your Story

As most of you know, I’m a writer. As might surprise some folks who know me, I’m also able to read. I’ve known how for almost three years now. From my own experience both writing and reading stories, here are five ways to fuck that up.

1. Don’t Think Enough
Your plot’s too thin, or you don’t think through the ideas to a satisfying conclusion, or you leave in glaring plot holes. Sometimes this happens because you’re a dumbfuck. More often it happens because you’re so focused on the individual words and sentences you forget to pay attention to the paragraphs and pages. 

2. Think Too Much
The opposite extreme, where you get so paralyzed by all the things that can go wrong — or the two million elements in your epic, tangled plot — that you can’t put a single word on the screen. See also “writer’s block,” which isn’t really a thing. The solutions is simple: STFUAW.

3 Getting Too Damn Cute
Funny is okay. Cute is okay. Ending your story with everything wrapped up in a neat little bow is okay. But if you try to be too fucking clever with all of your nods to other writers, literary allusions and close adherence to the Hero’s Journey, you will almost always lose the story you were meant to tell. Don’t do that. I don’t care how many people put Ulysses or Gravity’s Rainbow on their top 100 list…both are really up there because nobody understands them and too many people are afraid to admit that’s true. 

4. Never Write the Story
When you tell people you’re a writer, how often do they immediately tell you this great idea they had for a story? How often do you hear, “you know, I sometimes think I could be a writer, but…”  You know why they’re not writers? Because they don’t write.  Writing is hard work. It takes discipline and focus. Yes, you can write. Yes, you can make the time to write today. So why are you still procrastinating by finishing this post? Get writing already.

5. Listen to Too Much Advice
Including this advice. Your story is yours and nobody else’s. Only you can tell it, and only you know how it will best be told. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have alpha readers, beta readers and eventually a professional editor take a look. But even with them, take their suggestions and use only the ones that are right for your story. To paraphrase Bruce Lee, take what’s useful. Tell the rest to take a hike.