Advice for Fun and Profit

[vanity-lost.livejournal.com]

I know we have a ton of writers and writerly types in this group. Almost all of whom are talented like whoah. Plus just lots of intelligent, snarky peoples. So, I was wondering... 

If you could give LKH one piece of advice (literary or even otherwise I guess) what would it be? 

Or alterately... what's the best piece of writing advice you've ever gotten and how does Mad Ms. Hamilton violate it? 

Because seriously I sometimes wonder what her series would look like if someone was standing next to her with a 2x4 of Literary Wisdom. You know, someone to go "Peachy, darling, now just what the hell does X have to do with the main plot?" or "That's redundant. Delete and rephrase." 

There are some things that just seem so elementary going wrong- like time and characters popping into scenes they weren't in a moment before, but how to fix it?

Okay. I am stepping away from the keyboard now before the Nyquil takes further control.

Comments

[vanity-lost.livejournal.com]

Ah, Joss, how I love thee... I want to be that brave as a writer- able to cut out my fans' hearts and have them still understand why and love it anyway. It's okay to let major characters die if there's a reason and it's going to improve the story. Plus it thins out the cast...

There's no need to write War and Peace when a haiku will do.
AMEN to that. Let's send that to her on a Post-it. A big, permanent post-it.

[dwg.livejournal.com]

Oh lord, yes. I admire the man for turning me into an utter emotional wreck, but for all the right reasons. I happen to agree with him that happy people are boring. Characters get infinitely more interesting when A) people die, B) their sparkly love falls to shit, C) they have to put their sparkly love on hold to go deal with the impending apocalypse, D) all of the above. Personally, I'm a fan of taking a character and slowly turning them into the thing they fear/hate the most and seeing where that leads.

"Why write War and Peace when a haiku will do?" is one of my mantras...I think I coined it during my ID snark. o.0